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Gunpowder and Geometry
- The Life of Charles Hutton, Pit Boy, Mathematician and Scientific Rebel
- Narrated by: Jim Barclay
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
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Gunpowder and Geometry
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Publisher's summary
August 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne.
In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust choked, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he’s been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a clever lad - gifted at maths and languages - and for a time he hoped for a different life. Many hoped.
Charles Hutton, astonishingly, would actually live the life he dreamed of. Twenty years later you’d have found him in Slaughter’s coffeehouse in London, eating a few oysters with the President of the Royal Society.
By the time he died in 1823, he was a fellow of scientific academies in four countries while the Lord Chancellor of England counted himself fortunate to have known him. Hard work, talent and no small share of luck would take Charles Hutton out of the pit to international fame, wealth, admiration and happiness. The pi boy turned professor would become one of the most revered British scientists of his day. This book is his incredible story.
Critic reviews
"Wardhaugh has done a brilliant job in revealing a most curious period in British life’." (Steve Craggs, Northern Echo)
"Mathematics remains a bedrock of our society. This wonderful book goes a long way in highlighting why." (Jamie Condliffe, New Scientist)
"Wardhaugh's fascinating account of Poor Robin's Almanac persuasively reveals the power of the almanac to give mathematics a human face." (Marcus du Sautoy)
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 76
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Story4 out of 5 stars 76
Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world's most famous author and his work. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare's library, is a mystery. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces, and libraries; in riverbeds, sheep pens, and partridge coops; and in the corridors of the mind. Yet no trace of the Bard's manuscripts, books, or letters has ever been found.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Dismissed Mary Sidney Herbert without explanation
- By Lisa on 07-30-19
By: Stuart Kells
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The Road to Monticello
- The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson
- By: Kevin J. Hayes
- Narrated by: David Baker
- Length: 25 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer - a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Very Boring Book
- By Greg on 05-13-14
By: Kevin J. Hayes
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Frank Ramsey
- A Sheer Excess of Powers
- By: Cheryl Misak
- Narrated by: Liam Gerrard
- Length: 19 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred to him; he was the only philosopher whom Wittgenstein treated as an equal. Had he lived he might have been recognized as the most brilliant thinker of the century. This amiable shambling bear of a man was an ardent socialist, a believer in free love, and an intimate of the Bloomsbury set. For the first time Cheryl Misak tells the full story of his extraordinary life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Lovely Story of Lesser Known Master
- By Amazon Customer on 10-30-23
By: Cheryl Misak
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Gods of the Upper Air
- How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
- By: Charles King
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 295
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 254
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 252
A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced". What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great Book, Much Needed despite poor performance
- By J. Kahn on 08-21-19
By: Charles King
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J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Making of a Legend
- By: Colin Duriez
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 36
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
J.R.R. Tolkien's creations, imagination, and characters captured the attention of millions of readers. But who was the man who dreamt up the intricate languages and perfectly crafted world of Middle-earth? Tolkien had a difficult life, for many years: orphaned and poor, his guardian forbade him to communicate with the woman he had fallen in love with, and he went through the horrors of the First World War. An intensely private and brilliant scholar, he spent over 50 years working on the languages, history, peoples, and geography of Middle-earth,
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very insightful
- By Luke B. on 10-27-20
By: Colin Duriez
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Making History
- The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past
- By: Richard Cohen
- Narrated by: Richard Cohen
- Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this “witty, wise, and elegant” (The Spectator), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Missing 20 pages from book
- By Rick, Austin on 04-23-22
By: Richard Cohen
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Author in Chief
- The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote
- By: Craig Fehrman
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
In Craig Fehrman’s groundbreaking work of history, Author in Chief, the story of America’s presidents and their books opens a rich new window into presidential biography. From volumes lost to history - Calvin Coolidge’s Autobiography, which was one of the most widely discussed titles of 1929 - to ones we know and love - Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, which was very nearly never published - Fehrman unearths countless insights about the presidents through their literary works.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Fascinating
- By Jean on 03-12-20
By: Craig Fehrman
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Young Benjamin Franklin
- The Birth of Ingenuity
- By: Nick Bunker
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth, he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world, where he fought many battles with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of 41, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Good Book but LOTS of Names
- By Tim on 10-31-19
By: Nick Bunker
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The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
- By: Charles Darwin
- Narrated by: Greg Wagland
- Length: 2 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
This work, unsurprisingly, offers invaluable insights into the life and times of Charles Darwin, his personality and the formative influences that made him what he was, for here we have his own words and ‘voice’ at the close of a prodigiously productive career. He tells of his childhood, his student days at Edinburgh and Cambridge, his love of beetles, shooting and geology and of his grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. He talks at some length about his meetings with the great scientific men of the age, his attitudes to his critics, to religion and of his theories of evolution.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Darwin about himself
- By Terry Yancey on 05-23-17
By: Charles Darwin
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- By: John Tresch
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Know the Real Poe
- By Elliott Wolfe, M.D. on 06-28-21
By: John Tresch
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A World Beneath the Sands
- The Golden Age of Egyptology
- By: Toby Wilkinson
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 75
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 75
In A World Beneath the Sands, acclaimed Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson chronicles the ruthless race between the British, French, Germans, and Americans to lay claim to its mysteries and treasures. He tells riveting stories of the men and women whose obsession with Egypt’s ancient civilization helped to enrich and transform our understanding of the Nile Valley and its people and left a lasting impression on Egypt, too.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An entrancing listen, fascinating History
- By L. Ford Ballard, Jr. on 01-27-21
By: Toby Wilkinson
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The Professor and the Madman
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 5,249
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,044
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Story4 out of 5 stars 4,059
Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perfect example of a quality audible book.
- By Jerry on 07-07-03
By: Simon Winchester
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The Riddle of the Labyrinth
- The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code
- By: Margalit Fox
- Narrated by: Pam Ward
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 145
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 131
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Story4 out of 5 stars 130
In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative. When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Discovery and Translation of Linear B Script
- By Sires on 01-11-14
By: Margalit Fox
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Galileo Galilei
- A Captivating Guide to an Italian Astronomer, Physicist, and Engineer and His Impact on the History of Science
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Kevin Hung-Liang
- Length: 2 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 26
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story5 out of 5 stars 24
Galileo Galilei’s contributions to modern science were so fundamental to a variety of fields that even though he died almost 400 years ago, his name retains international acclaim. This 17th-century natural philosopher is often credited with the invention of the telescope, thanks to his many discoveries using that specific instrument, and though he was not, in fact, its inventor, the myth still persists.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Supposed to be the Age of Common Sense
- By Dianne E Parks on 03-26-20
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Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies
- How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature
- By: Elizabeth Winkler
- Narrated by: Eunice Wong
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story5 out of 5 stars 38
The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent!
- By Virgil Tracy on 06-03-23
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C.S. Lewis
- A Biography of Friendship
- By: Colin Duriez
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
An Oxford student of C.S. Lewis' said he found his new tutor interesting and was told by J.R.R. Tolkien, "Interesting? Yes, he's certainly that. You'll never get to the bottom of him." You can learn a great deal about people by their friends and nowhere is this more true than in the case of C.S. Lewis, the remarkable academic, author, popularizer of faith - and creator of Narnia. He lost his mother early in life and became estranged from his father, much to his regret.
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5 out of 5 stars
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It's a Great Concept
- By James on 08-13-20
By: Colin Duriez