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The Knowledge
- How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
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Publisher's summary
Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest - or even the most basic - technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, accurately tell time, weave fibers into clothing, or even how to produce food for yourself?
Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can't hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it.
But Dartnell doesn't just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all - the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. This would allow survivors to learn technological advances not explicitly explored in The Knowledge as well as things we have yet to discover. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.
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Fairly entertaining and informative...but
- By Timothy on 08-27-19
By: Ruth Kassinger
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Energy and Civilization
- A History
- By: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 20 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this monumental history, Vaclav Smil provides a comprehensive account of how energy has shaped society, from pre-agricultural foraging societies through today's fossil fuel-driven civilization and offers listeners a magisterial overview of humanity's energy eras.
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Not a good format for this book
- By C. Hoogeboom on 05-19-18
By: Vaclav Smil
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Teaming with Nutrients
- The Organic Gardener's Guide to Optimizing Plant Nutrition
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- Narrated by: Chris Lutkin
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Overall
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Performance
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Most gardeners realize that plants need to be fed but know little to nothing about the nature of the nutrients involved or how they get into plants. Teaming with Nutrients explains how nutrients move into plants and what both macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients do once inside. It shows organic gardeners how to provide these essentials.
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Wow, narrator can't even pronounce nucleus.
- By Jerry Bradley on 06-25-20
By: Jeff Lowenfels, and others
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Cræft
- An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts
- By: Alexander Langlands
- Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In Craeft, archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands argues that our modern understanding of craft only skims the surface. His journeys from his home in Wales have taken him along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, from Spain through France and England to Scotland and Iceland in search of the lost meaning of craft.
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Too little information too much brag and biography
- By Thomas B. on 04-28-21
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Origin Story
- A Big History of Everything
- By: David Christian
- Narrated by: Jamie Jackson
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day - and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History", the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going.
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A brilliant achievement, must read/listen
- By 11104 on 09-05-18
By: David Christian
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The Case for Mars
- The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must
- By: Robert Zubrin, Richard Wagner, Arthur C. Clarke - Foreword
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Since the beginning of human history Mars has been an alluring dream - the stuff of legends, gods, and mystery. The planet most like ours, it has still been thought impossible to reach, let alone explore and inhabit. Now with the advent of a revolutionary new plan, all this has changed. Leading space exploration authority Robert Zubrin has crafted a daring new blueprint, Mars Direct, presented here with engaging anecdotes. The Case for Mars is not a vision for the far future or one that will cost us impossible billions.
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Compelling
- By Michael D. Busch on 04-16-18
By: Robert Zubrin, and others
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Origins
- How Earth's History Shaped Human History
- By: Lewis Dartnell
- Narrated by: John Sackville
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
When we talk about human history, we often focus on great leaders, population forces, and decisive wars. But how has the earth itself determined our destiny? Our planet wobbles, driving changes in climate that forced the transition from nomadism to farming. Mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece. Atmospheric circulation patterns later on shaped the progression of global exploration, colonization, and trade. Even today, voting behavior in the southeast United States ultimately follows the underlying pattern of 75 million-year-old sediments from an ancient sea.
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GREAT Book with a Narrator Who's Falling Asleep
- By aaron on 08-02-20
By: Lewis Dartnell
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Coal
- A Human History
- By: Barbara Freese
- Narrated by: Shelly Frasier
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock altered the course of history. Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy, and even today powers our electrical plants, has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe.
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Uses Coal to push her Political Agenda
- By Kismet on 08-22-06
By: Barbara Freese
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The Upcycle
- Beyond Sustainability - Designing for Abundance
- By: William McDonough, Michael Braungart
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Upcycle is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Cradle to Cradle, the most consequential ecological manifesto of our time. Now, drawing on the lessons gained from 10 years of putting the cradle-to-cradle concept into practice with businesses, governments, and ordinary people, William McDonough and Michael Braungart envision the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis: We don't just reuse resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve them as we use them.
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A "must read" for the environmental movement.
- By Love owls on 07-09-13
By: William McDonough, and others
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Atomic Accidents
- A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
- By: James Mahaffey
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 15 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the moment radiation was discovered in the late nineteenth century, nuclear science has had a rich history of innovative scientific exploration and discovery, coupled with mistakes, accidents, and downright disasters.
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A NUCLEAR POINT OF VIEW
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 01-05-15
By: James Mahaffey
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No Immediate Danger
- Carbon Ideologies, Volume One
- By: William T. Vollmann
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In his nonfiction, William T. Vollmann has won acclaim as a singular voice tackling some of the most important issues of our age. Now, Vollmann turns to a topic that will define the generations to come - the factors and human actions that have led to global warming. Vollmann begins No Immediate Danger by examining and quantifying the many causes of climate change, from industrial manufacturing and agricultural practices to fossil fuel extraction, economic demand for electric power, and the justifiable yearning of people all over the world to live in comfort.
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Look at the brightside always and die in a dream!
- By Darwin8u on 04-14-19
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Ignition!
- An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
- By: John Drury Clark, Isaac Asimov - foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ignition! is the story of the search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. This search was a hazardous enterprise carried out by rival labs who worked against the known laws of nature, with no guarantee of success or safety. John Drury Clark writes with irreverent and eyewitness immediacy about the development of the explosive fuels strong enough to negate the relentless restraints of gravity. The resulting volume is as much a memoir as a work of history, sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an enterprise that eventually took men to the moon.
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Science man lists names of chemicals for 9 hours
- By Adrian on 05-06-19
By: John Drury Clark, and others
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Teaming with Microbes
- The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
- By: Jeff Lowenfels, Wayne Lewis
- Narrated by: Chris Lutkin
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains plants and then become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of toxic substances. Teaming with Microbes offers an alternative to this vicious circle and details how to garden in a way that strengthens, rather than destroys, the soil food web. You’ll discover that healthy soil is teeming with life - not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms.
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Poor delivery
- By Brian C. on 06-05-20
By: Jeff Lowenfels, and others
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Gothic Horror Hard Science Fiction
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How to Take Over the World
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Bestselling author and award-winning comics writer Ryan North has the answers. In this introduction to the science of comic-book supervillainy, he details a number of outlandish villainous schemes that harness the potential of today’s most advanced technologies. Picking up where How to Invent Everything left off, his explanations are as fun and elucidating as they are completely absurd.
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A hilarious exploration of selfish altruism
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The Idea Factory
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In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the1980s. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted nearly 15,000 employees, 1200 of whom held PhDs and 13 of whom won Nobel Prizes. Thriving in a work environment that embraced new ideas, Bell Labs scientists introduced concepts that still propel many of today’s most exciting technologies.
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Great story -- horrible pauses
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The Complete (Short) Guide to Absolutely Everything
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Humour and understandability.
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What listeners say about The Knowledge
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Steven
- 05-04-15
Enlightening
Worthy of everyone's time! Great text for all high schools. I'll read again to retain more of this. I highly recommend!
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- Daniel Luke
- 10-04-23
This Is an AMAZING book
I highly, highly recommend this book. It has a conceit, which is that you are basically asked to imagine that the world has all but ended, at least as we know it, and that you are one of the few survivors. How are you and your significantly-reduced-in-number fellow humans going to bring the world up to the level of civilization the world was at before the imagined catastrophe?
The author, in precise, finished prose that is never overweening, nor offputtingly jocular (but also never dull) takes the listener on a journey toward the things that would need to be done to re-establish civilization by retracing the steps of our forbears--the ones, in particular, which progressively lead to greater and greater degrees of technological progress.
Along the way, you'll learn so many fascinating things about farming, weaving, metallurgy, chemistry, anatomy, and tons more.
I hasten to add that the narration was also superb.
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- Digital Customer
- 03-22-21
I want book two!!
I learned more in this book than all my highschool science classes put together. I want John Lee to write a second book that goes more in-depth!
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- Joshua Philip Manchester
- 05-10-18
Outstanding book
This really is a genuine guide on how to survive and rebuild after an apocalypse. It’s awesome.
First of all, I will make my kids read this when they are old enough for pure education.
Second I will buy about five copies and keep them in watertight containers at various locations around the places I live and visit. You just never know.
Third - this book really really makes you appreciate all that humanity has achieved over the past 10,000 years. We live lives of abundance and comfort today relative to 99% of the time that Homo sapiens has existed.
If I have to make one critique it is that warfare and war fighting are left out of the book. The book does a great job of describing how survivors of a cataclysm could rebuild science and technology slowly over time. But in such a scenario there might be multiple bands of people doing this, in an environment of poor communication and loss of trust. There are likely to be battles and wars as humans struggle to survive with limited technologies, or as they fight over the ability to scavenge in certain areas. War is as old as humans, sadly. One must not assume that it won’t be part of the landscape of a post-apocalyptic environment. How do you ensure security so that your group of survivors have the means to pursue scientific development? How do you even govern a small group of people - even a few dozen? And as your surviving society scales, how would you organize your government such that the problems that led to the downfall of the previous technological civilization do not afflict your own primitive state? These would be an additional set of tough questions to answer for the survivors, especially those who would be leaders among them.
The narration quality was great here too - loved the narrator’s accent.
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- Zach Ridge
- 08-14-19
A Great Read
As a chemist I greatly enjoyed this book, as it largely focused on the use of inorganic chemistry to rebuild society.
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- Matt Ranlett
- 04-27-15
So much better than I hoped
This is an extremely engaging read filled with information I never even thought of before. I'd really like to turn some of this information into science experiments for my children. I can't recommend this book enough even if you only have a passing interest in the science that underpins our world.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Michael
- 04-08-15
I see the world differently now
That was amazing. I consider myself quite knowledgeable and knew a reasonably amount of the content covered, but was still blown away by some of the amazing knowledge that humanity has discovered and that the author has put together so well.
This way of thinking about the world and learning could be a great way for getting kids into science. There should be classes covering this.
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- Mary Donovan
- 11-25-22
I THOUGHT I was smart...
Read/Listen to this carefully, and you, too, can be the Eugene of your zombie apocalypse group. Just make sure you keep that mullet fresh.
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- RealTruth
- 05-31-15
Interesting discussion of basic chemistry
Although this book started out slow, I was more impressed with the book the further I got into it. It discusses the basic chemistry behind technologies such as glass, steel, acids, heating, foods, clothing, photography, metal working, medicine, etc., etc. It is a "what if" scenario of what would happen if there were a nuclear holocaust and the survivors needed to concoct basic technologies. The author draws upon the works of others to build a book which truly challenges the scientific knowledge of readers.
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6 people found this helpful
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- John
- 04-03-15
An interesting look at preparation
This book provides useful knowledge for not only the end of the world, but also any dire circumstances you may find yourself in.
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