Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Tomatoland

Subtitle: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit

Author: Barry Estabrook

Narrator: Pete Larkin

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-30-11

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 91 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, The Price of Tomatoes, investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point? Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants.

Throughout Tomatoland Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years.

Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well epos of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

Critic Reviews:

"[A] thought-provoking book." (Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

Neat Book

If you're interested in where your food comes from but not in a lot of preachy, unsolicited advice on how you should behave yourself, this is a fantastic read.

I'm pretty well versed on the whole food subject, but I was not aware of how bad the slavery issues in Florida had gotten.

All in all a very good read.

Do I Really Want to Eat Another Tomatoe Ball?

What made the experience of listening to Tomatoland the most enjoyable?

Great exposure of how our "industrial" tomato might not want to be part of my food intake.

Any additional comments?

Sometimes repetitious on some points. Still kept me glued to the speaker to the very end.

Terrific. Challenging. Eye opening.

I had no idea the complexity of this subject. This book covers abused farm workers, labor struggles, artisanal tomato growers, government regulations and the search for a good tasting tomato with equal detail. It's all fascinating and has me curious about where my food comes from and the impact of how it's harvested.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: The Optimism Bias

Subtitle: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain

Author: Tali Sharot

Narrator: Susan Denaker

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-14-11

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 33 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

One of the most innovative neuroscientists at work today investigates the bias toward optimism that exists on a neural level in our brains and plays a major part in determining how we live our lives.

Psychologists have long been aware that most people tend to maintain an often irrationally positive outlook on life. In fact, optimism may be crucial to our existence. Tali Sharot's experiments, research, and findings in cognitive science are at the center of an emerging technology that has lead to increased understanding of the biological basis of optimism. In this fascinating exploration, she takes an in-depth, clarifying look at how the brain generates hope and what happens when it fails; how the brains of optimists and pessimists differ; how the expectation of pleasure is formed; how anticipation and dread affect us; and how our optimistic illusions influence our financial, professional, and emotional decisions.

With its cutting-edge science and its wide-ranging and accessible narrative, The Optimism Bias provides us with startling new insight into the workings of the brain.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

Critic Reviews:

"Lively, conversational.... A well-told, heartening report from neuroscience's front lines." (Kirkus )

Members Reviews:

In Support of 'The Optimism Bias'

If you have made a career in educational technology then you must spend your days fighting against the "optimism bias." Work in technology long enough and you know that it is normal for our technology to fail. Projects take longer to complete than scheduled.

Vendors don't deliver products, updates, or patches when promised. Software is overly complex, and all too often poorly designed. Disks crash. Databases degrade. Data will be lost. We will fail to backup. The network will go down.

Why is it that all of us persist in believing in a higher ed that is transformed by technology?

Why do we see a bright future for technology enabled learning when the present is often so challenging? Tali Sharot tells us that our brains are hard wired for optimism, and that this evolved adaptation is a net positive for the success of our species. A brain that is designed to see a positive future is a helpful tool for motivating us to work harder today.

The ground that Sharot covers in The Optimism Bias is familiar to readers of popular nonfiction in fields ranging from brain science to social psychology to behavioral economics to evolutionary biology. One hopes that Kahneman and Tversky get a royalty for every time they are mentioned in one of these books.

At this point, there should be no doubt that we are "predictably irrational", why we "blunder", that the "gorilla is indeed invisible", that "choosing is an art", that we are very good at "being wrong", that we enjoy an "upside of irrationality", and that there is a "genius in all of us". And despite what Sharot argues, we are indeed "rational optimists", that our best behaviors (our "drive") comes from internal motivations, and that in the end we are nothing more than "well-dressed apes".

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: The Tell-Tale Brain

Subtitle: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

Author: V. S. Ramachandran

Narrator: David Drummond

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-21-11

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 458 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

V. S. Ramachandran is at the forefront of his field - so much so that Richard Dawkins dubbed him the "Marco Polo of neuroscience". Now, in a major new work, Ramachandran sets his sights on the mystery of human uniqueness.

Taking us to the frontiers of neurology, he reveals what baffling and extreme case studies can teach us about normal brain function and how it evolved. Synesthesia becomes a window into the brain mechanisms that make some of us more creative than others. And autism - for which Ramachandran opens a new direction for treatment - gives us a glimpse of the aspect of being human that we understand least: self-awareness.

Ramachandran tackles the most exciting and controversial topics in neurology with a storyteller's eye for compelling case studies and a researcher's flair for new approaches to age-old questions. Tracing the strange links between neurology and behavior, this book unveils a wealth of clues into the deepest mysteries of the human brain.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

Critic Reviews:

"Ramachandran produces an exhilarating and at times funny text that invites discussion and experimentation." (

Kirkus)

Members Reviews:

Great if you like understanding how brains work

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Do take some time to look at the included PDF before you start listening otherwise you will be frustrated at various points. The book does repeat some things from other of Ramachandran???s books, but it was all stuff that was interesting enough to bear repeating. The book also becomes speculative at points, but the author notes where experimental results end and speculation begins and he also points out that speculation is an important part of the scientific method. The speculation becomes a little wild near the end of the book when the author attempts to frame art in term of neuroscience, but it was interesting to think about nevertheless. The book mostly describes unusual neurological conditions, links them to specific brain regions, and describes experiments to test related theories. This is quite good fun if you are in to that sort of thing ??? if you are not, it might seem dry.

Really sets itself apart in the second half

There's a ton here. The first half of the book covers a lot that's pretty well discussed elsewhere, but in the second half, Ramachandran just explodes into a huge fireball of ideas that are expansive not only in their reach but are also impressive in their novelty and creativity. You get the feeling that the only thing keeping him back is time. It's definitely not a lack of important questions and well-designed experiments.

I especially liked his discussion of art and aesthetics and his speculations on why we like abstract art and what makes some art almost irresistible to the human brain. He comes to it with a refreshingly different perspective due to his Indian background. He's unwaveringly scientific, but seems to have a much greater pool of examples to draw from due to the vast cultural landscape India offers.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: The Brain that Changes Itself

Author: Norman Doidge

Narrator: Jim Bond

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-23-10

Publisher: Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 78 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

An astonishing new scientific discovery called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the adult human brain is fixed and unchanging. It is, instead, able to change its own structure and function, even into old age.

In this revolutionary look at the brain, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., provides an introduction to both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives theyve transformed.

Critic Reviews:

A remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain. (Oliver Sacks)

Mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff with implications for all human beings. (The New York Times)

Members Reviews:

Intriguing insight into the workings of the brain

This is a great 'read' if you are interested in the way the brain works and particularly how the brain manages to repair itself or work around obstacles to keep the body functioning. Its also professionally narrated. It talks about perceptions, how the brain deals with pain (it "allows" pain signals for example) and what it does if the body loses an eye or a limb by remapping parts of the brain to compensate, or how, in some cases, it fails such as phantom limb syndrome. I found it fascinating and insightful and would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who has a keen interest in science and research or human perception.

Seminal review of the area

Loved it and reminded of our need to be honest with ourselves about our level of knowledge.

Amazing, thought provoking stuff

What made the experience of listening to The Brain that Changes Itself the most enjoyable?

The concept of brain changes occurring from such unconventional treatments is truly fascinating.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Brain that Changes Itself?

The chapters on light and sound therapy and the scope of conditions they assist with.

Remarkable

What an amazing book. I now feel like I can achieve anything. For so many people to accomplish so much with such adversity is unbelieveable

A dishonest book, it is not evidence based science

What disappointed you about The Brain that Changes Itself?

It started off promisingly, neuroplasticity is real, but the author distorts the topic so much that in the end you can't tell fact from fiction.

What was most disappointing about Norman Doidges story?

His personal biases, (he has many). For example he rams is unproven idea that god exists down your throat in a patronizing manner. He pushes these commercial entities making a buck off neuroplasticity with what seems to be an uncritical eye.and on and on... Just because he is an MD does not make him right.

Which scene was your favorite?

The girl who was born with half a brain and made good use of it, without any help.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Snake oil sales men will make a lot of money from this book, so I guess sadness that many people will be sucked in.

Any additional comments?

No additional comments.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: The Tiger

Subtitle: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

Author: John Vaillant

Narrator: John Vaillant

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-24-10

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 539 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

Its December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a remote village in Russias Far East. The tiger isnt just killing people, its annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that these attacks arent random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be found before it strikes again.

As he re-creates these extraordinary events, John Vaillant gives us an unforgettable portrait of this spectacularly beautiful and mysterious region. We meet the native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside tigers, even sharing their kills with them. We witness the arrival of Russian settlers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, soldiers and hunters who greatly diminished the tiger populations. And we come to know their descendants, who, crushed by poverty, have turned to poaching and further upset the natural balance of the region.

This ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator is at the very heart of this remarkable book. Throughout, we encounter surprising theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens may have fit seamlessly into the tigers ecosystem. Above all, we come to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent super-predator that can grow to 10 feet long, weigh more than 600 pounds, and range daily over vast territories of forest and mountain.

Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the tiger himself. It is an absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.

Critic Reviews:

Suspenseful and majestically narrated.... Vaillant has written a mighty elegy that leads readers into the lair of the tiger and into the heart of the Kremlin to explain how the Amur tiger went from being worshipped to being poached. (Publishers Weekly)

The Tiger is the sort of book I very much like and rarely find.... In addition to tiger lore and scalding adventure, Vaillant shows us Russias far east and its inhabitants, their sometimes desperate lives interwoven with the economics of poaching and the politics of wildlife conservation. I was startled to learn about the zapovedniks and Russias primary place in global conservation. This is a book not only for adventure buffs, but for all of us interested in wildlife habitat preservation. (Annie Proulx)

Members Reviews:

Very well written and a must for Big Cat fans

I'll begin with the author's reading skills: Pretty damn good.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Four Fish

Subtitle: The Future of the Last Wild Food

Author: Paul Greenberg

Narrator: Christopher Lane

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-15-10

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 378 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

Our relationship with the ocean is undergoing a profound transformation. Just three decades ago, nearly everything we ate from the sea was wild. Today, rampant overfishing and an unprecedented biotech revolution have brought us to a point where wild and farmed fish occupy equal parts of a complex and confusing marketplace. We stand at the edge of a cataclysm; there is a distinct possibility that our childrens children will never eat a wild fish that has swum freely in the sea.

In Four Fish, award-winning writer and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna and investigating where each stands at this critical moment in time. He visits Norwegian megafarms that use genetic techniques once pioneered on sheep to grow millions of pounds of salmon a year. He travels to the ancestral river of the Yupik Eskimos to see the only Fair Tradecertified fishing company in the world. He makes clear how PCBs and mercury find their way into seafood; discovers how Mediterranean sea bass went global; challenges the author of Cod to taste the difference between a farmed and a wild cod; and almost sinks to the bottom of the South Pacific while searching for an alternative to endangered bluefin tuna.

Fish, Greenberg reveals, are the last truly wild food for now. By examining the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, he shows how we can start to heal the oceans and fight for a world where healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception.

Critic Reviews:

"An award-winning food journalist brilliantly dissects the relationship between humans and the four fish that dominate the seafood market....The narrative is grounded in common sense and anchored by first-rate, on-scene reporting from the Yukon and Mekong Rivers, Lake Bardawil in the Sinai Peninsula and the waters off the coasts of Long Island, Greece, Hawaii and the Shetland Islands. Hugely informative, sincere and infectiously curious and enthusiastic." (

Kirkus)

Members Reviews:

4 Reasons to Read "Four Fish"

Reason 1: You loved Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Standage's An Edible History of Humanity and everything by Michael Pollan.

Reason 2: You are fascinated by the fact that the majority of the fish we eat is farmed, and that aquaculture is the fastest growing food production system on the planet.

Reason 3: You are torn about eating seafood. You have heard that seafood populations are collapsing, and that many of the fish we enjoy today will not be available to our children due to overfishing. However, you also hear that we need to eat more seafood for our health, and you think it is a good idea to move away from corn fed beef and towards a more sustainable and health diet that contains more fish.

Reason 4: You like learning about the economics of food, the sociology of food producers, and the psychology of food buyers. You have read Paul Greenberg in the NYTimes magazine and other places, and know that his writing is smart and funny.

Great listen

If you fish, like to eat fish, and/or care about our environment, you will enjoy this book. From the personal story at its beginning to the common sense epilogue, this book is extremely well done (and well narrated), weaving in first-hand research along with entertaining stories.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Life Ascending

Subtitle: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

Author: Nick Lane

Narrator: Graeme Malcolm

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-25-10

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 277 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

Where does DNA come from? What is consciousness? How did the eye evolve? Drawing on a treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, Nick Lane expertly reconstructs evolution's history by describing its 10 greatest inventions - from sex and warmth to death - resulting in a stunning account of nature's ingenuity.

Critic Reviews:

"Original and awe-inspiring . . . an exhilarating tour of some of the most profound and important ideas in biology." (New Scientist)

Members Reviews:

Great and informative but with prior knowledge

This was an interesting and fun listen. I have been interested in evolution for most of my adult life, and while this book takes for granted that evolution is real (who, in their right minds, doesn't?), it does so with great inquiry. Many of the topics held within evolution are discussed here, such as the eye and if evolution was slow and gradual or fast and abrupt.

The book can seem to drag at points, more so if the reader (listener) does not have a firm grasp on many of the scientific terms (I didn't). Because I listened to this book commuting in 2 hour chunks, it was easy for my brain to tune out a lot of the scientific trains of thought. Not a good thing, if that's what you are expecting from this book.

All in all a decent listen and read. I would recommend this to anyone interested in evolution, but without the need to prove it's existence to themselves.

Great book!

This was a great book. I think I understood maybe half of it, but that half was fascinating. I used to be a science teacher, but I've been retired for a while now, and I've let my subscriptions to science magazines lapse, and I have fallen behind. He lets us in on the newest theories about a number of scientific theories, and they are fascinating: How did life begin? How was DNA, photosynthesis, cells, sex invented? Will we ever be able to overcome old age and death? There are ten chapters on ten topics, and the information in each one is mind boggling. I kept thinking, "Gee, I wish I'd known this when I was still teaching." But actually, much of it hadn't been discovered then. This is really fresh stuff.

You will have to concentrate to understand this book. I don't commute anymore, so I usually play computer games while I listen to Audible books--games that don't require a lot of thought. But even solitaire was too complicated to play while listening to this book. I plan to listen to it again, but I'm going to get the Kindle version to read along with the audio version.

This book is difficult but very rewarding. I recommend it highly.

technical but enlightening

The most technical of the many science/biology books I've read to date--not for those who hated biology class.

It was particularly good on the theories origins of life/DNA, photosynthesis, and eukaryotic cells. Not so great on consciousness (I think it's hard to make a case that that is one of the greatest "inventions" of evolution from the overall picture of life) and death (really a chapter about how we can avoid the degenerations/infirmations of old age--SPOILER: eat less).

I thought I had, at last, a science book that doesn't try to persuade us that evolution is true but, alas, in the final chapter the author made his pitch.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Next of Kin

Subtitle: What Chimpanzees Tell Us About Who We Are

Author: Roger Fouts, Stephen Tukel Mills, Jane Goodall (Introduction and notes)

Narrator: Roger Fouts

Format: Abridged

Length: 4 hrs and 32 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-08-10

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 25 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

Roger Fouts fulfilled humankind's age-old dream of talking to animals by pioneering communication with chimpanzees through sign language. Now, in Next of Kin, Fouts tells the dramatic story of his odyssey from novice researcher to celebrity scientist and caretaker of a family of chimpanzees, to his impassioned awakening as a crusader for the rights of animals.

At the heart of this captivating audiobook is Fouts's magical 30-year friendship with Washoe, the chimpanzee he met when she jumped into his arms. We follow Washoe as she grows from a mischievous baby chimp fresh out of the NASA space program into the matriarch of a clan of chimpanzees. Living and conversing with these sensitive creatures has given Fouts a profound appreciation of how much we share with our closest biological relatives, and what they can teach us about ourselves.

This stirring tale of friendship, courage, and compassion will change forever the way we view our biological - and spiritual - Next of Kin.

Critic Reviews:

"A remarkable personal saga . . . and a searingly honest account of just what has happened, arid is all too often still happening, to these marvelously intelligent creatures." (Cleveland Amory)

Members Reviews:

deeply moving story

This is my favorite book. It reads like a novel. a love story.

"It was Washoe who taught me that human is only an adjective that describes being. The essence of who I am is not my humanness, but my beingness" Roger Fouts, Next of Kin

Compassion in Action

I was mesmerized, horrified, uplifted, transformed by this important story of understanding and compassion. I, too, was taught that humans are unique because they have conscience and compassion. So, so wrong. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn the truth. The more I learn, the more I see that we humans are, indeed, unique; but not for attributes that render us "superior." Rather, we are unique among animals in our penchant for combining innate animal aggression with uniquely human narcissism to inflict suffering on other creatures, including members of our own species, far beyond anything seen in nature. This story hardens my resolve to cultivate compassion with the time I have left.

Truly amazing story

What made the experience of listening to Next of Kin the most enjoyable?

This is one of the most amazing stories that I've come across. The fact that it is narrated by the author is a plus, as at times you can actually hear true emotion in his voice.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Next of Kin?

The most memorable moment to me was easily a moment involving Washoe and one of the aides who had just returned from having a miscarriage. The exchange between the two actually brought tears to my eyes. It was truly amazing.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: Hope for Animals and Their World

Subtitle: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink

Author: Jane Goodall, Thane Maynard, Gail Hudson

Narrator: Jane Goodall

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-20-09

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 48 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

With the insatiable curiosity and conversational prose that have made her a best-selling author, Goodall - along with Cincinnati Zoo Director Thane Maynard - shares fascinating survival stories about the American crocodile, the California condor, the black-footed ferret, and more - all formerly endangered species and species once on the verge of extinction whose populations are now being regenerated.

Interweaving her own first-hand experiences in the field with the compelling research of premier scientists, Goodall illuminates the heroic efforts of dedicated environmentalists and the truly critical need to protect the habitats of these beloved species.

At once a celebration of the animal kingdom and a passionate call to arms, Hope for Animals and Their World presents an uplifting, hopeful message for the future of animal-human coexistence.

Critic Reviews:

"Goodall is no Pollyanna about species reclamation - she acknowledges that there have been more losses than gains - but these accounts of conservation success are inspirational." (Publishers Weekly)

Members Reviews:

Fighting for survival

This book is a very important recording of the work done by people all over the world to save species. Jane Goodall inspires us all to do our part in the fight to protect our earth!

Boring

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I can't recommend this book as it was very hard to get through. The book format is several small stories of animals, insects, plants that were on the brink of destruction and managed to bounce back. I started listening to this book to get a perspective of what we are doing right ecologically, but instead Jane Goodall provides nothing but anecdotes peppered with opinion .The book has very little actual science substance. The stories are incredibly repetitive.

Save yourself some time and just fill in the blanks with your favorite endangered animal.

_____ is a wonderful ______ but due to humans it is on the brink of destruction. So I went to see it and it made me so happy with their cute little _____ that it made me tear up. Luckily there is a team of scientist who found and captured these _____ and bred them and reintroduced them to the wild.

Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: What the Nose Knows

Subtitle: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life

Author: Avery Gilbert

Narrator: Jeff Woodman

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 1 min

Language: English

Release date: 09-15-09

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 55 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Biology

Publisher's Summary:

For example, contrary to popular belief, the human nose is almost as sensitive as the noses of many animals, including dogs; blind people do not have enhanced powers of smell; and perfumers excel at their jobs not because they have superior noses, but because they have perfected the art of thinking about scents.

In this entertaining and enlightening journey through the world of aroma, olfaction expert Avery Gilbert illuminates the latest scientific discoveries and offers keen observations on modern culture: how a museum is preserving the smells of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row; why John Waters revived the "smellie" in Polyester; and what innovations are coming from artists like the Dutch "aroma jockey" known as Odo7.

From brain-imaging laboratories to the high-stakes world of scent marketing, What the Nose Knows takes us on a tour of the strange and surprising realm of smell.

Critic Reviews:

"Avery Gilbert's whistle-stop journey...through, around and inside the nose is remarkably entertaining, and a great read for anyone seeking a tour that awakens the senses. Everybody who is anybody in the world of scent, and a few impostors too, make an appearance as we bounce from chapter to chapter, learning diverse olfactory gems." (New Scientist)

Members Reviews:

First half is good, second half is terrible.

I was really impressed with Avery Gilbert's work for the first half of this book. It was a more biologically-based approach than most other works that I've read about the subject. Gilbert explains why some scents are more discernable to some people than to others and why some are not discernable at all to others. He explains the inner workings of our sense of smell in understandable terms and he does so in an interesting way.

Then comes the second half of the book.

From there, it all just goes downhill. The beginning of the end comes with the introduction of the topic of smellovision and the various failed attempts of the film and theater industry to make smellovision a reality. Had this been mentioned briefly, it would have been an interesting side note. Sadly, Gilbert went on and on about it until the the book itself started to stink.

When he finally moved on, it was to discuss the grossest topics he could possibly come up with. It was as if an 8-year-old boy took over the book. Then a 15-year-old took over to bring up implications of scent in the porn industry. Really?

I will say that the last 10 minutes or so were mildly interesting as Gildbert deigned to return to actual science in his discussion of implications for genetics research.

I cannot recommend this book unless, like me, you have a fascination for all things related to scent. If that's the case, just listen until he starts talking about the film industry and then skip to the last 10 or 15 minutes of the book. If you're really interested in the film industry, you might like to listen to that part. Overall, I'm glad I heard the first and last part, but I was really disappointed in what could have been a great book.

Excellent when he sticks to the science

Would you listen to What the Nose Knows again? Why?

No. The information is interesting, but there is no point in hearing it a second time.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

The second half of the book veers off course.