-
Metamorphoses
- In Search of Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: Deborah Balm
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
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Publisher's summary
In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, customers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka.
Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects.
Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space, traveling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are, in part, homages to the great man himself.
Metamorphoses presents a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, combining literary scholarship with the responses of his audiences throughout the last century. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.
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Story
For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.
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I couldn't finish it
- By Customer on 04-17-24
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The Balanced Brain
- The Science of Mental Health
- By: Camilla Nord
- Narrated by: Camilla Nord
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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There are many routes to mental well-being. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Camilla Nord offers a fascinating tour of the scientific developments that are revolutionizing the way we think about mental health, showing why and how events—and treatments—can affect people in such different ways. In The Balanced Brain, Nord explains how our brain constructs our sense of mental health—actively striving to maintain balance in response to our changing circumstances.
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Mildly informative, minimally actionable
- By Michael on 03-29-24
By: Camilla Nord
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Smoke and Ashes
- Opium's Hidden Histories
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Ranjit Madgavkar
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis trilogy ten years ago, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research.
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I adored the narrator
- By J. Dusheck on 06-20-24
By: Amitav Ghosh
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Medieval Horizons
- Why the Middle Ages Matter
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: Ian Mortimer
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.
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Altered my perception of History
- By IowaGreyhound on 06-25-24
By: Ian Mortimer
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Why We Die
- The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality
- By: Venki Ramakrishnan
- Narrated by: John Moraitis
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The knowledge of death is so terrifying that we live most of our lives in denial of it. One of the most difficult moments of childhood must be when each of us first realizes that not only we but all our loved ones will die—and there is nothing we can do about it. Or at least, there hasn’t been. Today, we are living through a revolution in biology. Giant strides are being made in understanding why we age—and why some species live longer than others. Could we eventually cheat disease and death and live for a very long time, possibly many times our current lifespan?
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Factful and balanced view
- By Ein besorgter Nutzer on 04-14-24