The Axemaker's Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein
Read by James Burke
Genre: Nonfiction/History
Total Play Time: 3 hrs. 24 min.
Size: 90,58 MB
4 mp3 files
This audiobook is about the people who gave us the world in exchange for our minds.
They are the axemakers, whose discoveries and innovations, over thousands of years, have empowered us in innumerable ways.
Each time the axemakers offered a new way to make us rich or safe or
invincible or knowledgeable, we accepted their gift and used it to
change the world. And we always came back for more, unmindful of the
cost.
But each axemaker's gift, be it a plow, an alphabet, a steam engine, a
philosopgy or a microscope, was a double-edged sword. And now we are
learning a terrifying cause-and-effect lesson: that with our short-term
progress has come long-term devastation.
This brilliant journey through the past into the future by historian
James Burke and psycholgist Robert Ornstein explains how humanity has
created both immense good and immense harm, and put us in the
precarious spot we find ourselves today - with shrinking resources, a
ballooning population, and the ecosystem in trouble.
It also brings us to an appreciation that axemaker gifts have always
unleashed the kind of immense power that changes minds, and how our
survival may now depend on harnessing and refocusing that same power to
save ourselves.