Showing titles in Professionals & Academics

When Andy McCarthy left school in Year 10 because of relentless bullying, his career prospects weren't great, but he was determined to prove the doubters wrong. At age 19, he connected his first solar panel and suddenly found himself powered by a purpose. He would accelerate the world's transition to renewable energy, and he would do it in the coal-fired heartland of Victoria's Latrobe Valley. Here Comes the Sun is an electrifying tale for anyone interested in renewable energy, in building a business and in what it takes to follow a purpose without burning out.

What lessons might cancer teach him before it finishes him off? Peter Goldsworthy asks, obliquely. A GP of forty years' practice, as well as one of Australia's most awarded and celebrated writers, Goldsworthy ('Doctor Pete' to his patients) brings his characteristic black humour and storytelling power to the tale of his own cancer journey. Accidentally diagnosed after a scan of his dicky knee, he was thrown into a world that he knew only too well from the other side: a world that soon shrank to hospital visits, sleepless and hyped-up nights on dexamethasone and life-saving chemotherapy.

Thomas Bayes was an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician whose obscure life belied the profound impact of his work. Like most research into probability at the time, his theorem - independently discovered a few years later by Pierre-Simon Laplace, the great French mathematician - was mainly seen as relevant to games of chance, like dice and cards. But its implications soon became clear, affecting fields as diverse as medicine, law and artificial intelligence.

Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane - a very modern flying doctor. His job is get on a plane and bring patients home after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head overseas. Holiday SOS is his extraordinary story. It’s a unique medical memoir of the people he helps - and a year in the life of one of the world’s most frequent flyers!

Anna Kent has delivered babies in war zones, caring for the most vulnerable women in the most vulnerable places in the world. At 26 years old, not yet a fully trained midwife, she delivered a baby in a tropical storm by the light of a headtorch; the following year, she would be responsible for the female health of 30,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. But returning to the UK to work for the NHS, she soon learned that even at home the right to a safe birth was impossible to take for granted.

Drawing on over a hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today's highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on. Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish.

Every weekend, in Holland’s most popular newspaper, de Volkskrant, renowned science-journalist Ellen de Visser asks a different medical professional to tell her about ‘that one patient’; the patient who changed everything for them. Every day, in every country, thousands of patients share their stories with their doctors: stories they may never have told anyone else; stories that are heartbreaking, sometimes funny and - just occasionally - unforgettable.

C'è chi si indispettisce, c'è chi si esalta e c'è invece chi si rende conto, come il giovane Heisenberg durante la sua tormentata convalescenza a Helgoland, che probabilmente il traguardo è proprio questo: smettere di ascoltare il mondo come lo si è ascoltato fino a quel momento e avventurarsi verso una forma di comprensione assolutamente nuova. Per quanto terrore possa, a tratti, ispirare. È la via che ha preferito Benjamín Labatut, ricostruendo alcune scene che hanno deciso la nascita della scienza moderna.

En este audiolibro, la propia Rosa Montero nos habla de la superación del dolor, de las relaciones entre hombres y mujeres, del esplendor del sexo, de la buena muerte y de la bella vida, de la ciencia y de la ignorancia, de la fuerza salvadora de la literatura y de la sabiduría de quienes aprenden a disfrutar de la existencia con plenitud y con ligereza.

In 1937, Roger Penrose and his father discovered a sundial in a clearing behind their house in Colchester. In that machine made of light, shadow and time, six-year-old Roger discovered a 'world behind the world' of transcendently beautiful geometry. He had begun a journey that would make him one of the past century's most influential mathematicians, philosophers and physicists.

Following on from the events in A Zoo in My Luggage, The Whispering Land sees Gerald Durrell and his wife Jacquie travel to Argentina to collect animals for their newly established zoo. With rare insight and unique charm, Durrell pulls the listener into the tropical landscape of Patagonia, where he witnesses magical moments with penguins, seals and ocelots, and encounters a hilarious cast of characters, including a swearing parrot and a belching guanaco.

Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue for the inherent good of both business and capitalism. Featuring some of today's best-known and most-successful companies, they illustrate how these two forces can - and do - work most powerfully to create value for all stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment.

As Carl Sagan did for astronomy and Brian Green did for cosmology, Walter Lewin takes listeners on a marvelous journey in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power with which physics can reveal the hidden workings of the world all around us. "I introduce people to their own world," writes Lewin, "the world they live in and are familiar with but don't approach like a physicist - yet."

Ben Franklin's own lively story of his early years is a unique, fascinating, and influential look at this American founding father. It has been taught in schools as a moral tract, as a guide to self-improvement, and as the Great American Success Story. It also is relished both for its insight into colonial life and the mind of the man who most affected the development of our democratic form of government.

Everyone knows Einstein. The hair. The tongue. The equation. But who was the man behind the myth? This isn’t a physics textbook. It’s a human story — of a boy who asked strange questions, a thinker who bent time, and a refugee who watched the world weaponize his mind. Told in plain language with wit and clarity, Einstein: The Man Who Asked Why follows the journey of the quiet clockmaker’s son who reimagined space, challenged war, rejected authority, and spent his final days chasing an unfinished theory.

Heiress to the nearly 40-billion-dollar L’Oréal fortune, Liliane Bettencourt was the world’s richest woman and the 14th wealthiest person. But her gilded life took a dark yet fascinating turn in the past decade. At 94, she was embroiled in what has been called the Bettencourt Affair, a scandal that dominated the headlines in France. Why? It’s a tangled web of hidden secrets, divided loyalties, frayed relationships, and fractured families, set in the most romantic city - and involving the most glamorous industry - in the world.

Everyone has heard of DNA. But by itself, DNA is just an inert blueprint for life. It is the ribosome - an enormous molecular machine made up of a million atoms - that makes DNA come to life, turning our genetic code into proteins and therefore into us. Gene Machine is an insider account of the race for the structure of the ribosome, a fundamental discovery that both advances our knowledge of all life and could lead to the development of better antibiotics against life-threatening diseases.

In this shocking exposé, former EHM John Perkins gives an insider view into the corrupt system that cheats and strong-arms countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars and ultimately causes staggering income inequality and ecological devastation. EHMs are highly paid professionals who use development loans to saddle countries with huge debts and force them to serve US interests. Now, a new EHM wave is infecting the world, and at the peak of the devastation sits China, a newly dominant economic power, with its own insidious version of the US EHM blueprint.

Join Poppy Okotcha in her wild little garden in Devon, where, over the course of a year, she shares the inspiring, the mundane and the magical moments that arise from tending a garden through the seasons, and what they can teach us about living more sustainably. Alongside tips for sowing and growing, wild ingredients to be found and delicious seasonal recipes to make, she shows us how the small joys of engaging with the natural world are imperative for our physical and emotional wellbeing.