Angela Saini has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 49 ratings. The most-rated is Inferior.
Inferior
Summary
What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knew. For hundreds of years, it was common sense: Women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution, and for decades scientists - most of them male, of course - claimed to find evidence to support this. Whether looking at intelligence or emotion, cognition or behavior, science has continued to tell us that men and women are fundamentally different. Biologists claim that women are better suited to raising families or are, more gently, uniquely empathetic. Men, on the other hand, continue to be described as excelling at tasks that require logic, spatial reasoning, and motor skills. But a huge wave of research is now revealing an alternative version of what we thought we knew. The new woman revealed by this scientific data is as strong, strategic, and smart as anyone else. In Inferior, acclaimed science writer Angela Saini weaves together a fascinating - and sorely necessary - new science of women. As Saini takes listeners on a journey to uncover science's failure to understand women, she finds that we're still living with the legacy of an establishment that's just beginning to recover from centuries of entrenched exclusion and prejudice. Sexist assumptions are stubbornly persistent: even in recent years, researchers have insisted that women are choosy and monogamous while men are naturally promiscuous or that the way men's and women's brains are wired confirms long-discredited gender stereotypes. As Saini reveals, however, groundbreaking research is finally rediscovering women's bodies and minds. Inferior investigates the gender wars in biology, psychology, and anthropology and delves into cutting-edge scientific studies to uncover a fascinating new portrait of women's brains, bodies, and role in human evolution.
©2017 Angela Saini (P)2017 Random House Audio
Superior
Summary
2019 Best-Of Lists: 10 Best Science Books of the Year (Smithsonian Magazine) · Best Science Books of the Year (NPR's Science Friday) · Best Science and Technology Books from 2019 (Library Journal) An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences. Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between "races" - to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions - stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science - and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.
©2019 Angela Saini (P)2019 Random House Audio
Inferiori
Summary
Per centinaia di anni è stato un luogo comune: le donne sono il sesso debole, inferiore. Sono fisicamente più deboli, meno intelligenti, subordinate per natura. Persino uno studioso del calibro di Charles Darwin afferma che le donne si collocano a un gradino più basso dell'evoluzione, e per decenni gli scienziati - tutti uomini, ovviamente - hanno portato prove a sostegno di questa tesi. Che si tratti di intelligenza o emotività, di capacità di apprendere o di comportamento, la scienza ha continuato a dirci che uomini e donne sono sostanzialmente diversi. I biologi sostengono che le donne sono più adatte a prendersi cura della famiglia o, più gentilmente, che sono dotate di una spiccata empatia, mentre gli uomini eccellono in tutte le attività che richiedono ragionamento logico e spaziale e abilità motorie. Ma ora un'ondata di nuove ricerche propone una visione alternativa rispetto a ciò che credevamo di sapere. La donna nuova che emerge dai dati scientifici è forte, strategica e intelligente esattamente quanto la sua controparte maschile. Inferiori è un viaggio attraverso la scienza che mette alla prova i nostri preconcetti su uomini e donne, approfondisce la feroce guerra tra i generi dal punto di vista biologico, psicologico e antropologico, denuncia l'imperare dei pregiudizi nell'ambito della ricerca e incoraggia gli scienziati a perseguire la verità sul genere femminile. Il risultato è un ritratto della mente, del corpo e della storia evolutiva della donna. E chiedendosi che cosa significhino queste rivelazioni per noi come individui e come società, propone una visione innovativa e fresca della scienza nella quale le donne sono incluse anziché escluse.
©2019 HarperCollins Italia S.p.A. Tradotto da Raffaella Voi (P)2020 HarperCollins Italia S.p.A
The Year That Changed the World
Summary
"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" President Ronald Reagan's famous exhortation when visiting Berlin in 1987 has long been widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The United States won, so this version of history goes, because Ronald Reagan stood firm against the USSR; American resoluteness brought the evil empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, who was there at the time as a Newsweek bureau chief, begs to differ. In this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, Meyer shows that American intransigence was only one of many factors that provoked world-shaking change. He draws together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin. But the most important events, Meyer contends, occurred secretly, in the heroic stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle - leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; the Baltic shipwright Lech Walesa; the quietly determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who privately realized that his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary of the Communist party. Reporting for Newsweek from the frontlines in Eastern Europe, Meyer spoke to these players and countless others. Alongside their deliberate interventions were also the happenstance and human error of history that are always present when events accelerate to breakneck speed.
©2009 Michael Meyer (P)2009 Tantor