Gina Kolata has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 5 ratings. The most-rated is Flu.
Flu
Summary
Feeling feverish, tired, or achy? Listening to Gina Kolata's engrossing account of the 1918 Influenza epidemic is sure to give you the chills. When we think of plagues, we think of AIDS, Ebola, anthrax spores, and, of course, the Black Death. Influenza never makes the list. But in 1918 the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the pandemic raged. More American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu than were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Eskimos living in remote outposts in the frozen tundra succumbed to the flu in such numbers that entire villages were wiped out. If such a plague returned today, taking a comparable percentage of the U.S. population with it, 1.5 million Americans would die, which is more than the number killed in a single year by heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer's combined. Scientists have recently discovered shards of the flu virus in human remains frozen in the Arctic tundra and in scraps of tissue preserved in a government warehouse. In Flu, Gina Kolata, an acclaimed reporter for The New York Times, unravels the mystery of the lethal virus with the high drama of a great adventure story. From Alaska to Norway, from the streets of Hong Kong to the corridors of the White House, Kolata tracks the race to recover the live pathogen and probes the fear that has impelled government policy. A gripping work of science writing, Flu addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and considers what can be done to prevent it.
©1999 Gina Kolata
Rethinking Thin
Summary
In this eye-opening audiobook, New York Times science writer Gina Kolata shows that our society's obsession with dieting and weight loss is less about keeping trim and staying healthy than about money, power, trends, and impossible ideals. Rethinking Thin is at once an account of the place of diets in American society and a provocative critique of the weight-loss industry. Kolata's account of four determined dieters' progress through a study comparing the Atkins diet to a conventional low-calorie one becomes a broad tale of science and society, of social mores and social sanctions, and of politics and power. Rethinking Thin asks whether words like willpower are really applicable when it comes to eating and body weight. It dramatizes what it feels like to spend a lifetime struggling with one's weight and fantasizing about finally getting thin. It tells the little-known story of the science of obesity and the history of diets and dieting: scientific and social phenomena that have made some people rich and thin and left others fat and miserable. And it offers commonsense answers to questions about weight, eating habits, and obesity, giving us a better understanding of the weight that is right for our bodies.
©2007 Gina Kolata (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.
Ultimate Fitness
Summary
Gina Kolata, science reporter to The New York Times, takes a fascinating journey into the fads, fictions and genuine innovations that have defined the world of physical fitness. By examining fads through the decades, from weight lifting for men and women in the early days, to jogging, cycling, aerobics, and now spinning, Kolata explains the science of conditioning and the objective evidence behind commonly accepted prescriptions. Among the questions she addresses are: What is the best way to exercise for maximum effect? Is there really a "fat-burning zone"? Why is that some people won't become fit in spite of exercise? Are there foods, drinks or supplements that can help you exercise longer or harder? Kolata profiles researchers who successfully challenged conventional wisdom and marketed their inventions, and some who resisted initial criticism only to back down from their claims. With lively sketches of many of the mavericks who have influenced the industry, Kolata presents an eye-opening view of the inside workings of a multimillion-dollar business. Lively and engaging, Ultimate Fitness spotlights the machines and machinations and cuts through the marketing hype, not only to assess what is healthy, but also to understand what our obsession with staying healthy says about American culture today.
©2003 Gina Kolata (P)2003 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrick Publishers, LLC.
Mercies in Disguise
Summary
New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata follows a family through genetic illness and one courageous daughter who decides her fate shall no longer be decided by a genetic flaw. The phone rings; the doctor has the results. "Are you ready, Amanda?" The two people Amanda Baxley loves the most had begged her not to be tested. But she had to find out. If your family carried a mutated gene that foretold brutal illness and you could find out if you inherited it, would you do it? Would you confront it, accepting whatever answer came? Or ignore it while you could? In Mercies in Disguise, acclaimed New York Times reporter and best-selling author Gina Kolata tells the story of the Baxleys, an upstanding family in small-town South Carolina. Many of them were doctors, but still, they are struck down by an inscrutable illness. Finally they discover the cause of the disease after a remarkable sequence of providential events. Meanwhile science, progressing for 50 years along a parallel track, handed the Baxleys a question - not a cure but a blood test that would reveal who had the gene for the disease. Science offered another dilemma - fertility specialists had created a way to spare the children. A work of narrative nonfiction in the tradition of the The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Mercies in Disguise tells the story of a family that took matters into its own hands when medicine could not help. It's a story of a family dealing with unspeakable tragedy without being driven apart. It is the story of a young woman - Amanda Baxley - who faced the future, determined to find a way to disrupt her destiny.
©2017 Gina Kolata (P)2017 Recorded Books