Lydia Denworth has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators. The most-rated is Friendship.
Toxic Truth
Summary
They didn't start out as environmental warriors. Clair Patterson was a geochemist focused on determining the age of the Earth. Herbert Needleman was a pediatrician treating inner-city children. But in the chemistry lab and the hospital ward, they met a common enemy: lead. It was literally everywhere - in gasoline and paint, of course, but also in water pipes and food cans, toothpaste tubes and toys, ceramics and cosmetics, jewelry and batteries. Though few people worried about it at the time, lead was also toxic. In Toxic Truth, journalist Lydia Denworth tells the little-known stories of these two men who were among the first to question the wisdom of filling the world with such a harmful metal. Denworth follows them from the ice and snow of Antarctica to the schoolyards of Philadelphia and Boston as they uncovered the enormity of the problem and demonstrated the irreparable harm lead was doing to children. In heated conferences and courtrooms, the halls of Congress and at the Environmental Protection Agency, the scientist and doctor were forced to defend their careers and reputations in the face of incredible industry opposition. It took courage, passion, and determination to prevail against entrenched corporate interests and politicized government bureaucracies. But Patterson, Needleman, and their allies did finally get the lead out - since it was removed from gasoline, paint, and food cans in the 1970s, the level of lead in Americans' bodies has dropped 90 percent. Their success offers a lesson in the dangers of putting economic priorities over public health, and a reminder of the way science - and individuals - can change the world. The fundamental questions raised by this battle - what constitutes disease, how to measure scientific independence, and how to quantify acceptable risk - echo in every environmental issue of today: from the plastic used to make water bottles to greenhouse gas emissions. And the most basic question - how much do we need to know about what we put in our environment - is perhaps more relevant today than it has ever been.
©2009 Lydia Denworth (P)2018 Random House Audio
I Can Hear You Whisper
Summary
Lydia Denworth’s third son, Alex, was nearly two when he was identified with significant hearing loss that was likely to get worse. Her sweet boy with the big brown eyes had probably never heard her lullabies. Denworth knew the importance of enrichment to the developing brain but had never contemplated the opposite: Deprivation. How would a child’s brain grow outside the world of sound most of us take for granted? How would he communicate? Would he learn to read and write - weren’t phonics a key to literacy? How long did they have until Alex’s brain changed irrevocably? In her drive to understand the choices - starting with the angry debate between supporters of American Sign Language and the controversial but revolutionary cochlear implant - Denworth soon found that every decision carried weighty scientific, social, and even political implications. As she grappled with the complex collisions between the emerging field of brain plasticity, the possibilities of modern technology, and the changing culture of the deaf community, she gained a new appreciation of the exquisite relationship between sound, language, and learning. It became clear that Alex’s ears - and indeed everyone’s - were just the beginning. An acclaimed science journalist as well as a mother, Denworth interviewed the world’s experts on language development, inventors of ground-breaking technology, Deaf leaders, and neuroscientists at the frontiers of research. She presents insights from studies of everything from at-risk kids in Head Start to noisy cocktail party conversation, from songbirds to signal processing, and from the invention of the telephone to sign language. Weaving together tales from the centuries-long quest to develop the cochlear implant and simultaneous leaps in neuroscientific knowledge against a tumultuous backdrop of identity politics, I Can Hear You Whisper shows how sound sculpts our children’s brains and the life-changing consequences of that delicate process.
©2014 Lydia Denworth (P)2014 Gildan Media LLC
Friendship
Summary
The bonds of friendship are universal and elemental. In Friendship, journalist Lydia Denworth visits the front lines of the science of friendship in search of its biological, psychological, and evolutionary foundations. Finding it to be as old as life on the African savannas, she also discovers that friendship is reflected in our brain waves, detectable in our genomes, and capable of strengthening our cardiovascular and immune systems. Its opposite, loneliness, can kill. As a result, social connection is finally being recognized as critical to our physical and emotional well-being. With warmth and compassion, Denworth weaves together past and present, field biology and cutting-edge neuroscience, to show how our bodies and minds are designed to make friends, the process by which social bonds develop, and how a drive for friendship underpins human (and nonhuman) society. With its refreshingly optimistic vision of the evolution of human nature, this book puts friendship at the center of our lives.
©2020 Lydia Denworth (P)2020 Audible, Inc.