Neil Shubin has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 26 ratings. The most-rated is Your Inner Fish.
Your Inner Fish
Summary
Why do we look the way we do? What does the human hand have in common with the wing of a fly? Are breasts, sweat glands, and scales connected in some way? To better understand the inner workings of our bodies and to trace the origins of many of today’s most common diseases, we have to turn to unexpected sources: worms, flies, and even fish. Neil Shubin, a leading paleontologist and professor of anatomy who discovered Tiktaalik - the “missing link” that made headlines around the world in April 2006 - tells the story of evolution by tracing the organs of the human body back millions of years, long before the first creatures walked the earth. By examining fossils and DNA, Shubin shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our head is organized like that of a long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genome look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Shubin makes us see ourselves and our world in a completely new light. Your Inner Fish is science writing at its finest - enlightening, accessible, and told with irresistible enthusiasm.
©2008 Neil Shubin (P)2008 Books on Tape
Some Assembly Required
Summary
The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth - a new view of the evolution of human and animal life that explains how the incredible diversity of life on our planet came to be. Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened. We have now arrived at a remarkable moment - prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multibillion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention. In Some Assembly Required, Neil Shubin takes listeners on a journey of discovery spanning centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity.
©2020 Neil Shubin (P)2020 Random House Audio
The Universe Within
Summary
From one of our finest and most popular science writers, the best-selling author of Your Inner Fish, comes the answer to a scientific mystery story as big as the world itself: How have astronomical events that took place millions of years ago created the unique qualities of the human species? In his last book, Neil Shubin delved into the amazing connections between human anatomy - our hands, our jaws - and the structures in the fish that first took over land 375 million years ago. Now, with his trademark clarity and exuberance, he takes an even more expansive approach to the question of why we are the way we are. Starting once again with fossils, Shubin turns his gaze skyward. He shows how the entirety of the universe's 14-billion-year history can be seen in our bodies. From our very molecular composition (a result of stellar events at the origin of our solar system), he makes clear, through the working of our eyes, how the evolution of the cosmos has had profound effects on the development of human life on earth.
©2013 Neil Shubin (P)2013 Random House Audio
A Most English Princess
Summary
"In this sweeping, immersive novel, A Most English Princess draws readers into the mesmerizing world of the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria - Princess Vicky - as she emerges into a powerful force in her own right and ascends to become the first German Empress.” (Marie Benedict, New York Times best-selling author of The Only Woman in the Room) Perfect for fans of the BBC's Victoria, Alison Pataki's The Accidental Empress, and Daisy Goodwin's Victoria, this debut novel tells the gripping and tragic story of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, Victoria, Princess Royal. To the world, she was Princess Victoria, daughter of a queen, wife of an emperor, and mother of Kaiser Wilhelm. Her family just called her Vicky...smart, pretty, and self-assured, she changed the course of the world. January 1858: Princess Victoria glides down the aisle of St. James Chapel to the waiting arms of her beloved, Fritz, Prince Frederick, heir to the powerful kingdom of Prussia. Although theirs is no mere political match, Vicky is determined that she and Fritz will lead by example, just as her parents Victoria and Albert had done, and also bring about a liberal and united Germany. Brought up to believe in the rightness of her cause, Vicky nonetheless struggles to thrive in the constrained Prussian court, where each day she seems to take a wrong step. And her status as the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria does little to smooth over the conflicts she faces. But handsome, gallant Fritz is always by her side, as they they navigate court intrigue, and challenge the cunning Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, while fighting for the throne - and the soul of a nation. At home they endure tragedy, including their son, Wilhelm, rejecting all they stand for. Clare McHugh tells the enthralling and riveting story of Victoria, the Princess Royal - from her younger years as the apple of her father Albert's eyes through her rise to power atop the mighty German empire to her final months of life.
©2020 Clare McHugh (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers