Sharman Apt Russell has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Knocking on Heaven's Door.
Within Our Grasp
Summary
An important, hopeful book that looks at the urgent problem of childhood malnutrition worldwide and the revolutionary progress being made to end it A healthy Earth requires healthy children. Yet nearly one-fourth of the world’s children are stunted physically and mentally due to a lack of food or nutrients. These children do not die but endure a lifetime of diminished potential. During the past 30 years, says Sharman Russell, we have seen a revolution in how we treat these sick children and in how - with a new understanding of the human body and approach to nutrition, and new ways to reach out to hungry mothers and babies - we have gone from unwittingly killing severely malnourished children to bringing them back to health through the “miracle” of ready-to-eat therapeutic food. Intertwined with stories of scientists and nutrition experts on the front lines of finding ways to end malnutrition for good, Russell describes her travels to Malawi, one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world and also the site of pathbreaking, cutting-edge research into childhood malnutrition. (Eighty percent of Malawians are farmers subsisting on less than an acre of land and coping with erratic weather patterns due to global warming; 50 percent live below the poverty line; and 42 percent of Malawi’s children are affected by a lack of food or nutrients.) As she writes of her personal exploration of new friendships and insights in a country known as “the warm heart of Africa”, Russell describes the programs that are working best to reduce childhood stunting and explores how malnutrition in children is connected to climate change, how vitamins and minerals are preventing these harmful effects, why the empowerment of women is the single most effective factor in eliminating childhood malnutrition, and what the costs of ending childhood malnutrition are. Sharman Russell, much-admired writer of luminous prose and humane heart, whose writing has been called, “elegant” (The Economist) and “extraordinarily well-crafted, far-reaching, and heart-wrenching” (Booklist), winner of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing, has crafted an illuminating, inspiring book that makes clear the promise of what is today, gratefully, within our grasp.
©2021 Sharman Apt Russell (P)2021 Random House Audio
Knocking on Heaven's Door
Summary
On a hotter and more volatile Earth in the 23rd century, humans like Clare and Jon live in utopia, hunting and gathering in small tribal bands, engaged in daily art and ritual, reunited with old friends like the shaggy mammoth and giant ground sloth. Even better, they still have solar-powered laptops and can communicate with each other around the world. The understanding of physics has also advanced. When scientists first cloned extinct species from the Pleistocene, they discovered that many of them were telepathic - that consciousness travels in waves. For most people, animism has become the preferred religion, a panpsychism compatible with the laws of a fractal holographic universe. As Clare tells one of her students, the return to an older, Paleolithic lifestyle is "one of humanity's greatest achievements." It's too bad that utopia had to come at such a cost: a genetically engineered supervirus that wiped out most of Earth's human population. Humanity was shaken by that event and vowed to change. Now, on the 150th anniversary of that catastrophe, a small group of men and women - as well as a smarter-than-average dire wolf and saber-toothed cat - are suddenly faced with decisions in which the stakes are higher than ever before. Will Earth repeat the cycle of unbridled hubris? Or is humanity's destiny even stranger than that?
©2016 Sharman Apt Russell (P)2016 Audible, Inc.