Thomas Homer-Dixon has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 11 ratings. The most-rated is Commanding Hope.
Commanding Hope
Summary
From the number one best-selling thought leader: Calling on history, cutting-edge research, complexity science, and even Lord of the Rings, Thomas Homer-Dixon lays out the tools we can command to rescue a world on the brink. For three decades, the renowned author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization and The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? has examined the threats to our future security - predicting a deteriorating global environment, extreme economic stresses, mass migrations, social instability, and wide political violence if humankind continued on its current course. He was called the Doom Meister, but we now see how prescient he was. Today just about everything we've known and relied on (our natural environment, economy, societies, cultures, and institutions) is changing dramatically - too often for the worse. Without radical new approaches, our planet will become unrecognizable as well as poorer, more violent, more authoritarian. In his fascinating long-awaited new book (dedicated to his young children), he calls on his extraordinary knowledge of complexity science, of how societies work and can evolve, and of our capacity to handle threats, to show that we can shift human civilization onto a decisively new path if we mobilize our minds, spirits, imaginations, and collective values. Commanding Hope marshals a fascinating, accessible argument for reinvigorating our cognitive strengths and belief systems to affect urgent systemic change, strengthen our economies and cultures, and renew our hope in a positive future for everyone on Earth.
©2020 Thomas Homer-Dixon (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada
The Upside of Down
Summary
From the author of the number one best-selling and Governor General’s Literary Award-winning The Ingenuity Gap - an essential addition to the bookshelf of every thinking person with a stake in our world and our civilization. This is a groundbreaking, essential book for our times. Thomas Homer-Dixon brings to bear his formidable understanding of the urgent problems that confront our world to clarify their scope and deep causes. The Upside of Down provides a vivid picture of the immense stresses that are simultaneously converging on our societies and threatening a breakdown that would profoundly shake civilization. It shows, too, how we can choose a better route into the future. With the immediacy that characterized his award-winning international best seller, The Ingenuity Gap, Homer-Dixon takes us on a remarkable journey - from the fall of the Roman empire to the devastation of the 9/11 attacks in New York, from Toronto in the 2003 blackout to the ancient temples of Lebanon and the wildfires of California. Incorporating the newest findings from an astonishing array of disciplines, he argues that the great stresses our world is experiencing - global warming, energy scarcity, population imbalances, and widening gaps between rich and poor - can’t be looked at independently. As these stresses combine and converge, the risk of breakdown rises. The first signs are appearing in the wastelands of the Arctic, the mud-clogged streets of Gonaïves, Haiti, and the volatile regions of the Middle East and Asia. But while the consequences of denial in our more perilous world are dire, Homer-Dixon makes clear that we can use our emerging understanding of the complex systems in which we live to avoid catastrophic collapse in a way the Roman empire could not. This vitally important new book shows how, in the face of breakdown, we can still provide for the renewal of our global civilization. We are creating the conditions for catastrophe, but by understanding the underlying principles that make human and natural systems resilient - and by working together to put those principles into effect - we can still limit the severity of collapse and foster regeneration, innovation, and renewal.
©2020 Thomas Homer-Dixon (P)2020 Penguin Random House Canada