Rob Dunn
All Books By Rob Dunn
A Natural History of the Future
- By: Rob Dunn
- Narrator: Donald Chang
- Length: 8 hours 40 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 09, 2021
- Language: English
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4(445 ratings)
A leading ecologist argues that if humankind is to survive on a fragile planet, we must understand and obey its iron laws
Our species has amassed unprecedented knowledge of nature, which we have tried to use to seize control of life and bend the planet to our will. In A Natural History of the Future, biologist Rob Dunn argues that such efforts are futile. We may see ourselves as life’s overlords, but we are instead at its mercy. In the evolution of antibiotic resistance, the power of natural selection to create biodiversity, and even the surprising life of the London Underground, Dunn finds laws of life that no human activity can annul. When we create artificial islands of crops, dump toxic waste, or build communities, we provide new materials for old laws to shape. Life’s future flourishing is not in question. Ours is.
As ambitious as Edward Wilson’s Sociobiology and as timely as Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, A Natural History of the Future sets a new standard for understanding the diversity and destiny of life itself.
Every Living Thing
- By: Rob Dunn
- Length: 10 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: March 10, 2020
- Language: English
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4.03(270 ratings)
Biologist Rob Dunn’s Every Little Thing is the story of man’s obsessive quest to catalog life, from nanobacteria to new monkeys. In the tradition of E. O. Wilson, this engaging and fascinating work of popular science follows humanity’s unending quest to discover every living thing in our natural world-from the unimaginably small in the most inhospitable of places on earth to the unimaginably far away in the unexplored canals on Mars.
... Read moreNever Home Alone
- By: Rob Dunn
- Length: 9 hours 32 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 06, 2018
- Language: English
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4.18(1550 ratings)
A natural history of the wilderness in our homes, from the microbes in our showers to the crickets in our basements
Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters. You are not alone. Yet, as we obsess over sterilizing our homes and separating our spaces from nature, we are unwittingly cultivating an entirely new playground for evolution. These changes are reshaping the organisms that live with us — prompting some to become more dangerous, while undermining those species that benefit our bodies or help us keep more threatening organisms at bay. No one who reads this engrossing, revelatory book will look at their homes in the same way again.
... Read moreNever Out of Season
- By: Rob Dunn
- Narrator: Dan Woren
- Length: 11 hours 28 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: March 14, 2017
- Language: English
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3.95(410 ratings)
That’s the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time. Our corporate food system has nearly perfected the process of turning sunlight, water and nutrients into food.
But our crops themselves remain susceptible to the nature’s fury. And nature always wins. Authoritative, urgent, and filled with fascinating heroes and villains from around the world, Never Out of Season is the story of the crops we depend on most and the scientists racing to preserve the diversity of life, in order to save our food supply, and us.
The Man Who Touched His Own Heart
- By: Rob Dunn
- Narrator: Robert Fass
- Length: 12 hours 6 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: February 03, 2015
- Language: English
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3.92(597 ratings)
The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first “explorers” who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts’ chambers, through the first heart surgeries — which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived — to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts’ lives, almost defying nature in the process.
Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion, effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else’s beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn’s fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.
The Wild Life of Our Bodies
- By: Rob Dunn
- Length: 10 hours 23 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: March 17, 2020
- Language: English
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3.91(1154 ratings)
Biologist Rob Dunn reveals the crucial influence that other species have upon our health, our well-being, and our world in The WildLife of Our Bodies-a fascinating tour through the hidden truths of nature and codependence. Dunn illuminates the nuanced, often imperceptible relationships that exist between homo sapiens and other species, relationships that underpin humanity’s ability to thrive and prosper in every circumstance. Fans of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma will be enthralled by Dunn’s powerful, lucid exploration of the role that humankind plays within the greater web of life on Earth.
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