11 Best 20th Century, Science Books
20th Century, Science is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top 20th Century, Science audiobooks everyone must read.
See the top 11 20th Century, Science audiobooks below.
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Far Side of the Moon
- By: Liisa Jorgensen
- Narrator: Stacy Gonzalez
- Length: 9 hours 55 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.6(46 ratings)
4.6(46 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USD“Perhaps the most human story to emerge from mankind’s greatest technological achievement.”–Capt. Phil “Rowdy” Yates (USN Ret.) Far Side of the Moon is the untold, fully authorized story of the lives of Frank and“Perhaps the most human story to emerge from mankind’s greatest technological achievement.”–Capt. Phil “Rowdy” Yates (USN Ret.)
Far Side of the Moon is the untold, fully authorized story of the lives of Frank and Susan Borman. One was a famous astronaut–an instrumental part of the Apollo space program–but the other was just as much a warrior. This real-life love story is far from a fairy tale.
Life as a military wife was beyond demanding, but Susan always rose to the occasion. When Frank joined NASA and was selected to command the first mission to orbit the moon, Susan’s well-hidden depression and alcoholism finally came to light. Frank had to come to terms with how his “mission above all else” mentality contributed to his wife’s suffering. As Susan healed, she was able to begin helping others who suffered in silence from mental illness and addiction.
Discover how Frank and Susan’s love and commitment to each other is still overcoming life’s challenges, even beyond their years as an Apollo commander and the founder of the Astronaut Wives Club.
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One Giant Leap
- By: Charles Fishman
- Narrator: Fred Sanders
- Length: 30 hours 11 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
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4.17(1266 ratings)
4.17(1266 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDThe New York Times bestselling, “meticulously researched and absorbingly written” (The Washington Post) story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic Apollo 11 moon mission.President John F. KennedyThe New York Times bestselling, “meticulously researched and absorbingly written” (The Washington Post) story of the trailblazers and the ordinary Americans on the front lines of the epic Apollo 11 moon mission.
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President John F. Kennedy astonished the world on May 25, 1961, when he announced to Congress that the United States should land a man on the Moon by 1970. No group was more surprised than the scientists and engineers at NASA, who suddenly had less than a decade to invent space travel.
When Kennedy announced that goal, no one knew how to navigate to the Moon. No one knew how to build a rocket big enough to reach the Moon, or how to build a computer small enough (and powerful enough) to fly a spaceship there. No one knew what the surface of the Moon was like, or what astronauts could eat as they flew there. On the day of Kennedy’s historic speech, America had a total of fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience–with just five of those minutes outside the atmosphere. Russian dogs had more time in space than US astronauts. Over the next decade, more than 400,000 scientists, engineers, and factory workers would send twenty-four astronauts to the Moon. Each hour of space flight would require one million hours of work back on Earth to get America to the Moon on July 20, 1969.
“A veteran space reporter with a vibrant touch–nearly every sentence has a fact, an insight, a colorful quote or part of a piquant anecdote” (The Wall Street Journal) and in One Giant Leap, Fishman has written the sweeping, definitive behind-the-scenes account of the furious race to complete one of mankind’s greatest achievements. It’s a story filled with surprises–from the item the astronauts almost forgot to take with them (the American flag), to the extraordinary impact Apollo would have back on Earth, and on the way we live today. From the research labs of MIT, where the eccentric and legendary pioneer Charles Draper created the tools to fly the Apollo spaceships, to the factories where dozens of women sewed spacesuits, parachutes, and even computer hardware by hand, Fishman captures the exceptional feats of these ordinary Americans. “It’s been 50 years since Neil Armstrong took that one small step. Fishman explains in dazzling form just how unbelievable it actually was” (Newsweek). -
The Secret of Life
- By: Howard Markel
- Length: 15 hours 7 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: September 21, 2021
- Language: English
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4.16(354 ratings)
4.16(354 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.99 USDAn authoritative history of the race to unravel DNA’s structure, by one of our most prominent medical historians. James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 discovery of the double helix structure of DNA is the foundation of virtually everyAn authoritative history of the race to unravel DNA’s structure, by one of our most prominent medical historians.
James Watson and Francis Crick’s 1953 discovery of the double helix structure of DNA is the foundation of virtually every advance in our modern understanding of genetics and molecular biology. But how did Watson and Crick do it–and why
were they the ones who succeeded?In truth, the discovery of DNA’s structure is the story of five towering minds in pursuit of the advancement of science, and for almost all of them, the prospect of fame and immortality: Watson, Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and
Linus Pauling. Each was fascinating and brilliant, with strong personalities that often clashed. Howard Markel skillfully re-creates the intense intellectual journey, and fraught personal relationships, that ultimately led to a spectacular
breakthrough. But it is Rosalind Franklin–fiercely determined, relentless, and an outsider at Cambridge and the University of London in the 1950s, as the lone Jewish woman among young male scientists–who becomes a focal point for Markel.The Secret of Life is a story of genius and perseverance, but also a saga of cronyism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and misconduct. Drawing on voluminous archival research, including interviews with James Watson and with Franklin’s
sister, Jenifer Glynn, Markel provides a fascinating look at how science is done, how reputations are undone, and how history is written, and revised.A vibrant evocation of Cambridge in the 1950s, The Secret of Life also provides colorful depictions of Watson and Crick–their competitiveness, idiosyncrasies, and youthful immaturity–and compelling portraits of Wilkins, Pauling, and most
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cogently, Rosalind Franklin. The Secret of Life is a lively and sweeping narrative of this landmark discovery, one that finally gives the woman at the center of this drama her due. -
Einstein
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrator: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 21 hours 31 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2007
- Language: English
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4.16(162596 ratings)
4.16(162596 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.95 USDWinner of the 2008 Audie Award for Biography/MemoirThe definitive, internationally bestselling biography of Albert Einstein. Now the basis of Genius, the ten-part National Geographic series on the life of Albert Einstein, starring the Oscar, Emmy,Winner of the 2008 Audie Award for Biography/Memoir
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The definitive, internationally bestselling biography of Albert Einstein. Now the basis of Genius, the ten-part National Geographic series on the life of Albert Einstein, starring the Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Award–winning actor Geoffrey Rush as Einstein.
How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson’s biography shows how Einstein’s scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom. Einstein explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk—a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate—became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom, and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.
Einstein, the classic #1 New York Times bestseller, is a brilliantly acclaimed account of the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, “an illuminating delight” (The New York Times). The basis for the National Geographic series Genius, by the author of The Innovators, Steve Jobs, and Benjamin Franklin, this is the definitive biography of Albert Einstein. -
Einstein
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrator: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 7 hours 19 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2007
- Language: English
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4.16(162596 ratings)
4.16(162596 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0017.95 USDWinner of the 2008 Audie Award for Biography/MemoirThe definitive, internationally bestselling biography of Albert Einstein. Now the basis of Genius, the ten-part National Geographic series on the life of Albert Einstein, starring the Oscar, Emmy,Winner of the 2008 Audie Award for Biography/Memoir
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The definitive, internationally bestselling biography of Albert Einstein. Now the basis of Genius, the ten-part National Geographic series on the life of Albert Einstein, starring the Oscar, Emmy, and Tony Award­–winning actor Geoffrey Rush as Einstein.
How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson’s biography shows how Einstein’s scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom. Einstein explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk—a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn’t get a teaching job or a doctorate—became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom, and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.
Einstein, the classic #1 New York Times bestseller, is a brilliantly acclaimed account of the most influential scientist of the twentieth century, “an illuminating delight” (The New York Times). The basis for the National Geographic series Genius, by the author of The Innovators, Steve Jobs, and Benjamin Franklin, this is the definitive biography of Albert Einstein. -
109 East Palace
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrator: Anne Twomey
- Length: 6 hours 0 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2005
- Language: English
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4.07(1385 ratings)
4.07(1385 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0015.95 USDFrom the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the story of the three-thousand people who lived together in near confinement for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer and the world’s best scientists to produce the atomic bombFrom the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the story of the three-thousand people who lived together in near confinement for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer and the world’s best scientists to produce the atomic bomb and win World War II.
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In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer’s first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable. -
Midnight in Chernobyl
- By: Adam Higginbotham
- Narrator: Jacques Roy
- Length: 13 hours 55 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2019
- Language: English
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4.06(16 ratings)
4.06(16 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDOne of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019!A New York Times Best Book of the Year A Time Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner One of NPR’s Best Books ofOne of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019!
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A New York Times Best Book of the Year
A Time Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner
One of NPR’s Best Books of 2019
Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster–and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters.
Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute.
Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.
Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will–lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary. -
The Age of Radiance
- By: Craig Nelson
- Narrator: George Newbern
- Length: 14 hours 40 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2014
- Language: English
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3.89(409 ratings)
3.89(409 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.99 USD“A thrilling, intense, and disturbing account of the atomic era, from the discovery of X-rays to the tragic meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant…Rich with powerful images and fraught with drama” (The“A thrilling, intense, and disturbing account of the atomic era, from the discovery of X-rays to the tragic meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant…Rich with powerful images and fraught with drama” (The Christian Science Monitor).
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When Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller forged the science of radioactivity, they began a revolution that ran from the nineteenth century through the course of World War II and the Cold War to our current confrontation with the dangers of nuclear power and proliferation. While nuclear science improves our lives, radiation’s invisible powers can trigger cancer and cellular mayhem. Writing with a biographer’s passion, New York Times bestselling author Craig Nelson unlocks one of the great mysteries of the universe.
In The Age of Radiance, Nelson illuminates a pageant of fascinating historical figures: Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Curtis LeMay, John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Ronald Reagan, and Mikhail Gorbachev, among others. He reveals how Jewish scientists fleeing Hitler transformed America from a nation that created light bulbs into one that split atoms; Alfred Nobel’s dream of global peace; and how, in our time, emergency workers and utility employees fought to contain life-threatening nuclear reactors. By tracing our complicated relationship with the dangerous energy we unleashed, Nelson discusses how atomic power and radiation are indivisible from our everyday lives.
Brilliantly told and masterfully crafted, The Age of Radiance provides a new understanding of a misunderstood epoch in history and restores to prominence the forgotten heroes and heroines who have changed all of our lives for better and for worse. “This is the kind of book that doesn’t just inform you but leaves you feeling smarter.” (The Dallas Morning News). -
Summer for the Gods
- By: Edward J. Larson
- Narrator: Brian Troxell
- Length: 10 hours 47 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: October 03, 2017
- Language: English
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3.89(1640 ratings)
3.89(1640 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.98 USDThe Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America’s schools In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century’sThe Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America’s schools
In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century’s most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education. That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day-in cities and states throughout the country.
Edward Larson’s classic Summer for the Gods — winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History — is the single most authoritative account of this pivotal event. An afterword assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution, and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.
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Churchill’s Bomb
- By: Graham Farmelo
- Narrator: Clive Chafer
- Length: 14 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2013
- Language: English
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3.71(118 ratings)
3.71(118 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDPerhaps no scientific development has shaped the course of modern history as much as the harnessing of nuclear energy. Yet the twentieth century might have turned out differently had greater influence over this technology been exercised by GreatPerhaps no scientific development has shaped the course of modern history as much as the harnessing of nuclear energy. Yet the twentieth century might have turned out differently had greater influence over this technology been exercised by Great Britain, whose scientists were at the forefront of research into nuclear weapons at the beginning of World War II.
As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill’s Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country’s lead and was slow to realize the bomb’s strategic implications. This was odd–he prided himself on recognizing the military potential of new science and, in the 1920s and 1930s, had repeatedly pointed out that nuclear weapons would likely be developed soon. In developing the bomb, however, he marginalized some of his country’s most brilliant scientists, choosing to rely mainly on the counsel of his friend Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford physicist with often wayward judgment. Churchill also failed to capitalize on Franklin Roosevelt’s generous offer to work jointly on the bomb and ultimately ceded Britain’s initiative to the Americans, whose successful development and deployment of the bomb placed the United States in a position of supreme power at the dawn of the nuclear age. After the war, President Truman and his administration refused to acknowledge a secret cooperation agreement forged by Churchill and Roosevelt and froze Britain out of nuclear development, leaving Britain to make its own way. Dismayed, Churchill worked to restore the relationship. Churchill came to be terrified by the possibility of thermonuclear war and emerged as a pioneer of d+(r)tente in the early stages of the Cold War.
Contrasting Churchill’s often inattentive leadership with Franklin Roosevelt’s decisiveness, Churchill’s Bomb reveals the secret history of the weapon that transformed modern geopolitics.
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Burning the Sky
- By: Mark Wolverton
- Narrator: John Lescault
- Length: 8 hours 6 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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3.71(129 ratings)
3.71(129 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USD“Last September the United States drew a thin curtain of radiation around the earth…The feat was regarded by some of its leading participants as the greatest scientific experiment of all time.” –Walter Sullivan, the New York“Last September the United States drew a thin curtain of radiation around the earth…The feat was regarded by some of its leading participants as the greatest scientific experiment of all time.” –Walter Sullivan, the New York Times, March 19, 1959
After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, Nicholas Christofilos, an eccentric Greek American physicist, brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the United States from a Soviet attack: launching nuclear warheads to detonate in outer space, creating an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming Soviet ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest scientific experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.
In Burning the Sky, Mark Wolverton tells the unknown and controversial story of this scheme to reveal a fascinating narrative that still has powerful resonances today. He chronicles Christofilos’ unconventional idea from its inception to execution, when he persuaded the military to carry out the dangerous test–using the entire Earth’s atmosphere as a laboratory. Combining his investigation of recently declassified military documents with more than a decade of experience in researching and writing about the science of the Cold War, Wolverton examines the scientific, political, and environmental implications of Argus, as well as that of the atmospheric tests that followed. He also discusses the roles played by physicist James Van Allen and President Eisenhower in the scheme, and how the whistle-blowing journalists at The New York Times blew the lid off what was supposed to be America’s ultimate nuclear secret.
Burning the Sky is an engrossing book that will intrigue any lover of scientific or military history and will remind readers why Project Argus remains frighteningly relevant nearly sixty years later.
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Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.
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