
Carbon
The Book of Life
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Narrated by:
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Peter Coyote
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By:
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Paul Hawken
About this listen
A journey into the world of carbon, the most versatile element on the planet, by the New York Times bestselling author Paul Hawken
Carbon is the only element that animates the entirety of the living world. Though comprising a tiny fraction of Earth’s composition, our planet is lifeless without it. Yet it is maligned as the driver of climate change, scorned as an errant element blamed for the possible demise of civilization.
Here, Paul Hawken looks at the flow of life through the lens of carbon. Embracing a panoramic view of carbon’s omnipresence, he explores how this ubiquitous and essential element extends into every aperture of existence and shapes the entire fabric of life. Hawken charts a course across our planetary history, guiding us into the realms of plants, animals, insects, fungi, food, and farms to offer a new narrative for embracing carbon’s life-giving power and its possibilities for the future of human endeavor.
In this stirring, hopeful, and deeply humane book, Hawken illuminates the subtle connections between carbon and our collective human experience and asks us to see nature, carbon, and ourselves as exquisitely intertwined—inseparably connected.
©2025 Paul Hawken (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Fascinating. . . . Illuminating. . . . Carbon ends with enchanting details about consciousness and ways forward as our climate changes.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Paul Hawken invites us to see the connections that bind us to everything else on the planet. Carbon is an enormously hopeful book—hopeful about the creatures we live among and about our innate human capacities.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
“Endlessly endlessly fascinating! Human beings, over the millennia, have come up with a thousand ways to carefully observe the world around us, and Paul Hawken has managed to collect and synthesize these observations—from the sweat lodge to the satellite—in a way that helps us see what now must be done. There's information, and then there's wisdom—and this book is a compendium of the latter.”—Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature
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Overall
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Stronger tells a story of breathtaking scope, from the battlefields of the Trojan War in Homer’s Iliad, where muscles enter the scene of world literature; to the all-but-forgotten Victorian-era gyms on both sides of the Atlantic, where women build strength and muscle by lifting heavy weights; to a retirement home in Boston where a young doctor makes the astonishing discovery that frail ninety-year-olds can experience the same relative gains of strength and muscle as thirty-year-olds if they lift weights.
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Breaking Bread
- How Baking Shaped Our World
- By: David Wright
- Narrated by: David Wright
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In Breaking Bread, third generation baker, food writer and presenter David Wright examines the universal questions about bread and baking. About the people who make and shape the bread we buy and the difficulties that social and cultural change, food fads and health directives have had, and are having, on the baking industry. After his family bakery sadly closed its doors after seventy-five years, Wright asks if the the closure of the bakery underlines the very idea that bread is a dying foodstuff. Is bread good or bad? And what does the future hold for bread?
By: David Wright
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Knead to Know
- A History of Baking
- By: Neil Buttery
- Narrated by: Neil Buttery
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Food historian and chef Neil Buttery takes the listener on a journey exploring the creation, evolution and cultural importance of some of our most beloved baked foods, whether they be fit for a monarch's table, or served from the bakestone of a lowly farm labourer. This book charts innovations, happy accidents and some of the most downright bizarre baked foods ever created.
By: Neil Buttery
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The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything
- How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World
- By: Peter Brannen
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Carbon dioxide: this seemingly simple and ubiquitous substance is fundamental to how our planet works. All life is made from CO2, and its behavior on this planet has kept Earth bizarrely habitable for hundreds of millions of years. In its workings lie both the splendor of our world and the potential for life’s destruction. In short, it is the most important substance in history. But why is CO2 as essential to life on Earth as it is capable of destroying it? Award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen reveals carbon dioxide’s fundamental role in the operation and maintenance of our planet
By: Peter Brannen
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Into the Clear Blue Sky
- The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere
- By: Rob Jackson
- Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Climate change is here. From the millions displaced by the floods in Pakistan to California and Canadian towns incinerated by wildfires, we are experiencing the anguish that climate change causes. Fossil fuels are making the planet unlivable, and they are deadly. We know that we must cut emissions if we are going to limit the catastrophes, but is that enough? In Into the Clear Blue Sky, climate scientist and chair of the Global Carbon Project Rob Jackson explains that we need to redefine our goals.
By: Rob Jackson
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Supermassive
- Black Holes at the Beginning and End of the Universe
- By: James Trefil, Shobita Satyapal
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 7 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Led by physicist James Trefil and astrophysicist Shobita Satyapal, this book traverses the incredible history of black holes and introduces contemporary developments and theories on still unanswered questions about the enigmatic objects. From the early work of Albert Einstein and Karl Schwarzschild to an insider look at black hole-galaxy connection research led by co-author Satyapa, the comprehensive book surveys an exciting and evolving branch of space science.
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Technical, dry with some interesting bits
- By Chris Brooks on 03-12-25
By: James Trefil, and others
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Doctors by Nature
- How Ants, Apes, and Other Animals Heal Themselves
- By: Jaap de Roode
- Narrated by: Anand Jagatia
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Ages before the dawn of modern medicine, wild animals were harnessing the power of nature's pharmacy to heal themselves. Doctors by Nature reveals what researchers are now learning about the medical wonders of the animal world. In this visionary book, Jaap de Roode argues that we have underestimated the healing potential of nature for too long and shows how the study of self-medicating animals could impact the practice of human medicine.
By: Jaap de Roode
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Forest Euphoria
- The Abounding Queerness of Nature
- By: Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
- Narrated by: Aven Shore
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship.
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Is this my perfect book?
- By Rachel Funk on 06-29-25
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White Light
- The Elemental Role of Phosphorus-in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World
- By: Jack Lohmann
- Narrated by: Jack Lohmann
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A profound and lyrical reflection on the cyclical nature of life, what happens when we break that cycle, and how to repair it—told through the fate of phosphorus.
By: Jack Lohmann
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The Ministry of Truth
- The Biography of George Orwell's 1984
- By: Dorian Lynskey
- Narrated by: Andrew Wincott
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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1984 isn't just a novel; it's a key to understanding the modern world. George Orwell's final work is a treasure chest of ideas and memes - Big Brother, the Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, 2+2=5 - that gain potency with every year. Particularly in 2016, when the election of Donald Trump made it a best seller ("Ministry of Alternative Facts", anyone?).
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words from MY mouth...
- By Amazon Customer on 08-02-19
By: Dorian Lynskey
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The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change
- Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation
- By: Jerome R. Corsi PhD, Marc Morano - foreword
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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This book exposes the truth that the climate change hoax is a political movement aimed at eliminating capitalism by spreading alarming disinformation that in order to "save the Earth" from global warming, we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by switching from hydrocarbon fuels to renewable energies. The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation reveals a science-based understanding of Earth's climate and temperature that Green New Deal proponents are trying to hide.
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Fantastic information.
- By Mick Lunzer on 12-28-22
By: Jerome R. Corsi PhD, and others
I particularly loved the first chapter and the last, but all the chapters in between are also exquisite and are the weft on the warp of the first and last.
I loved it so much that I have ordered a hard copy. There are wonderful quotes throughout the book and particularly good are the ones at the beginning of each chapter. I need to have the book to hold in my hand, but I am sure I will re-listen to the audio version often as well. It is not a text that manipulates or shames, but sheds light and wonder on this existence and encourages one to connect and find balance in the web of life.
A book for all humans
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Brilliant, sensitive, compassionate!
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Riveting
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Writing style
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Outstanding!
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beauty
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I am deeper because of this….
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A transformative view of our current circumstance
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Fascinating and inspiring
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aweful narration
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