Audiobook Reviews in Five Minutes

If I had to recommend just one audiobook this year, which one would it be? In What's Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies, Tim Urban tackles the perplexing question of why, despite technological advancements, society seems to lack wisdom. He introduces the concept of the 'Ladder of Thinking,' where high-rung thinking embraces truth and open-mindedness, contrasting with low-rung thinking's...

When was the last time you listened to an audiobook that combined history, memoir, and rock music? This audiobook represents storytelling at its finest, combined with exceptional editing and production quality and woven with intimate reinterpretations of some of U2’s most iconic and poignant songs, produced by Bono and The Edge.. Connect with Audiobook Reviews in 5 Facebook Audiobook Reviews in Fi...

Do you need practical advice on identifying dysfunctional family patterns? Or choosing the best path to breaking the cycle and living your life your way? Nedra Glover Tawwab is a licensed therapist, writer, and speaker based in North Carolina. With over a decade of experience in mental health, she specializes in working with individuals and couples on relationships, boundaries, and healing from tr...

This episode is also available on the Access Ideas podcast . What makes for a happy life, a fulfilling life? A good life? The authors of The Good Life promise the answer may be closer than you realize! Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz are the director and associate director of The Grant Study, also known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies...

Subscribe to the Access Ideas podcast on all podcast streaming platforms. You can expect ad-free, entertaining and informative episodes on a variety of topics throughout 2022. ** What drives our fascination with the fictional Roy family? HBO's Succession follows the dysfunctional owners of Waystar RoyCo, a global media and entertainment conglomerate, who are fighting for control of the company ami...

Are you an ideas enthusiast or collector? Our new podcast, Access Ideas, expands on a few familiar areas of interest and explores questions you didn’t know you had, such as can Jane Austen novels serve as escapist fantasy, why is sleep science so controversial, and what drives our obsession with HBO’s Succession? You can expect ad-free, entertaining and informative episodes on a variety of topics...

My favourite audiobook of 2021! Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (2012) and Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done (2011), a collection of columns for the Guardian newspaper. Four Thousand Weeks is about making the most of our radically finite lives in a world of impossible demands, relentless distraction an...

Looking for a gripping TRUE story that's impossible to put down? In his 15-hour audiobook published in April 2021, Keefe captures a family saga that spans the twentieth century and leads up to 2020. Members of the Sackler family founded Purdue Pharma, the infamous maker of OxyContin, a prescription drug that has fuelled an opioid epidemic across North America for the last twenty years. Patrick Rad...

“ This is one of the most important books that will be published in 2021 . The Covid vaccine will soon free humanity from a biological pandemic, and this book, if widely read, could free humanity from an equally deadly scourge—high conflict.” — Jonathan Haidt , Social psychologist, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, and author CThe Coddling of the Amer...

One of my top audiobook listens for 2021. Dr Judson Brewer is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown University . As an addiction psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for treating addictions, Dr. Jud has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety...

One of my top audiobook listens for 2021. Gates identifies the Five Grand Challenges of climate change as manufacturing (31%), electricity (27%), agriculture (19%), transportation (16%), and buildings (7%). Since there’s no single solution for any of these sectors, Gates proposes we speed up the cycle of innovation and attract a mix of private and public investment that is more risk tolerant than...

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever…” Ultimately, stories have emotional power over us, and great stories stay with us for a lifetime. Haig’s charming style made this listen impossible to put down. And, although it covers some heavy subject matter, The Midnight Library is an easy listen beautifully narrated by British actress Carey Mulliga...

One of my top audiobook listens for 2021! One Goodreads reviewer gave this book three stars out of five, criticizing it as a “Love Letter to Listening” (but lacking tips of how to listen better). This same rationale is exactly why I’m giving this title five out of five stars. The fact is, most of us know perfectly well what listening skills are, but we’re not practicing good listening habits becau...

Fiona Hill is director of the Center on the United States and Europe, and senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution. Growing up in England’s coal-mining country, Fiona Hill knew that she was in a forgotten place. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father told her to get out—to go to...

Dr. Jane Goodall DBE is an ethologist and environmentalist. From infancy she was fascinated by animal behavior, and in 1957 at 23 years old, she met the famous paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey while she was visiting a friend in Kenya. Impressed by her passion for animals, he offered her the chance to be the first person to study chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, in the wild. And so th...

One of my top audiobook listens for 2021! Think Again is a 21st Century reboot of Enlightenment ideas, celebrating skepticism and science. Adam Grant’s balance of storytelling and statistics is fascinating, but what makes this listen fun is how Grant challenges us to explore our own tendencies and guides us in how to practice rethinking our beliefs. How often do you think again? Take the quiz: htt...

Can the audiobook format add something of value to classic literature? Leo Tolstoy's epic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature and famously begins with the line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31188265-anna-karenina Connect with Audiobook Reviews in 5: · Instagram: h...

One of my top audiobook listens for 2021! All of us have experienced unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a breakup, or a job loss. These experiences can be deeply lonely and confusing. I’m reviewing this book because I’m thinking of all the people I know living through what may feel like one of the most difficult winters of our lifetimes. Katherine May is a N...

Professor David Nutt is a neuropsychopharmacologist and researcher at Imperial College London. In 2009, he was infamously dismissed from his role as Chair of the United Kingdom’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The reason was his public stance that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause. Most controversial of all was his claim that alcoh...

Karl Deisseroth has spent his life researching the human mind, both as a renowned clinical psychiatrist and as a researcher creating and developing the revolutionary field of optogenetics, which uses light to help decipher the brain’s workings. Projections is promoted as a work that combines his knowledge of the brain’s inner circuitry with a deep empathy for his patients in order to examine what...

Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy Edward Slingerland makes a bold claim in his new book in that overall and over the course of history, alcohol has produced net positive benefits for both individuals and cultures, or our taste for it would have been eliminated by genetic or cultural evolution (given its heavy costs). We would not have civilization without intoxication, b...

Things I learned from Falling is promoted as a memoir by Claire Nelson, who shares how she fell over 25 feet after wandering off the trail in a deserted corner of Joshua Tree Park. The fall shattered her pelvis, rendering her immobile. She lay in a canyon for the next four days, exposed to the relentless California sun. Her rescuers had not expected to find her alive. What the publisher promotion...

Anna Lembke is the medical director of Stanford Addiction Medicine, program director for the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship, and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. She is the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding research in mental illness, for excellence in teaching, and for clinical innovation in treatment. A clinician scholar, she has published more t...

Matt Haig is an author for children and adults. His memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, was a number one bestseller, staying in the British top ten for 46 weeks. His children’s book A Boy Called Christmas was a runaway hit and is translated in over 40 languages. It is being made into a film starring Maggie Smith, Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent and The Guardian called it an ‘instant classic’. His novel...

Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (2012) and Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done (2011), a collection of columns for the Guardian newspaper. Four Thousand Weeks is about making the most of our radically finite lives in a world of impossible demands, relentless distraction and political insanity (and 'produ...