Jared Flatow Audiobooks

Shoulders of Giants: seven hours on the science and engineering shelf, read by the author

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 5.0/5 average

1 listener rating

Who is Jared Flatow?

Standing on the shoulders of giants is the oldest compliment in science, a way of conceding that no discovery arrives from nowhere. Taking the phrase as a title sets a clear expectation: this will be a book about inheritance, about what one generation of thinkers hands to the next.

Shoulders of Giants is how Jared Flatow reaches our science and engineering shelf, and the decision to narrate it personally says something about intent. Writers who read their own non-fiction usually want the emphasis kept exactly where they put it, which suits a book of ideas rather better than a hired performance would.

That is as far as the record goes here, and deliberately so. The argument is the introduction.

Jared Flatow in audiobooks

Seven hours and change is a comfortable full length for popular science: room to develop a line of thought properly without turning into a course of lectures. Jared Flatow reads it, so the pacing belongs to the person who built the argument in the first place.

The title is a recent arrival and a single listener verdict sits behind it so far, far too thin a base to draw anything from, encouraging though the mark looks. The honest approach is the usual one with new science writing: play the opening minutes and see whether the register suits you. Some listeners want anecdote, others want the mechanism, and a quarter of an hour will settle which this is.

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