Vaclav Smil Audiobooks

Numbers Don't Lie: energy, food and technology measured rather than guessed at

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.2/5 average

2 listener ratings

Who is Vaclav Smil?

Some writers refuse to let a good story survive contact with the data. Vaclav Smil has made that refusal his life’s work.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1943 and long settled in Canada, he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba. His interests are almost comically broad: energy systems, food production, the environment, demography, economic history and public policy, with a long strand of work on China. What holds it together is method rather than subject matter. Smil counts things, at scale, and follows the arithmetic wherever it happens to lead.

The result is a body of work that resists technological optimism and doom-mongering with equal firmness. He is sceptical of easy transitions, impatient with round numbers, and reliably inconvenient for everybody’s argument at once, which may be why Bill Gates has named him a favourite author and reads each new volume as it appears. The prose is dry, dense and quietly devastating. Nobody comes to Smil for reassurance; they come to find out what is actually the case.

Vaclav Smil in audiobooks

Numbers Don’t Lie is by some distance the most approachable door into his work, and a sensible first listen. It is built as a run of short, self-contained pieces, each taking one question about energy, food, machines, populations or the environment and answering it with measurement instead of opinion.

Stephen Perring narrates, and the format suits audio unusually well. At under six hours, with every chapter a complete argument in itself, it is easy to listen in short bursts without losing the thread, which is not something anyone could say of Smil’s longer and more forbidding volumes.

Expect to have several settled assumptions dismantled along the way, usually in a single paragraph and without any fuss. Come for the surprising figures, stay for the habit of mind they quietly teach. His audiobooks are gathered below.