AuthorSarah Everts
NarratorSophie Amoss
Duration18h 4m
CategoriesAdult Non-Fiction, Science and Nature
PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing
VersionUnabridged
An Outside Magazine 2021 Science book pick
One of Smithsonian's 10 Best Science Books of 2021
A taboo-busting romp through the shame, stink, and strange science of sweating.
Sweating may be one of our weirdest biological functions, but it’s also one of our most vital and least understood. In The Joy of Sweat, Sarah Everts delves into its role in the body—and in human history.
Why is sweat salty? Why do we sweat when stressed? Why do some people produce colorful sweat? And should you worry about Big Brother tracking the hundreds of molecules that leak out in your sweat—not just the stinky ones or alleged pheromones—but the ones that reveal secrets about your health and vices?
Everts’s entertaining investigation takes readers around the world—from Moscow, where she participates in a dating event in which people sniff sweat in search of love, to New Jersey, where companies hire trained armpit sniffers to assess the efficacy of their anti-sweat products. In Finland, Everts explores the delights of the legendary smoke sauna and the purported health benefits of good sweat, while in the Netherlands she slips into the sauna theater scene, replete with costumes, special effects, and towel dancing.
Along the way, Everts traces humanity’s long quest to control sweat, culminating in the multibillion-dollar industry for deodorants and antiperspirants. And she shows that while sweating can be annoying, our sophisticated temperature control strategy is one of humanity’s most powerful biological traits.
Deeply researched and written with great zest, The Joy of Sweat is a fresh take on a gross but engrossing fact of human life.
Author: Henry Marsh
Author Henry Marsh
Narrator Henry Marsh
Duration 7h 47m
Henry Marsh has spent a lifetime operating on the surgical front line. Prompted by his retirement from his full-time job in the NHS, and through his continuing work in Nepal and Ukraine, Henry has been forced to reflect more deeply about what 40 years spent handling the human brain has taught him. Moving between encounters with patients in his Lond...
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Author: Annaka Harris
Author Annaka Harris
Narrator Annaka Harris
Duration 2h 22m
As concise and enlightening as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, this mind-expanding dive into the mystery of consciousness is an illuminating meditation on the self, free will, and felt experience. What is consciousness? How does it arise? And why does it exist? We take our experience of being in the world for...
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Author: Robin Wall Kimmerer
Author Robin Wall Kimmerer
Narrator The Author
Duration 16h 44m
As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldes...
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Author: David Wallace-Wells
Author David Wallace-Wells
Narrator David Wallace-Wells
Duration 8h 33m
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Uninhabitable Earth written and read by David Wallace-Wells. It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely...
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No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference
Author: Greta Thunberg
Author Greta Thunberg
Narrator The Author
Duration 1h 15m
'Everything needs to change. And it has to start today' In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. Her actions ended up sparking a global movement for action against the climate crisis, inspiring millions of pupils to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning he...
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Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee
Author Siddhartha Mukherjee
Narrator Dennis Boutsikaris
Duration 19h 31m
*Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016* The Gene is the story of one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in our history, from bestselling, prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Spanning the globe and several centuries, The Gene is the story of the quest to decipher the master-code that makes and defines humans, th...
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Author: Douglas W. Tallamy
Author Douglas W. Tallamy
Narrator Jonathan Todd Ross
Duration 6h 40m
As development and subsequent habitat destruction accelerate, there are increasing pressures on wildlife populations. But there is an important and simple step toward reversing this alarming trend: Everyone with access to a patch of earth can make a significant contribution toward sustaining biodiversity. There is an unbreakable link between native...
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Author: Monty Don
Author Monty Don
Narrator Monty Don
Duration 7h 38m
Written as he talks, this is Monty Don right beside you in the garden, challenging norms and sharing advice. Discover Monty's thoughts and garden ideas around nature, seasons, color, design, pests, flowering shrubs, containers, and much more. Read about the month-by month jobs he does in his own garden that he hopes are relevant to you.
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Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Author Malcolm Gladwell
Narrator Malcolm Gladwell
Duration 8h 47m
The highly anticipated new book from Malcolm Gladwell, host of Revisionist History and No.1 international bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw and David and Goliath. The routine traffic stop that ends in tragedy. The spy who spends years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The false conviction of...
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Author: David George Haskell
Author David George Haskell
Narrator The Author, Cassandra Campbell
Duration 10h 26m
David Haskell's award-winning The Forest Unseen won acclaim for eloquent writing and deep engagement with the natural world. Now, Haskell brings his powers of observation to the biological networks that surround all species, including humans. Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees' connections with webs of fun...
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