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The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth's Past Mass Extinctions Audiobook
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As new groundbreaking research suggests that climate change played a major role in the most extreme catastrophes in the planet's history, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen takes us on a wild ride through the planet's five mass extinctions and, in the process, offers us a glimpse of our increasingly dangerous future.
Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future.
Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits.
Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.
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“Adam Verner is up to the difficult task of narrating this complex story…Verner sounds truly interested in the material and draws in the listener as well. He seems at times to have just learned this cool fact that he’s now sharing—one hears that kind of enthusiasm in his voice.”
— AudioFile
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“If readers have time for only one book on the subject, this wonderfully written, well-balanced, and intricately researched selection is the one to choose.”
— Library Journal (starred review) -
“A much-needed overview…both as a cautionary lesson and a hopeful demonstration of how life on Earth keeps rebounding from destruction.”
— Booklist -
“Effectively linking past and present…with projections for the future and a warning against inaction in the face of climate change.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“A simultaneously enlightening and cautionary tale of the deep history of our planet and the possible future, when conscious life may become extinct.”
— Kirkus Reviews -
“Want to know the future? Look to the past, the deep past. That’s one of the many insights you’ll glean from reading Brannen’s entertaining, engaging, elegant book.”
— David Biello, author of The Unnatural World -
“A vivid, fascinating story about all the past and future lives of our planet.”
— Michael Pye, author of The Edge of the World
The Ends of the World Listener Reviews
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Don Monchil, 11/24/2022
About Peter Brannen
Peter Brannen is an award-winning science journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Wired, the Washington Post, Slate, Boston Globe, and Aeon, among other publications. A graduate of Boston College, he was a 2015 journalist-in-residence at the Duke University National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and a 2011 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Science Journalism Fellow. This is his first book.
About Adam Verner
Adam Verner is a stage, film, television, and voice actor and an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator. He holds a BS in theater arts from Bradley University and an MFA from Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.