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    Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
    Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
    Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
    Audiobook12 hours

    Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

    Written by David Christian

    Narrated by Jamie Jackson

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A captivating history of the universe -- from before the dawn of time through the far reaches of the distant future. Most historians study the smallest slivers of time, emphasizing specific dates, individuals, and documents. But what would it look like to study the whole of history, from the big bang through the present day -- and even into the remote future? How would looking at the full span of time change the way we perceive the universe, the earth, and our very existence? These were the questions David Christian set out to answer when he created the field of "Big History," the most exciting new approach to understanding where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. In Origin Story, Christian takes readers on a wild ride through the entire 13.8 billion years we've come to know as "history." By focusing on defining events (thresholds), major trends, and profound questions about our origins, Christian exposes the hidden threads that tie everything together -- from the creation of the planet to the advent of agriculture, nuclear war, and beyond. With stunning insights into the origin of the universe, the beginning of life, the emergence of humans, and what the future might bring, Origin Story boldly reframes our place in the cosmos.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateMay 22, 2018
    ISBN9781501996634
    Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
    Author

    David Christian

    David Christian is Professor in the Department of History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (1990), Imperial and Soviet Russia: Power, Privilege and the Challenge of Modernity (1997), and A History of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia: Volume 1: Inner Eurasia from Prehistory to the Mongol Empire (1998).

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    Reviews for Origin Story

    4.5/5

    134 ratings9 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Aftee reading Sapiens,Guns germs and steel and countless other different books,i felt a deep paucity in my outlook about the origin story....this book by David Christian completely does justice to its mandate. Explained scientifically and lucidly. The narration makes or breaks the book. We all know it. The narrator has performed this rendition beautifully which forces you to move on with it. Hence,go for it guyz.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Excellent from beginning to end. The narrator was impeccable. I will definitely read/listen to it again. If you’re curious about how everything might have commenced, where we are at and where we’re going, this is highly recommended and will not disappoint.
    • 5/5
      Similar to Sapiens, but broader and more scholarly. Deserves more praise
    • 5/5
      Great book to read
      Nice story telling and great knowledge
    • 5/5
      Great book. I recommend people to read it. But the author has a strong leftist bias and isn't aware of it. It's to be expected for someone writing a book of this kind. And it's very well written. So all in all a great book.
    • 4/5
      how I wish I understood chemistry and physics so books like this wouldn’t give me splitting headaches. Yet every year or so I pick one up determined to understand the universe. As Chris says “oh you are in your ‘I will prove I’m smart enough to understand this’ frustrated mood.” He says it’s from my lack of imagination. (I still argue with him about those stupid worms in Dune.)Back to Origin Story, I did have a non-headache mind-blown moment during the chapter about the first photosynthesizing one-celled organisms that output so much oxygen we went into a 1 hundred million year ice age until the Earth’s plates moved and enough volcanoes erupted...this was about 3.5 billion years ago. The book is split perfectly in half with 155 pages pre-humans and 155 pages human life. Most of the human section is similar to books like “Guns Germs and Steel” and “sapiens” but his last chapter about the near future is worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Every culture and tradition has had its origin story, its understanding of how the world came to be as they knew it, which formed the basis for their further understanding of how to live, interact with others, get food, make clothes. Our origin stories are the basis of how we understand everything.Now, in the early 21st century, we know far more about the origin of the universe, our sun, our planet, and life on Earth. We live in a society of unparalleled complexity, and in the last two hundred years, we have gained the ability not just to support more human beings, but to improve the daily lives of most humans on the planet, not just an elite 10% or so.What we haven't done yet is integrate this knowledge into a new, shared origin story that helps us cope with this new, complex, and rapidly changing world.Christian intends this as at least a first pass at a modern origin story. In a lively, highly readable or listenable style, he lays out the basics of our new knowledge of the origins of the universe, our planet, and life on Earth, as well as an overview of the evolution of our species and development of our societies, right down to how we made the transition from strictly agrarian societies to today's high-tech, rapidly changing world. And he looks at the challenges as well as the benefits of that transition and our current power to affect our planet.Christian makes the point, as others have in the last few years, that we now have, in essence, the controls for our only habitable planet. We decide what species live and which ones die, and we are playing with the climate controls. If we understand and master those controls in time, we have the potential to give our species the best and most comfortable lives we have ever had.Or we could make the planet uninhabitable for such an energy-consuming culture, and drive ourselves back to the early agrarian or even hunter-gatherer level.Or we could render the planet uninhabitable for our species altogether, and leave Earth to start over again, with other species in a climate unlike any that has existed since the first primates evolved.Despite that potential grim outcome, I found this overall a lively and interesting book, well worth the time I spent listening to it. Recommended.I bought this audiobook.
    • 4/5
      A smaller summary volume of the material from 'Maps of Time'. A great overview of the complexity thresholds we have crossed to get where we are today, from elementary physics to chemistry, to life, dinosaurs, their extinction and the rise and rise of intelligent mammals and the noosphere.
    • 5/5
      An astonishing history, from big bang to the present. The author is a professor of history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. His background was in Russian history, but over 20 years ago he developed an interest in world history, history across the globe. That wasn’t enough for him, so he began teaching big history, beginning with the physics of the big bang. Bill Gates funded this to be taught in schools, and David Christian taught it at university in a modern history department. Science merges with history as he argues that analogous forces were at work in the development of the universe, the creation of earth, the formation of life, and then human epochs. His imsight is that this is an origin story, one not just for one nation or one language, but for all people.