Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Human Geography

When we talk about human history, we focus on great leaders, mass migration and decisive wars. But how has the Earth itself determined our destiny? How has our planet made us? As a species we are shaped by our environment. Geological forces drove our evolution in East Africa; mountainous terrain led to the development of democracy in Greece; and today voting behaviour in the United States follows the bed of an ancient sea. The human story is the story of these forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents.

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices.

To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change we need to study people who live in harsh environments. This audiobook tells the personal stories of humans living in extreme situations, and of the financial infrastructure they create. Here, economies are not concerned with the familiar stock market crashes, housing crises, or banking scandals of the financial pages.

Can Donald Trump really build that wall? What does Brexit mean for Ireland's border? And what would happen if Elon Musk declared himself president of the Moon? In Border Wars, Professor Klaus Dodds takes us on a journey into the geopolitical conflict of tomorrow in an eye-opening tour of the world's best-known, most dangerous and most unexpected border conflicts from the Gaza Strip to the space race. Along the way, we'll discover just what borders truly mean in the modern world.

In The Journey of Humanity, Oded Galor offers a revelatory explanation of how humanity became, only very recently, the unique species to have escaped a life of subsistence poverty, enjoying previously unthinkable wealth and longevity. He reveals why this process has been so unequal around the world, resulting in the great disparities between nations that exist today. He shows why so many of our efforts to improve lives have failed and how they might succeed.

Globally, Black people are among the most affected by the climate crisis, despite contributing very little to it. For a long time, the crisis was portrayed as yet another injustice for Black people to care about, on top of the day-to-day oppression they face. In Black Climates, Selina Nwulu reframes the crisis to encompass our disconnection from each other and the world around us. She argues that the root of climate change lies in historical colonial violence and ongoing exploitation, making it inherently racist.

It is time to reevaluate the merits of the inconspicuous life, to search out some antidote to continuous exposure, and to reconsider the value of going unseen, undetected, or overlooked in this new world. Might invisibility be regarded not simply as refuge, but as a condition with its own...

It wasn't long-ago that Britons could have been as at home in Varanasi as they could have been in Wolverhampton—why?—because the shape and location of Britain's land-mass has not always been the same, and with large parts of Britain scattered across the globe, British borders and its identity has always been on the move. But, by knowing more about the twelve pivotal moments that occurred over a 2,000-year period, we can not only gain a full sense of our British history, but we can also understand where we are heading.

An illuminating history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth—by the bestselling author of Nations Apart North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures...

"A revelation of the drive and creative flux of the metropolis over time."--Nature "This is a must-read book for any city dweller with a voracious appetite for understanding the wonders of cities and why we're so attracted to them."--Zahi Hawass, author of Hidden Treasures of Ancient Egypt A...

"A world-class intellectual. . . . [Colin Woodard’s] research can help Americans rediscover their common identity in spite of all the attempts to divide them." —Garry Kasparov "A powerful paradigm for understanding the defining hot button issues of contemporary America and the action we can...