The Avid Reader Show

Mar 17 2025 791 ep. 37 mins 927
The Avid Reader Show Podcast artwork

The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com

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Episode 776: Einstein in Oxford - Andrew Robinson

Mar 17 2025 45 mins  
An intimate account of Albert Einstein’s visit to Oxford in the 1930’s, casting new light on why he continues to be the world’s most famous scientist.In 1931, Albert Einstein visited Oxford to receive an honorary degree and lecture on relativity and the universe. While teaching, he naturally chalked equations and diagrams on several blackboards. Today, one of these boards is

Episode 775: Hidden in the Heavens - Jason Steffen

Mar 17 2025 62 mins  
Are we alone in the universe? It’s a fundamental question for Earth-dwelling humankind. Are there other worlds like ours, out there somewhere? In Hidden in the Heavens, Jason Steffen, a former scientist on NASA’s Kepler mission, describes how that mission searched for planets orbiting Sun-like stars—especially Earth-like planets circulating in Earth-like orbits. What the Kepl

Episode 774: Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy - Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember

Feb 18 2025 60 mins  
We tend to think of our memories as impressions of the past that remain fully intact, preserved somewhere inside our brains. In fact, we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them. Memory Lane introduces readers to the cutting-edge science of human memory, revealing how our recollections of the past are constantly adapting and changing, and why a fa

Episode 773: David Bates - An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence

Feb 18 2025 60 mins  
A new history of human intelligence that argues that humans know themselves by knowing their machines.We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Desc

Episode 772: Gareth Gore - Opus

Feb 18 2025 54 mins  
A thrilling exposé recounting how members of Opus Dei—a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect—pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks.In an era of disinformation and deep fakes, here is a real-life conspiracy which hid in plain sight for more than sixty years. Gore tells

Episode 771: Jonathan Silvertown - Selfish Genes to Social Beings: : A Cooperative History of Life

Nov 26 2024 55 mins  
For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation?Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with

Episode 770: Elizabeth Winder - Parachute Women: The Women Behind The Rolling Stones

Nov 25 2024 60 mins  
Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling StonesDiscover the true story of the four women who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help shape and curate the image of The Rolling Stones—perfect for fans of Girls Like Us.The Rolling Stones have long been considered one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of

Episode 769: Jim Baggott - Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement

Nov 22 2024 66 mins  
The definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate and its continuing legacyIn 1927, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began a debate about the interpretation and meaning of the new quantum theory. This would become one of the most famous debates in the history of science. At stake were an understanding of the purpose, and defense of the integrity, of science. What (if any) limi

Episode 768: Lewis Cohen MD - Winter's End: Dementia and Dying

Nov 21 2024 64 mins  
Arguably among the worst of all medical afflictions, the dementias slowly destroy one's personality, take a tremendous emotional, physical, and financial toll on patients and families, and are irreversible and inexorably fatal. Winter's End: Dementia and Its Life-Shortening Options is constructed around a lengthy and detailed nonfiction account that is layered with the voices of ap

Episode 767: Rowan Jacobsen - Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul

Nov 21 2024 50 mins  
When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. The waxy mass-market chocolate of his childhood had left him indifferent to it, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite of Cru Sauvage was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back thro