How I Learned to Understand the World
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How I Learned to Understand the World
Narrated by:
Simon Slater
Buy Now for £14.35
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Narrated by:
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Simon Slater
Summary
This is a book that contains very few numbers. Instead, it is about meeting people who have opened my eyes.
It was facts that helped him explain how the world works. But it was curiosity and commitment that made the late Hans Rosling, author of worldwide best seller Factfulness, the most popular researcher of our time.
How I Learned to Understand the World is Hans Rosling's own story of how a young scientist became a revolutionary thinker and takes us from the swelter of an emergency clinic in Mozambique to the World Economic Forum at Davos.
In collaboration with Swedish journalist Fanny Härgestam, Hans Rosling wrote his memoir with the same joy of storytelling that made a whole world listen when he spoke.
©2020 Rosling Education (P)2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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If you enjoy books like Prisoners of Geography……I think you’ll love this.
Fascinating and fantastic!
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Highly recommended.
Captivating
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Really interesting
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Understanding is the soul of humanity..
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I had first picked up How I Learned to Understand the World about a year or so ago, when I was looking for something non-fiction to read. I’d never even heard of Hans Rosling before then, but the title had grabbed my attention, so I bought it—then let it get the same fate as many of my other books and left it unread on my shelf. Until now.
I’ve always had a problem with classics and non-fiction books. Even when I was enjoying them, I had a hard time getting that daily page quota in, because it took me ages to get to the end of even one paragraph and by the time I did get there, I got discouraged and disinterested. That was not the case with How I Learned to Understand the World. Fanny Härgestam was right about one thing when she summed up her experiences about writing this book: Hans Rosling had lived a full life. He first told us about his childhood, about being born into a poor family, but eventually growing out of that poverty and being the first in his family to receive high education. Then he told us about being a fresh graduate from medical school and setting out to see the world with his eventual wife, Agneta. About working in places like Africa and India, and being humbled about his knowledge of medicine. About growing their own family with Agneta and combining that with further work in foreign lands—and tragically the loss of their youngest child. About eventually giving up on the medical field and turning to things like, science, then lecturing, then entrepreneurship, and then finally to writing. About meeting all sorts of amazing people and getting to know all the good and bad things about the world.
It really surprised me how much I enjoyed this book and how invested I became of Rosling’s life. It put a smile to my face every time something good or fun happened to him, got frustrated along with him, and got sad (and occasionally even almost shed a few tears) whenever something sad happened. But my strongest feeling was probably my sense of justice. Or more accurately, how unjust I found everything. Hans was truly a people’s person. He loved his fellow humans, respected them and had a strong desire to further understand them and help make their lives better. For all his life he thought that people had a basic right to be healthy and made sure they got all the available help they needed or made more options available to them. Given that little background information, I found it extremely unfair that he himself had so much trouble with his own health: they discovered he had a serious liver problem when he was only 20-years old, then he discovered he had testicular cancer, and although he was cancer free for many years, it was said cancer’s eventual return that ended up taking him from this world before his time. Härgestam was lucky to spend the last few months of his life with him and got to learn about his amazing life from the man himself. She described him as a happy and upbeat person, even as he was fighting with cancer, and as someone who just couldn’t sit down and rest, not until he felt like all his work had been done.
5/5, would listen to it again
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