Cosmosapiens

This book is an ambitious undertaking. In audio format, it's tough to digest, even with the capable narrator Gildart Jackson. Author John Hands set out to provide a comprehensive review of all the theories relating to cosmology, evolution, and consciousness. The theories, which vary in complexity, are presented in short snippets by the British-accented Jackson, making frequent references to other sections of the book by number and to the bonus material PDF containing diagrams and charts. This text requires sustained attention to understand the complex concepts and absorb the many details. Listeners must also commit to reviewing the bonus material and to jumping to the referenced sections in order to fully comprehend the concepts. Readers may be better off sticking to the print version. S.E.G. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 30, 2015
In this audacious, ambitious, and philosophically completist study, Hands (Housing Co-operatives) leads an interdisciplinary search through all the current human knowledge that may help answer two burning questions: What are we, and where do we come from? Hands proceeds from the basics of cosmology, chemistry, biology, ethology, philosophy, physics, and more as he addresses historical concepts and current orthodoxies, testing for explanatory and predictive power before he advances to newer and more exotic ideas. The result is a pearl of dialectical reasoning between Hands and the most celebrated experts he can find. In today’s age of specialization, readers will welcome this throwback to the days of the well-informed layperson, conversant and opinionated in a variety of topics. Hands feels that science is the right tool for allowing humans to understand ourselves, but he highlights controversies at the leading edge and explicitly closes his research with a summary of science’s limitations. He ends with a bold, definitive list of everything he thinks we know about ourselves and delivers a short answer to his guiding question: “We are the unfinished product of an accelerating cosmic evolutionary process characterized by collaboration, complexification, and convergence, and the self-reflective agents of our future evolution.” Hands grounds his musings in logic and scientific fact to produce a thoughtful treatise for the eternally curious.