An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
Richard Dawkins' Memoirs • Book 1
by Richard Dawkins
Narrated by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
The man who made atheism a bestseller reads you his own origin story — and his wife joins him for it.
- Great if you want: insight into how a restless, contrarian scientific mind forms
- Listening experience: reflective and unhurried — a memoir that thinks more than it dramatizes
- Narration: Dawkins reads with dry wit; Ward adds unexpected warmth to key passages
- Skip if: you want the provocateur — this ends before his fame and controversies
Listen to An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist on Audible →
About This Audiobook
An Appetite for Wonder is the first volume of Richard Dawkins's memoir, covering his childhood in colonial Africa through his time at Oxford and the intellectual development that led to The Selfish Gene. Dawkins traces the formation of his scientific thinking through the teachers, landscapes, and cultural moments that shaped a mind capable of the radical re-description of Darwinism that made him one of science's most recognized public figures.
Dawkins narrates in his own voice, joined by Lalla Ward, and the combination gives the memoir an intimacy and authority that only self-narration can provide. His dry humor about his own early certainties and his genuine wonder at the natural world come through with a warmth that his public persona sometimes obscures. The listening experience is illuminated by hearing the man himself reflect on how he became who he is.