Disorder cover art

Disorder

Hard Times in the 21st Century

 Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Disorder

By: Helen Thompson
Narrated by: Kitty Kelly
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £15.99

Buy Now for £15.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

Getting to grips with the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s.

The twenty-first century has brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks. Their fallout has led central banks to create over $25 trillion of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilized the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault lines in the United States.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories—one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies—and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic, the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why, as the green transition takes place, the longstanding predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place.

©2022 Helen Thompson (P)2022 Tantor Politics & Government 21st Century

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Influence Empire cover art
The Age of Awakening cover art
Financial Cold War cover art
Money and Power cover art
The Economic Weapon cover art
Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? cover art
A Superpower Transformed cover art
Russia Resurrected cover art
Follow the Money cover art
America in Retreat cover art
The Russian Economy cover art
A Brief History of Equality cover art
How China Loses cover art
Forgotten Continent cover art
EuroTragedy cover art
Russia's Crony Capitalism cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Found this an interesting listen. Explained the importance of energy, economy, and emergent nations and alliances. No issue with how it was read at all.

Cohesive analysis of global developments

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
She is an intellectual titan. Joins a lot of dots coherently and compellingly to explain how we have ended up where we are. Read this book now!

Helen is a boss

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This was an extraordinary book telling a complex yet familiar story. I found it compelling if depressing in its fatalism. Sadly I must highlight multiple problems in the narration. 1. Too fast! This is complex stuff & listening in the car meant I often found myself trying to digest one idea before the next one was rattled off. 2. Poor tone. I’m afraid the narrator’s tone can only be described as bedtime story mode. When you’re bouncing through a narration in a jaunty way without a clue what you’re reading because that bit of your brain is wandering off somewhere else. I really wish Thompson could have narrated because she is so obviously passionate about the subject matter and would have created emphasis in the right places rather than this singsong disappointment. 3. Shocking proofing. Did anyone listen to this before it was released? ‘Aggregate’ pronounced like ‘egregious’, ‘gilets jaunes’ becoming ‘gilets jeunes’, ‘de Tocqueville’ pronounced ‘de tok A vil’. There were so many other word mangles & mispronunciations but these stick out. I don’t blame the narrator for this - it must be hard to read a book with unfamiliar words, but who proof-listened to check for this stuff? Anyway tremendous book but wish I had hard copy so I could mark it up.

A fascinating, smart book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Subject is fascinating, but the narration is just too fast to take it all in. I tried listening at reduced speed, but she sounded drunk, which was worse. Will probably have to buy the hardcopy.

Why so fast!?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
It’s hard to know what to rate the narrative of this book because the narration is so bad that it distracts from the text. So many names are pronounced incorrectly that eventually I just gave up, because it became too irritating. de Tocqueville, Francois Hollande, BNP Paribas, Silvio Berlusconi… on and on it goes. It’s not like these are difficult names, or that it isn’t well-known how to pronounce them. But when it’s just one wrong after another, it emphasises the extent to which this book is read like it’s a manual, rather than a narrative. There is no understanding from the narrator as to what is being read, and as a result, if there is substance to the text it just washes over you.

Rarely do I get hours into a book and am unable to tell you a single concept that I have taken out of it; almost never do I give up on a book. But in this case, both of those things were true.

Dreadful narration undermines the book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An exceptional history of the current geopolitical issues in Ukraine and energy issues to come.

Geopolitical masterclass for the world today. .

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
An extraordinary feat of analysis bringing together energy, mentalist policy and democracy to make sense of the last hundred years of geopolitics and critically the today's geopolitical dramas. Brilliantly researched and moulded I to an accessible story. Let down somewhat by flat and badly-researched delivery.

Must-read Intellectual Triumph

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Superb book. I had to buy and read it in print because the narrator is so poorly educated that there are no end of mispronounced names and phrases. They have obviously never listened to any current affairs. I would have sent it back but the content is so important and thought provoking that it would have sent the wrong message. Author was poorly served

fantastic book but terrible narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This is a very good and very important to understand what is actually happening around the world these days. Disastrous consequences of politics.

Very good!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
fascinating read, but worth taking into account fair but critical reviews from Howard Davis and Matthew Klein

thought provoking but flawed

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews