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How I Learned to Understand the World

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How I Learned to Understand the World

By: Hans Rosling, Dr Anna Paterson
Narrated by: Simon Slater
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About this listen

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 Professionals & Academics Science & Technology Africa

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All stars
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Great for learning about this amazing man, his amazing family and for learning more about his work.

Really interesting

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It was great to get more insight into Hans and some of his life experiences, first heard about in his excellent book Factfulness. Like another reader I do agree it ended rather abruptly though which was disappointing but maybe intentional as there is more to follow?

Great insight into the man and his life

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I would highly recommend this book either before or after Factfulness.

If you enjoy books like Prisoners of Geography……I think you’ll love this.

Fascinating and fantastic!

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I had been familiar with Hans Rosling's phenomenal TED presentations. This book revealed this to be the tip of the berg. A well told story about a remarkable man and his journey

The story behind an amazing man

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The author himself describes this book as a memoir and skillfully guides us thought his very interesting life and how it has changed his world view. I've heard it twice now, which is something I definitely can't say about many more books. That should suffice.

read after factfulness

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“It’s never too late to give in, so we might as well do it some other time!”

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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We can all learn something from Hans Rosling's life story. An inspiring journey through the 20th century and the changes the world went through, seen by the eyes of this Swedish academic with a insatiable desire to make this planet a better place.

Wonderful story, we can all learn from

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Being someone from a humble background in a developing country who had the opportunity of visiting Europe. I have always had an emotion to be felt heard. I felt just that when I heard him. The book was an expression of grounded humanity.

Understanding is the soul of humanity..

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I loved Factfulness by Hans Rosling, so naturally turned to this memoir a few months later. It servers as a beautiful reminder and deep dive on some of his best stories, without going into the lecturing that the other book had. It did feel like a sudden end - missing some kind of summary or overall thought on his life’s achievements. It saddens me to think that time ran out for him.

The story of ‘Factfullness’

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Captivating, beautifully narrated, essential reading for the wide-eyed audience and the busy policymakers alike.

Highly recommended.

Captivating

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