Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson

Jennifer Michael Hecht

Jul 2009 · Blackstone Audio Inc. · Narrated by Martha Harmon Pardee

About this audiobook

In this sweeping history, Jennifer Michael Hecht celebrates doubt as an engine of creativity and as an alternative to the political and intellectual dangers of certainty. Just as belief has its own history featuring people whose unique expressions of faith forever changed the world, doubt has a vibrant story and tradition with its own saints, martyrs, and sages. Hecht shows that the great doubters ponder the same issues as the great believers. She celebrates such heroes of doubt as Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, Wang Ch'ung, Hypatia, Maimonides, Galileo, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Emily Dickinson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Margaret Sanger, people who drove history forward by challenging the powers and conventional wisdom of their time and heritage.

About the author

Jennifer Michael Hecht, an accomplished historian and an award-winning poet, earned a PhD in the history of science from Columbia University. She is the author of The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France and coauthor of the major textbook Western Civilizations: The Continuing Experiment. She lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of history at Nassau Community College.

Martha Harmon Pardee, award-winning narrator, has been recording books for the Library of Congress’ National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped for fifteen years, with over 850 titles to date. She graduated from Northwestern University and for the past twenty years has lived in Denver, where she works as an actress and voice-over artist. She and her husband, actor-narrator Erik Sandvold, have two children.