Audiobook Sample

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  • Title: Thinking as a Science
  • Author: Henry Hazlitt
  • Narrator: LibriVox Volunteers
  • Length: 04:37:48
  • Version: Abridged
  • Release Date: 01/01/2016
  • Publisher: LibriVox
  • Genre: Non-Fiction, Psychology
  • ISBN13: SABLIB9786528
Dear kindred spirits of the written and spoken word,

As I settled into my favorite armchair with a cup of oolong tea, the familiar crackle of a LibriVox recording transported me back to my graduate school days at Harvard, where I first discovered how profoundly format shapes intellectual engagement. Henry Hazlitt’s “Thinking as a Science” arrived in my auditory landscape like a well-organized seminar – structured yet conversational, rigorous yet accessible, much like the best lectures from my mentor Professor Langdon’s famed ‘Textual Alchemy’ course.

Hazlitt’s century-old wisdom about systematic thinking resonates with surprising freshness in our era of cognitive overload. The chapter on ‘Reading and Thinking’ particularly struck a chord, reminding me of my semester teaching Comparative Media Studies at Berkeley, where we examined how digital natives process information differently than their print-nourished predecessors. His distinction between knowledge acquisition and thinking stimulation mirrors the pedagogical challenges I’ve faced when students confuse information retrieval with genuine comprehension.

LibriVox’s volunteer narrators deliver Hazlitt’s prose with admirable clarity, though the audio quality varies slightly between chapters – a charming reminder of the project’s democratic ethos. The collective narration style creates an intriguing polyphony, with different voices embodying various aspects of Hazlitt’s thinking process. While professional studio productions might offer slicker acoustics, there’s intellectual poetry in hearing these ideas articulated by multiple thinkers, much like a cognitive version of Whitman’s ‘I contain multitudes.’

Through a cultural lens, Hazlitt’s approach reveals its mid-20th century Western rationalist roots. Contemporary listeners might notice the absence of modern cognitive science perspectives or Eastern philosophical traditions – gaps that became particularly apparent to me during my Kyoto research fellowship, where I studied Zen approaches to cognition. Yet the core principles of logical structuring and fallacy avoidance remain universally valuable, akin to Aristotle’s “Organon” for the modern autodidact.

The audiobook format amplifies certain dimensions of Hazlitt’s work. His conversational tone gains intimacy when spoken, transforming abstract principles into what feels like personal mentorship. However, the extensive bibliography section might challenge audio-only processing – I found myself wishing for PDF accompaniment during these catalogues, much as I’ve advised my podcast listeners to supplement audio learning with visual materials.

Compared to contemporary critical thinking guides like Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Hazlitt’s work feels more prescriptive than descriptive, more about how thinking “should” function than how it actually does. This creates both its strength as a practical manual and its limitation as a psychological study. For listeners seeking rigorous self-improvement rather than scientific exploration, this distinction becomes a virtue.

What fascinates me most is how Hazlitt’s self-taught background permeates the text. His systematic approach mirrors the autodidact’s need to create structure where formal education might provide it. This quality makes the work particularly valuable for lifelong learners outside traditional academia – a demographic I’ve engaged with extensively through my literary podcast.

The audiobook’s free availability through LibriVox embodies the very democratic intellectual values Hazlitt champions. While modern listeners might supplement it with recent neuroscience perspectives (I often recommend pairing it with Annie Murphy Paul’s “The Extended Mind”), as a foundational text for conscious cognition, it remains remarkably potent. The audio experience particularly suits Hazlitt’s methodical approach – something about hearing the thinking process articulated aloud makes the mental discipline feel more attainable.

For educators, this audiobook offers a compelling resource for teaching critical thinking across disciplines. In my Contemporary Fiction seminar last spring, we used excerpts to analyze narrative construction in Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad”, demonstrating how literary analysis benefits from structured thought processes. The students responded with remarkable engagement, perhaps because audio delivery mirrors how we naturally process language and ideas.

As both a literature professor and digital humanist, I appreciate how this audiobook bridges print and audio cultures. Hazlitt’s focus on reading as thinking preparation takes on new dimensions in our multi-modal age, where reading competes with streaming and scrolling. The listening experience itself becomes a meta-exercise in the very cognitive discipline Hazlitt advocates.

In intellectual solidarity,
Prof. Emily Chen