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  • Count Down

  • How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race
  • Written by: Shanna H. Swan, Stacey Colino - contributor
  • Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
  • Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (46 ratings)

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Count Down cover art

Count Down

Written by: Shanna H. Swan, Stacey Colino - contributor
Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell
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Publisher's Summary

In the tradition of Silent Spring and The Sixth Extinction, an urgent, “disturbing, empowering, and essential” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) book about the ways in which chemicals in the modern environment are changing - and endangering - human sexuality and fertility on the grandest scale, from renowned epidemiologist Shanna Swan.

In 2017, author Shanna Swan and her team of researchers completed a major study. They found that over the past four decades, sperm levels among men in Western countries have dropped by more than 50 percent. They came to this conclusion after examining 185 studies involving close to 45,000 healthy men. The result sent shockwaves around the globe - but the story didn’t end there. It turns out our sexual development is changing in broader ways, for both men and women and even other species, and that the modern world is on pace to become an infertile one.

How and why could this happen? What is hijacking our fertility and our health? Count Down unpacks these questions, revealing what Swan and other researchers have learned about how both lifestyle and chemical exposures are affecting our fertility, sexual development - potentially including the increase in gender fluidity - and general health as a species. Engagingly explaining the science and repercussions of these worldwide threats and providing simple and practical guidelines for effectively avoiding chemical goods (from water bottles to shaving cream) both as individuals and societies, Count Down is “staggering in its findings” (Erin Brockovich, The Guardian) and “will serve as an awakening” (The New York Times Book Review).

©2020 Shanna H. Swan. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

What listeners say about Count Down

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This is for everyone

Everyone in healthcare or interested in preserving their family’s reproductive health should read this! Parents need to start applying this information years before conception.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
  • K
  • 2021-10-18

Good brook, poor narrator

This narrator was monotone and robotic and ruined the experience. Dr. Swan should have narrated her own book.

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    3 out of 5 stars
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  • Cam
  • 2021-05-09

Emotional without detail

Fertility is one piece of a large conplicated puzzle. Swan is too invested in giving her work grandiosity that she assigns cataclysm to something we haven't weighted yet.

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