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Flock without Birds by Filip Dousek
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Flock without Birds

$20.99

Retail price: $22.95

Discount: 8%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Length 13 hours 35 minutes
Language English
Narrators Jonathan Davis & Scott Brick

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

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A genre-bending, mind-altering novel about the illusions that make up our world.

Flock without Birds comes in two volumes, with neither one first or second—it’s up to the listener to start with the Story or the Book.

In the Story, an aging philosopher tells the tale of the Book—a tale of love that spans centuries, continents, and precious texts. Adam, who will one day write the Book, is a young PhD student torn between love and his obsession—coding an algorithm to sift the world’s data and find God, dead or alive. But a series of mysterious paintings lead him on a winding journey from Cambridge through a Faustian bargain to the edge of reason. Meanwhile in his library, Toito the philosopher calls into question everything there is to believe about Adam—and our world.

The Book—Adam’s journal from a foreign prison—promises to cure the divisions that plague the world. Their root cause isn’t politics, capitalism, race, religion, or media. A deeper layer, obvious and invisible, forms what we think, believe, and do. It shapes our wars and our relationships. Unless we confront these illusions, we will remain slaves to the obvious and lose the greatest freedom—the freedom to create a different world. The code—and the key—is within the human mind. But will Adam himself manage such a feat? Can he escape the prisons of the body and of the mind, and regain his love? After reading both volumes, Adam’s story—and our society—will look very different in the end. Two tales, separate and intertwined, ask the question: Where does the whole end and the part begin? What is a flock without birds?

Filip Dousek is an analytics and artificial intelligence pioneer. He was the founder and CEO of Stories.bi, one of the first startups to automate big data analysis. The company started a revolution in analytics and was ultimately acquired.

But before Stories, Filip wrote a novel. It took him 12 years to complete and told the story of a Cambridge PhD coding AI to find God, the order of the Universe, or at least the mother of all fractals. It was also about the centurial paradigm shift from objects to relationships and how it will change everything we know. In short, he wrote Flock Without Birds as fiction. A few years later, he built Stories and made it reality.

Jonathan Davis has received widespread critical acclaim for his narration in a variety of genres. He has won the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration in 2009, 2011, and 2012, as well as being a finalist for an Audie in 2007, 2013, and three times in 2014. He has also garnered accolades from Publishers Weekly, USA Today, and AudioFile magazine.

Scott Brick first began narrating audiobooks in 2000, and after recording almost 400 titles in five years, AudioFile magazine named Brick a Golden Voice and “one of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy.” He has read a number of titles in Frank Herbert’s bestselling Dune series, and he won the 2003 Science Fiction Audie Award for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. Brick has narrated for many popular authors, including Michael Pollan, Joseph Finder, Tom Clancy, and Ayn Rand. He has also won over 40 AudioFile Earphones Awards and the AudioFile award for Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense 2011. In 2007, Brick was named Publishers Weekly’s Narrator of the Year.

 Brick has performed on film, television and radio. He appeared on stage throughout the United States in productions of Cyrano, Hamlet, Macbeth and other plays. In addition to his acting work, Brick choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films including Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. He has also been hired by Morgan Freeman to write the screenplay adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

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Reviews

“One of the most pleasant literary surprises.”

“A triumph. Read it.”

“Philosophy blends with adventure, technology with poetry, and mysticism with logic—all in the tension of the black and white books, that are everything but black and white.”

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