Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Genocide of One: A Thriller
    Unavailable
    Genocide of One: A Thriller
    Unavailable
    Genocide of One: A Thriller
    Audiobook18 hours

    Genocide of One: A Thriller

    Written by Kazuaki Takano

    Narrated by Joe Knezevich

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The internationally bestselling, award-winning Japanese thriller about a child who may be the future of the human race--or the cause of its extinction.
    During a briefing in Washington D.C., the President is informed of a threat to national security: a three-year-old boy named Akili, who is already the smartest being on the planet. Representing the next step in human evolution, Akili can perceive patterns and predict future events better than most supercomputers, and is capable of manipulating grand-scale events like pieces on a chess board. And yet, for all that power, Akili has the emotional maturity of a child--which might make him the most dangerous threat humanity has ever faced.
    An American soldier, Jonathan Yeager, leads an international team of elite operatives deep into the heart of the Congolese jungle under Presidential orders to destroy this threat to humanity before Akili's full potential can be realized. But Yeager has a very sick child, and Akili's advanced knowledge of all things, medicine included, may be Yeager's only hope for saving his son's life. Soon Yeager finds himself caught between following his orders and saving a creature with a hidden agenda, who plans to either save humanity as we know it--or destroy it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateDec 2, 2014
    ISBN9781619694330
    Unavailable
    Genocide of One: A Thriller

    Related to Genocide of One

    Related audiobooks

    War & Military Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Can Science Cure Aging?

      Sep 13, 2018

      Can Science Cure Aging?
      2 min read

    • Article

      Michael Lewis: ‘We Were Incentivised To Have A Bad Pandemic Response’

      May 9, 2021

      An event as large and devastating as the Covid pandemic was always going to attract a rush of authors seeking to uncover the story behind the decade’s biggest story. Leading the pack – not for the first time – is Michael Lewis, the man with an unerri

      9 min read

    • Article

      Hot Docs

      Jun 6, 2023

      Directed by Eric Gandini This polished European documentary explores the uneven distribution of work, from work-obsessed countries like the US to societies where the young are either happily (or unhappily) jobless or paid to do nothing. The film cove

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Rolodex Of Rogues

      May 14, 2018

      A Rolodex Of Rogues
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Wisdom of Mass Salvation

      Jan 18, 2018

      Incoming! Incoming! Uh . . . pardon me while I interrupt this false alarm to quote Martin Luther King: "Science investigates," he says in "The Strength to Love," "religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Robert C. Koehler: Protecting Borders, Not Life

      Jun 10, 2021

      Remember the Space Force? You know, the sixth branch of the U.S. military, officially created in 2019, “establishing space as a warfighting domain and guaranteeing that the United States will dominate in that environment just like all others.” Thus d

      3 min read

    • Article

      Border Security: Wall Vs. Principles

      Aug 2, 2018

      Consider the limited thinking that produces a concept such as "border security." The essential assumption here is that the United States of America is primarily a physical container -- 3.5 million square miles of freedom and prosperity, whoopee, but

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Commons

      Aug 9, 2020

      The Commons
      4 min read

    • Article

      San Francisco Is Smarter Than You Are: The city is a big brain that can solve big problems.

      Oct 23, 2014

      Its achievements are undeniable. Having hosted what some historians call the greatest creation of wealth in human history,1 the San Francisco Bay Area had the fastest growth rate in the United States in 2012,2 the highest per-capita gross domestic pr

      6 min read

    • Article

      Genes And Science

      Jan 16, 2022

      Genes And Science
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Commons

      Dec 23, 2019

      In November, Mark Bowden reported on what top military officers really think about President Donald Trump. There is a common misconception, which Mark Bowden repeats, that a military officer swears to obey all orders that descend to him or her from t

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Aug 1, 2020

      The July feature story, “Fish Out of Water,” has everything: colonization’s long-term effects, the ridiculously destructive border wall, the environmental costs of human habitat, the imminent loss of a species that lasted millions of years, and so mu

      2 min read

    • Article

      Tech

      Feb 6, 2023

      When I was five years old, I watched the Challenger shuttle explode. I remember running from the TV in the living room to the kitchen to tell my mum. It was astonishing. The first civilian supported by NASA, the world’s largest and most well-funded s

      3 min read

    Reviews for Genocide of One

    4.5/5

    185 ratings26 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Very good book. Sci fi, but still possible.. That is my favorite kind of book.
    • 2/5
      It was slow mov8ng and low tech... I r3commend skipping it
    • 4/5
      Well written and suspenseful. I had just seen W about the. Bush presidency and a lot of similarities with Rush in the story. Many different facts peppered throughout the text, such Gengis Kann descendants. Very enjoyable
    • 5/5
      Great storyline. Agree with other reviewers that it had a heavy hand of politics in it.
    • 3/5
      Interesting idea but poor execution, two cons
      1) duration, dragged on for a little too long
      2) very political, clearly based on the Bush Administration and then added a lot of unnecessary insinuations. Regardless of political affiliations, it was not necessary.
    • 5/5
      Not a story for the faint of heart. An exciting, engaging look at the psychology of the human race that brings up interesting questions and keeps you on the edge of your seat.
    • 5/5
      The story line was enjoybale if not unique. The audiobook was great.
    • 5/5
      Many challenging and interesting ideas! Very hard to put down!
    • 5/5
      Clearly a wild ride lots of suspense. I couldn't put it down.
    • 5/5
      This audiobook was well voiced and truly a thriller. The concept of the next evolution of the human race was presented in a insightful and inspired way. I thought the writing was strong albeit a bit heavy handed sometimes. It was political but thought provoking. I’ll look for more books by this author.
    • 5/5
      Really good story. Very complex, imaginative, and executed very well. The reading was brilliantly done.
    • 4/5
      I was unsure when this began how I would like it, but in the end I enjoyed this book immensely.
    • 4/5
      Interesting premise and story. The baseline human characters were relatable. The story was told on two threads. The out of Africa thread was more entertaining to me than the Japan thread. The Japan thread was at least 50% indecipherable technical jargon relating to medical and pharmacological subject matter. It could have benefitted from stricter editing IMO. With that being said I was able to surf the web through the overly dense parts and then pay attention during the plot advancing parts. Overall I liked it and found it very thought provoking.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed hearing this book. It is a bit different but the science,politics and international flavor was very apt for our times.
    • 5/5
      All aspects of a great read made this book enjoyable. I listened all night and now I have to go to work. I'll be exhausted but it was worth it. Nice experience, which is why I read...
    • 4/5
      The novel was a bit heavy on the science but overall was really good.
    • 4/5
      Well-written, but naive in places (stout promise given to develop a life-saving drug in a brief time period, e.g.).

      Excessively preachy and repetitive. I prefer a writer demonstrate their message through actions and characters instead of endless explanations, and after a while I heard myself muttering, "Yeah, yeah, I GET it!"

      Promising author once he gets the lectures out of his system.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      One of the best books I've ever read. I actually got chills numerous times. What an exciting, upsetting, horrifying and uplifting look at the human condition.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      a bit abstract concept but a good pastime. creative. well developed characters
    • 3/5
      The reader does a great job and greatly enhances the audiobook's appeal. The story is well written, decent dialogue and action sequences, original premise and story line, characters not so much. But, it doesn't take long before the reader realizes the whole thing is a progressive pacifist manifesto against the second Bush administration, total turn off. Don't like political views injected into my entertainment.
    • 5/5
      AMAZING!!!! It touches on so many topics... Sci-Fi, Human Condition, Politics, and pretty much everything I love... author pretty much nailed it. I hope to one day shake the hand of Joe.

      ATTN JOE: If you ever happen to read this review (highly unlikely but I'm giving it a shot). You may find me on instagram @Tripp_Art or www.TrippArt.com. I'd like to offer you a portrait painting to show my appreciation. My works collected my many celebrities and I've been featured on multiple TV show's for a start. Though more importantly from one artist to another thank you for your ingenious & highly creative mind.....

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      this was an excellent book. well written and very interesting plot. Thanks to the author.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book! I love thrillers, and I love sci-fi, so this book was perfect for me. It's full of suspense and kept me interested and wanting to know more. I couldn't stop listening! All the way through, I was rooting for the Yeager, Akili, and the other good people in this book until the end.
    • 2/5
      “When human evolution occurs, we will soon vanish from the face of the earth. We will suffer the same fate that befell Peking man and the Neanderthals.”I really tried hard to like this but I could never really get all that interested in this book. It felt far too long and I was far too bored by it. The characters were all underdeveloped and that is why I never really cared about any of them. There was a ton of science in this book and it tended to become technical and boring like this passage:The extraction procedure isolated the nonpolar organic materials of the reaction mixture into a nonpolar organic solvent, leaving behind the unwanted polar constituents in a polar water phase.How do you expect me to stay interested in the story, let alone awake, while reading that? There was some action in this book that I found pretty exciting but that just couldn't make up for the rest of the book. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the galley.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Jonathan Yeager has just finished a tour working for a private defence contractor, protecting VIPs visiting Baghdad - in plainer terms, a mercenary - when he is recruited for a secret mission in Africa. Operation Guardian is to seek out and kill a group who may be infected by a deadly virus but its members are also given the strange instruction to kill on sight a “living creature you’ve never seen before,” a creature which becomes immediately clear is the operation’s real target.Kento Koga is a pharmaceutical research worker whose father, a virologist, has just died. He receives an email from his dead father asking him to look in a certain book and not to tell anyone. In there he finds an ATM card and a memo informing him about a hidden laptop of which he is never to relinquish control, an address to go to and to expect all his communications to be monitored. The building contains equipment for carrying out Organic Chemistry reactions and he is tasked with researching and synthesising an agonist for a mutant form of the protein GPR769,l to be completed within one month. Unfortunately the prologue, which describes a meeting in the White House, dissipates any sense of mystery about the reasons for Operation Guardian as it reveals the existence of a new life form (an evolved human, or more precisely a Pygmy born into the Kanga band of Mbuti.) This may lead to the extinction of the human race and of course is seen as a threat to the US. The President here is named as Gregor S Burns but reads as an extremely thinly disguised version of George W Bush, as he ordered an invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and declared victory before the war was won. The US security apparatus is also concerned about leaks to human rights organisations concerning extraordinary rendition (a procedure which Takano feels the need to explain to us at length.) A secondary purpose of Operation Guardian is to kill the leaker, Warren Garrett, one of its members, who wishes to intimidate President Burns into stopping rendition/torture by revealing the evidence to threaten him with a war crimes tribunal. We all know this could never really happen and like the text’s attempts to soften Yeager and the other members of the operation is rather limp. These are killers after all. And the relationship between the two strands? Yeager’s son Justin suffers from pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis, or PAECS, which is the fatal disease caused by mutant GPR769. There are occasional passages from other points of view which are only visited the once.Takano has characters hark on violence’s inevitability. “We project our true colours onto our enemies, fear them, and attack them. And in using violence against others, the nation and religion are the support systems that pardon our actions.” Maybe so; but, “‘War is just another form of cannibalism. Humans use their intelligence to try to hide their instinct for cannibalism,’” Really? Again, “‘Good deeds are seen as virtuous precisely because they run counter to human nature,’” which is definitely arguable. The point is in any case somewhat undermined by Koga’s determination to succeed and the members of Operation Guardian ending up protecting the creature - a three-year old named Akili.The descriptions of the mechanics involved in undertaking Organic Chemistry are also not convincing. And a month to synthesise a chemical’s agonist from scratch - even with the help of an advanced computer programme - is more than a tall order. The violent scenes, in addition to being curiously perfunctory, read more like reportage at a remove. Then there is the skating over of the ethics of administering an untested drug (actually two drugs; an allosteric agent is also required) on human patients.Extinction is an uneasy mix of military fiction and thriller. A work of pure SF would surely focus more on the evolved human. Granted, Akili has an undeveloped pharynx and is therefore incapable of speech (though can two-finger type.) He can factorise large numbers into their prime components so compromising the security of encrypted data and communication between computers but otherwise his agency is limited. Not so Koga’s mysterious telephonic prompter, a further link between the two main narratives. Whether it is a consequence of translation is difficult to determine but the writing is plodding. It is also full of redundancies and meanderings of various sorts such as a disquisition on the lack of remuneration scientists receive for their endeavours. The slightest action is described, information dumping is intrusive, often ad hoc and frequently unnecessary. One phrase read, “Yeager, who’d had reconnoitring training.” Haven’t all soldiers? As SF, Extinction is nugatory. Action thriller devotees may wish to take a look.
    • 5/5
      Rasanter Roman, der unglaublich fesselt und spannend ist. Es kommen zwar zahlreiche wissenschaftliche Beschreibungen vor, aber das große Ganze ist hervorragend geschrieben. Es läßt einen nicht los !