歴史

2012 Audie Award Finalist for Audiobook of the Year Walter Isaacson’s “enthralling” (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family...

From the New York Times-bestselling author, a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts. The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a...

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried 58 shipping containers from Newark to Houston....

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph...

Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, a 20-story-high concrete structure just fifty miles north of Los Angeles, suddenly collapsed, releasing a devastating flood that roared 54 miles to the Pacific Ocean, destroying everything in its path. It was a horrific catastrophe...

2015 Audie Award Finalist for Nonfiction Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a “riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving” (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the...

Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson overturn conventional wisdom about how economies work--revealing the untold story of who wins and who loses the rewards of prosperity--in a work that fundamentally transforms how we look at and understand the world...

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “A cri de coeur that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies.”—The Wall Street Journal From the Palantir co-founder, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of...

The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software or the story of the Internet or the story of "smart" handheld devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of the invention and development of...

In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology....

The former editor of the Financial Times delivers, “with literary flair and stunning revelations” (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize winner), the unputdownable first Western biography of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, financial disruptor and personification of the 21st century’s addiction to instant...

Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers - those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks....

Packed with never-before-heard stories and timeless wisdom on the art of computer science, the business of technology, and the durable power of relationships, The Bleeding Edge provides a rare history of how and why the internet looks and feels the way it does today....

How Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us...

The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock for a legendary music festival. For Neil M. Maher, the conjunction of these two era-defining events is not entirely coincidental. With its lavishly funded mandate to send a man to the...

A global tour of energy--the builder of human civilization and also its greatest threat. Energy is humanity's single most important resource. In fact, as energy expert Michael E. Webber argues in Power Trip, the story of how societies rise can be told largely as the story of how they manage...

This 50th anniversary edition of Men, Machines, and Modern Times, though ultimately concerned with a positive alternative to an Orwellian 1984, offers an entertaining series of historical accounts taken from the 19th century to highlight a main theme: the nature of technological change, the...

Discover the invisible infrastructure reshaping the world’s largest asset class. For over a century, commercial real estate operated on an analog playbook. Deals were won through local monopolies, personal Rolodexes, and a "ledger-in-head" mentality.

How did a simple design error cause one of the great disasters of the 1980s - the collapse of the walkways at the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel? What made the graceful and innovative Tacoma Narrows Bridge twist apart in a mild wind in 1940? How did an oversized waterlily inspire the...

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen US aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing...