Posted on March 6, 2012  Comments (2)

James Gleick is a great science writer. I remember first reading his book, Chaos, which I loved. He continues to write engaging and entertaining books on science. His 2011 release The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, is now available in paperback.

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. Gleick provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And now the information age arrives. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

Related: science books – What Dogs Reveal About Evolution – Microcosm by Carl Zimmer – The Last Lecture Book