History

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh.

From one of tech’s boldest thinkers and his longtime deputy and advisor, a sweeping indictment of Silicon Valley, showing how the West has slid into a culture of complacency, even as we enter a new era of mounting global threats.

Science writer Adam Becker investigates how Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, emergent AI tyrants, and limitless growth—pervert public discourse and distract us from real social problems.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster, based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research—a riveting history that flows like a thriller.

John Strausbaugh takes us behind the Iron Curtain in this witty, deeply researched history of the surprisingly ramshackle Soviet space program, and how its success was more spin than science....

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly....

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide....

El esperado nuevo libro de Yuval Noah Harari, uno de los pensadores más innovadores, interesantes y clarividentes de la actualidad, y autor de Sapiens, el fenómeno literario global que ha cautivado a millones de lectores.

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

The binge-worthy first Western biography of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, financial disruptor and personification of the 21st century’s addiction to instant wealth, Gambling Man is an unforgettable character study and alarming true story of twenty-first-century commerce.

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with....

Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism....

From the New York Times-bestselling author comes a new volume on the history of human ingenuity—and its attendant breakthroughs and busts....

A celebrated commentator on the human consequences of technology, Nicholas Carr reorients the conversation around modern communication, challenging some of our most cherished beliefs about self-expression, free speech, and media democratization.

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann....

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and solving an extraordinary range of problems....

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson led the design of such crucial aircraft as the P-38 and Constellation, but he will be more remembered for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. His extraordinary leadership of the Lockheed "Skunk Works" cemented his reputation....

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover....

The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today (Naomi Klein)....

Throughout history, technological change — whether it takes the form of agricultural improvements in the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, or today’s artificial intelligence — has been viewed as a main driver of prosperity, working in the public interest.

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....

La biografía definitiva de Steve Jobs, el fundador de Apple, escrita con su colaboración....

The mastermind behind Apple sheds his low profile and steps forward to tell his story for the first time....

Ignition! is the story of the Cold War era search for a rocket propellant that could be trusted to take man into space. A favorite of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, listeners will want to tune into this "really good book on rocket[s]," available for the first time in audio....