Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood - Softcover

James Gleick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007225741 ISBN 13: 9780007225743

Publisher: Fourth Estate (HarperCollins), 2012

Synopsis

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. London, Fourth Estate, 2012. 13 cm x 20 cm. 527 pages. With several illustrations. Original softcover. Excellent condition with only minor signs of external wear. Some underlining by preowner on several pages. Otherwise clean inside with solid binding. Includes the following chapters: Drums That Talk / The Persistence of the Word / Two Wordbooks / To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work / A Nervous System for the Earth / Information Theory / Into the Meme Pool / New News Every Day etc. Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012, the world's leading prize for popular science writing. We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code. In 'The Information' James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the 'bit', it is a fascinating account of the modern age's defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives. (Amazon) James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author and historian of science whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for his writing about complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called 'one of the great science writers of all time'. Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011). Three of his books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists; and The Information was awarded the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award in 2012 and ..

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011: In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But that's just the "History." The "Theory" focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via the media of their times. In the "Flood," Gleick explains genetics as biology's mechanism for informational exchange--Is a chicken just an egg's way of making another egg?--and discusses self-replicating memes (ideas as different as earworms and racism) as information's own evolving meta-life forms. Along the way, readers learn about music and quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an "interesting number," and why "[t]he bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle." What results is a visceral sense of information's contemporary precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physical/symbolic palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate analytical engine. If Borges's "Library of Babel" is literature's iconic cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which "creatures of the information" may just recognize themselves. --Jason Kirk

About the Author:

James Gleick was born in New York in 1954. He worked for ten years as an editor and reporter for The New York Times. He is the bestselling author of Chaos, Genius, Faster, What Just Happened and a biography of Isaac Newton.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate (HarperCollins)
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0007225741
• ISBN 13: 9780007225743
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 526