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James Gleick, the author of the bestsellers Chaos and Genius , brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanished as soon as it was born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood “talking drums” of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He 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 poet’s brilliant and doomed daughter, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

And then the information age comes upon us. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And they sometimes feel they are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. It will transform readers’ view of its subject.

James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.

Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.

Bibliography:

1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)

1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)

1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)

1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)

2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)

2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)

2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)

2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )

Prologue 3
1 Drums That Talk 13
2 The Persistence of the Word 28
3 Two Wordbooks 51
4 To Throw the Powers of Thought into Wheel-Work 78
5 A Nervous System for the Earth 125
6 New Wires, New Logic 168
7 Information Theory 204
8 The Informational Turn 233
9 Entropy and Its Demons 269
10 Life's Own Code 287
11 Into the Meme Pool 310
12 The Sense of Randomness 324
13 Information Is Physical 355
14 After the Flood 373
15 New News Every Day 398
Epilogue 413
Acknowledgments 427
Notes 429
Bibliography 477
Index 505
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