Isaacson’s
balanced and compelling portrait of one of the richest people on earth reveals
a man on a self-described quest to save human consciousness from annihilation.
His corporate ventures, from Tesla to SpaceX to OpenAI, are all infused with this
monomaniacal design, and Isaacson convincingly depicts Musk’s engineering
brilliance as key to the success of each of them (though the jury is still out
on Twitter, an impulse purchase for which he seems to have serious buyer’s
remorse).
At the same time, self-anointed messiahs seldom make good managers,
friends, or spouses, and Musk leaves a broad swath of emotional destruction on
his journey to the stars. Wildly combining traits of Thomas Edison, Citizen
Kane, and Dr. Manhattan, Isaacson’s portrayal of Elon Musk is insightful and
absolutely gripping.
From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
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. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars…
Stephen Markley’s massive near-future climate
apocalypse novel The Deluge features a sprawling Balzacian cast and an
acknowledged debt to Stephen King’s The Stand.
The narrative proceeds, year
by painful year, to detail the climatic, political, and social catastrophe
that’s just around the corner.
The benefit of Markley’s painstaking approach is
that the world he builds looks depressingly like our own: no Mad Max/Planet of
the Apes craziness. Just a bunch of highly realistic political and corporate
skullduggery that inches us closer and closer to apocalypse.
The characters are
largely idealists, including a neurodiverse policy wonk who, entirely
straight-faced, proposes that the nation’s billion domestic pets be converted
to a ready source of protein. I found myself continuing to wonder about a lot
after finishing The Deluge, a sign of a worthwhile read.
"This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting." -Stephen King
From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.
In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become…
Wulf brings eighteenth-century Enlightenment science, philosophy, and
thought to life like no other contemporary writer.
Chasing Venus is the amazing story of the
first global scientific collaboration: the expeditions to measure the transit
of Venus across the face of the sun in 1761 and 1769.
The result, if achieved,
would enable scientists, for the first time, to calculate the distance from the
Earth to the sun. The teams of astronomers and surveyors that fanned out across
Europe, North America, and Asia to take the necessary measurements faced
adversity ranging from wars and hostile locals to equipment failures and bad
weather. Yet, against the odds, they succeeded, ushering in a new era in
astronomy and scientific cooperation.
The author of the highly acclaimed Founding Gardeners now gives us an enlightening chronicle of the first truly international scientific endeavor—the eighteenth-century quest to observe the transit of Venus and measure the solar system. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the earth and the sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and…
The Genome Defense
is a gripping, behind-the-scenes account of the landmark legal battle in which
the ACLU ended the practice of patenting human genes in America.
Through interviews with more than a hundred
lawyers, activists, scientists, doctors, and patients, Contreras brings to life
the science, law, and politics behind this epic contest between a group of civil
rights advocates and the powerful biotech industry.
Patent law is often viewed as a dense,
hyper-technical field that is understood only by a few specialist lawyers with
scientific or engineering degrees. But
patents, and the companies that own them, affect our everyday lives -- they
determine what products we can buy, how much they cost, and whether they are
likely to improve in the future.
