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  • The Information

  • A History, a Theory, a Flood
  • Written by: James Gleick
  • Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
  • Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (39 ratings)

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The Information cover art

The Information

Written by: James Gleick
Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
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Publisher's Summary

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation 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 vanishes as soon as it is born. 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. 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 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 then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: Aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we 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.

©2011 James Gleick (P)2011 Random House

What the critics say

"Accessible and engrossing." ( Library Journal)

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So, hear me out...

What could be more boring than a whole book about information? At least that's what I thought when I saw it. Nevertheless, because I like the author and narrator and I'm familiar with information theory, I decided to give this book a try and honestly, it's amazing! the history he recounts was all new *ahem* information for me. I found myself truly captivated in most chapters like I was listening to a detective novel expecting the villian to be revealed on the next page. this audiobook garnered the most bookmarks I've ever given any audiobook.

Well done, Mr. Gleick. Well done.

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love love

this was a fundamental shift in thinking about how the universe is best understood. I loved it

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