History

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades....

From a New York Times bestselling author and investigative journalist comes The Social Network for the video game industry: a riveting examination of Blizzard Entertainment's rise and shocking downfall—"A fast paced thrill ride, perfect for anyone who has ever played a video game" (Ben...

Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year 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) The most urgent story in modern tech begins...

Conquering the Electron offers listeners a true and engaging history of the world of electronics, beginning with the discoveries of static electricity and magnetism and ending with the creation of the smartphone and the iPad....

Walkley Award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer exposes the next frontier of feminism through the lens of artificial intelligence. Man-Made aims to open readers’ eyes to a transformative technological shift in society and give them the tools to make positive change. Winner, 2023 Australian...

This book conveys every aspect of the Apollo missions with breathtaking immediacy and stunning detail....

A unique study of the engineering and tools used to create Egyptian monuments Presents a stone-by-stone analysis of key Egyptian monuments, including the statues of Ramses II and the tunnels of the Serapeum Reveals that highly refined tools and mega-machines were used in ancient Egypt...

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried 58 shipping containers from Newark to Houston....

Ignition! is the inside story of the Cold War era search for a rocket propellant which 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. Ignition!...

On a moonless night in 1991, a dozen US aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing....

On a cold January morning in 1986, NASA launched the Space Shuttle Challenger, despite warnings against doing so by many individuals. The fiery destruction of Challenger on live television moments after launch remains an indelible image in the nation's collective memory....

Simply Electrifying brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world....

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it....

Before smartphones, back even before the Internet and personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system....

The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software or the story of the Internet or the story of "smart" handheld devices....

Brought to you by Penguin. Those who understand how AI thinks are about to win big. We are used to thinking of computers as being a step up from calculators - very good at storing information, and maybe even at playing a logical game like chess. But up to now they haven't been able to think in...

Bitcoin was promised to be a liberating technology, a free market alternative to state-controlled money. But that promise was broken after a small group of insiders took over the project and fundamentally changed Bitcoin's design.

Harvard Medical School psychologist and Huffington Post blogger Craig Malkin addresses the "narcissism epidemic," by illuminating the spectrum of narcissism, identifying ways to control the trait, and explaining how too little of it may be a bad thing. "What is narcissism?" is one of the fastest...

The #1 New York Times bestseller from David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize—the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly—Wilbur and Orville Wright. On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two...

Yorkshire is 'a continent unto itself', a region where mountain, plain, coast, downs, fen and heath lie close. By weaving history, family stories, travelogue and ecology, Richard Morris reveals how Yorkshire took shape as a landscape and in literature, legend and popular regard. The result is a...

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

A riveting account of the birth and remarkable evolution of the most important development in entertainment since television, Replay is the ultimate history of video games....

A top cybersecurity journalist tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare—one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb. “Immensely enjoyable...

Tracy Kidder's "riveting" (Washington Post) story of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry. Computers have changed since...

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.