The Information

A History, a Theory, a Flood

By: James Gleick

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins

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

Critic reviews

"Accessible and engrossing." ( Library Journal)

This is my book of the decade!

Where does The Information rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This is among the top three (of several hundred).

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Information?

The talking drums stuck with me. I have told that story over and over.

Mandatory

Mandatory reading for the modern citizen of this interconnected highly networked ever-expanding world of ours. Plus it’s a fun read :)

Wonderful

Fascinating and provocatIve, and enhanced by a narrator who clearly understands what he's reading, and its implications.

An essential read for today's knowledge worker.

Would you listen to The Information again? Why?

Yes. I found the content and the narration very good. Given the massive scope and content in this book, I was hooked and the narration was something I felt made it easy to listen to for long periods of time. Listening to the book again is needed to get the timeline of key events and people into order. I think IT workers and any knowledge workers would find this book interesting in understanding the history of information and where information management is going.

What did you like best about this story?

The historical characters are brought to life in this book. Even though learning about 'information' may sound boring, this book made it really interesting with all its human stories and conflicts.

Deeper than Necessary but Interesting

This book is a liberal artists dream in that it leaves no stone unturned It is more like a fine wine to be savored than a source of quick ideas. People in a hurry for a.payoff may get frustrated.

Expected a bit more

Wanted some deeper insights rather than history, and mispronunciation of some names were frustrating.

Information in Historical Context

James Gleick in “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” seeks to place information in historical context. To accomplish that he opens the book by discussing the advent of drumming, signals, telegraph, telephone and the computer. A most interesting section contains an explanation of how Babbage invented the first computer and how it worked. In the subsequent portion he relates how information theorists worked on the coding, decoding, and re-coding of information. The final chapters link such as DNA , and quantum mechanics to information. It is this last portion of the book that was the most thought provoking for me. This book is wonderful as history, stimulating as philosophy, and a fine introduction to theoretical aspects of the topic. The reading of Rob Shapiro is excellent.

Changed how I live and work

No other book in recent memory has had such an impact on how I view the world as this one. I really wish that Audible provided some kind of text copy of books you've purchased because I've wanted to go back and reference it many times since I finished it. My only complaint was that I found a few hours of it boring enough to skip over somewhere in the first half.

in the end, it's all information

Fascinating history of information. This book illuminates the enormous amount of information behind everything from the dictionary to the human genome. A good part of the book discussed the data that supports many of the laws of physics...most of which went totally over my head. The narration was terrific, which kept me listening even when I struggled to grasp what was being discussed.

Great, but over-technical at times

Great book, the first few chapters especially were beyond fascinating. At times it could get a tad over-technical for my liking, but it was always fascinating, even when I only understood parts of it.