Machine History

This gripping military history reveals how one industrial invention transformed global warfare and political authority. Perfect for an educational commute, this thought-provoking narrative shifts the focus from calibers to the human cost of mechanized combat. It explores the factory owners...

In his insightful and provocative work, Lennox explores the biblical text in light of the rapidly exploding world of technology, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI), and warns modern believers of the implications of Jesus’ final earthly message to his followers, as well as a potential link to the end times leader that the Gospel writer John refers to as the Antichrist.

Winner of the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award Named a Best Book of 2025 by The Economist “Framed as a biography of Jensen Huang, the only CEO Nvidia has ever had, the book is also something more interesting and revealing: a window onto the intellectual, cultural, and economic...

The remarkable true story of a lone genius whose quest to unlock the science behind the perfect swing changed golf forever. In 1939, Homer Kelley played golf for the first time and scored 116. Frustrated, he did not play again for six months; when he did he carded a 77. Determined to understand why he was able to shave nearly 40 strokes off his score, Kelley spent three decades of trial and error to unlock the answer and to recapture that one wonderful day when golf was easy and enjoyable.

As lives offline and online merge, it's easy to forget how we got here. Rise of the Machines reclaims the story of cybernetics, a control theory of man and machine. Thomas Rid delivers a portrait of our technology-enraptured era. Springing from mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of myths about the future of machines. This vision radically transformed the postwar world, ushering in sweeping cultural change.

When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash had taken place silently over the previous year, in obscure financial markets where the SEC doesn’t bother to look: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was actually happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking.

For decades, history has considered Tammany Hall, New York's famous political machine, shorthand for the worst of urban politics: graft, crime, and patronage personified by notoriously corrupt characters. Infamous crooks like William "Boss" Tweed dominate traditional histories of Tammany, distorting our understanding of a critical chapter of American political history. In Machine Made, historian and New York City journalist Terry Golway convincingly dismantles these stereotypes.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER How a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human In Against the Machine, “furiously gifted” (The Washington Post) novelist, poet, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth presents a wholly original—and terrifying—account of...

Read by George Newbern "George Newbern provides a convincing, conversational narration of this audiobook about robot intelligence. There's a lot to digest. Much of it deals with speculation as to who will be right: those who believe in AI (artificial intelligence machines that may eventually...

Behind every great revolution is a vision, and behind perhaps the greatest revolution of our time, personal computing, is the vision of J.C.R. Licklider. In a simultaneously compelling personal narrative and comprehensive historical exposition, Waldrop tells the story of the man who not only instigated the work that led to the internet, but also shifted our understanding of what computers were and could be.

This is the complete history of the synthesizer—from electromagnetic experiments in the 1870s to the software and hardware you use today. You'll discover how these instruments evolved from room-sized laboratory equipment to portable analog classics to digital dominance to the software revolution to the analog revival happening right now. Every major instrument, every breakthrough, every paradigm shift that shaped how electronic music gets made. You'll understand why the Minimoog became legendary, how the Prophet-5 changed everything with patch memory, why the DX7 killed analog synthesis ...

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...

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...

The Doomsday Machine is Ellsberg's hair-raising insider's account of the most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization, whose legacy - and renewal under the Obama administration - threatens the very survival of humanity. It is scarcely possible to estimate the true dangers of our present nuclear policies without penetrating the secret realities of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, when Ellsberg had high-level access to them.

Discover the dark, hidden history of the US Navy's WWII morale machine. The popular narrative of World War II is filled with heroic sailors, USO dances, and sanitized Hollywood romances. But behind the victory parades lies a horrific reality that the top brass deliberately buried. Flesh & Saltwater: The Toxic Logistics of WWII Navy Morale by Laurence Blake provides a groundbreaking, unvarnished look at the systemic exploitation that fueled the Allied war effort. From the sprawling, sweat-drenched "Bull Pens" of Honolulu's Hotel Street to the bombed-out rubble of Naples and the segregated ...

Bloomsbury presents Hot Type, written and read by Jeff Jarvis. Hot Type is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg’s movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting...

The first robot to walk the earth was a bronze giant called Talos. This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention, more than 2,500 years ago. In this groundbreaking account of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements - and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines.

In an era of exponentially evolving AI, the most important “code” we must rewrite is our own. It is up to us for love to conquer fear—the only path that leads humanity to an Age of Abundance for All. To navigate the convergence of AI, Quantum Computing, Robotics, and Brain-Computer Interfaces—the Superfecta—we must move beyond the Scarcity Mindset and embrace a new way of being.

From historian and bestselling author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Empire of the Summer Moon comes a “captivating, thoroughly researched” (The New York Times Book Review) aviation history detailing the rise and fall of the world’s largest airship—and the doomed love story between an...

An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people and companies making it happen. How did we build large language models? How do they think, if they think? What will the world look like if we have billions of AIs that are as smart as humans, or even smarter?