The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
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The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

James Gleick (Author), Rob Shapiro (Narrator), Random House Audio (Publisher)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,446 ratings
Editors' pick Best Science Fiction & Fantasy
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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.

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  1. Listening Length
    16 hours and 37 minutes
  2. Author
    James Gleick
  3. Narrator
    Rob Shapiro
  4. Audible release date
    March 1, 2011
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Random House Audio
  7. ASIN
    B004Q3NKK4
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
  10. See all details
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Product details

Listening Length 16 hours and 37 minutes
Author James Gleick
Narrator Rob Shapiro
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date March 01, 2011
Publisher Random House Audio
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B004Q3NKK4
Best Sellers Rank #18,392 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#18 in History of Engineering & Technology
#19 in History of Computers & Technology
#22 in Social Sciences Research

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
1,446 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Brian J Boyle
5.0 out of 5 stars A Book That Explains Everything About Who Made What (and How) You Can Read This Review On the Piece of Glass In Front of You
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2016
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Like anything Gleick writes (Chaos, Genius, Faster...) it is a non-fiction work that is hard to put down yet when you've read it you still want more!

This is an EXTREMELY broad and deep subject and its treatment as an ever-accelerating history --from unexpected complexities of African drums,
to the subtleties of Morse's and other codes, to the exponentially growing and overwhelming surfeit of ubiquitous information today-- serves as a
beautifully well-integrated, lucid and comprehensible foundation for the expertly crafted centerpiece: Claude Shannon's Theory of Information.

To tie together the totality of the technology that is most central to the 21st Century with the encoding of the double helix 21 million centuries ago
(an approximation, assuming RNA preceded DNA as Life's Secret Decoder Ring for about half of its history,) could take as many volumes as
Gibbon's, Wells' or Churchill's histories. Yet with the finesse of the ever-so-clever encoding that lets us put all nine of Ludwig's symphonies in
perfect precision on a 100mm-diameter piece of plastic or compress a 1+Gigabit/second 1080i streaming video into the 20 Mbit/s MPEG
transport stream on the Internet, Gleick manages to squeeze it all in and make it as much a "page-turner" as any Tom Clancy technothriller.

Shannon, the nominal intellectual Ulysses of this multifaceted Odyssey, would have celebrated his 100th on April 30 (2016,) but those in
the world of technology impacted by his work (to wit, EVERYTHING) --from Bell Labs, MIT, Boston Museum of Science and the IEEE and ACM
technical societies have planned to do it for him at dozens of universities and sites around the world. (And, perhaps, beyond: Voyagers I & II,
which have now left the Solar System, directly employ his 1948 "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" to let their electronic whispers
"phone home" over eight billion miles, the same mathematics of signals that lets us Skype with a friend in Tibet.

In a rare class with Turing and Feynman, according to his widow, Betty, (whom he met at Bell Labs a half century before,) had Alzheimer's not robbed him of his genius by the arrival of the new millennium he did so much to create, "He would have been bemused" by all this Magick,
(i.e., "sufficiently advanced technology.") From the Bells Labs and "Brass Rat" old-timers I've spoken with who knew him, I believe this one quiet man who wrote TWO PhD theses at MIT in 1940 --"A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits" and "An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics"--
would been bemused by AND have loved that this book that fully lives up to its subtitle: "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood..."
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Phil Nova
4.0 out of 5 stars History? Check. Theory? Check! But where's the Flood?
Reviewed in the United States on March 24, 2012
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Other reviewers have already gone into detail regarding the subject of the book, so I won't belabor that here. The author jumps from talking drums to the telegram to Charles Babbage to transistors, and Gleick is so good at drawing connections between these subjects that it never feels disjointed. It's a really masterful demonstration of how to weave biography, science, and history into one satisfying whole. As a reader with a technical background but no knowledge of the subject, I appreciated the level of rigor in the theoretical sections of the book, although I could see how it might alienate non-techie readers. My advice to them is: read this book anyway, and if it gets too dense, just skip ahead. It's too important, and too well-written, to miss entirely.

The book is divided into three sections, and each considers a different question. The "History" section asks: how does the way information is transmitted affect the way we think? One of Gleick's major theses here is that formal logic is a byproduct of written language, and he is very convincing on this point. Another very compelling section was the stuff about early computers, and the story of Babbage and Lady Ada. Gleick has a gift for making scientists relateable, and his enthusiasm for unconventional thinking is contagious.

The "Theory" section spells out Shannon's information theory, and brings some much-needed attention to the work of the most influential scientist you've never heard of. As I've said, this part can be a bit technical, which I appreciated, but if that's not your style, you can skim parts of this section without losing the major points. The description of Turing machines was also a highlight. Gleick's exuberant descriptions give the reader a sense of the excitement that the scientists themselves must have felt as they created these deceptively simple, staggeringly powerful theories.

Then... the "Flood." I'm a huge fan of Gleick's, but he really dropped the ball on this one. Ostensibly the last section of the book deals with the modern problem of data deluge, but it's a disappointment: there's little research or actual information, and plenty of conflicted hand-wringing. It almost seemed like it had been tacked on by another author. To some extent, this is okay -- data deluge isn't really what this book is meant to be about -- but given how big of a part this section plays in the marketing of the book, I would have preferred that Gleick just left it out entirely and shifted his focus to the book's much stronger sections.

The "Flood" section isn't bad, necessarily, just a disappointment compared to the quality and depth of the first two sections. Luckily, it doesn't detract much -- just don't expect more than a cursory look at data deluge from this particular book.

All in all, a very strong popular science book (which could just as reasonably be called a history book). If you're a pop science fan, you're probably familiar with some of the ideas and events described here, but only the very rare reader won't have something new and exciting to discover. It's mostly accessible to non-geeks, too; just plan on skimming the occasional section if you're hopelessly math-averse.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Karl
5.0 out of 5 stars Great gift for CS students!
Reviewed in Germany on September 23, 2023
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It's a really neat historical introduction to informatics and computer science. It doesn't really go into technical details (not a textbook), but outlines the development of some of the more fundamental ideas and lingo. Also just a fun read!
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Marcelo Torres Llamas
5.0 out of 5 stars El mejor libro de los últimos 12 meses
Reviewed in Mexico on March 22, 2019
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El arco narrativo del libro es cronológico, por lo que nos permite ir entendiendo cómo evolucionó el concepto de información, sus usos, sus detractores, sus promotores. Al ser también un tema inacabado creo que el autor acertadamente va cerrando el libro con sus posibles aplicaciones actuales, a nivel tecnología y biología, y deja la puerta abierta a pensar, escribir o reflexionar sobre el significado, como un acompañante natural de la información.
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Douglas Teixeira
5.0 out of 5 stars História + Ciência
Reviewed in Brazil on December 26, 2017
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Este é um dos melhores livros que li este ano, sem dúvida alguma! Acho que o James Gleick é um dos melhores autores da atualidade que escrevem sobre ciência para o público em geral. Nesse livro, o autor conta a história do que hoje chamamos de informação desde os primórdios. Desde os primórdios mesmo! O livro começa contando como tambores são usados em tribos da África para enviar mensagens importantes, conta como o alfabeto foi inventado, como o dicionário foi inventado, como o telégrafo, o telefone, e o computador foram invetados, explica o que é a chamada Teoria da Informação, e explica a evolução do conceito de "informação" até os dias de hoje. É um livro relativamente denso, mas excepcional.
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MVE
5.0 out of 5 stars Estupendo libro.
Reviewed in Spain on November 8, 2018
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Tema trascendental, escrito de forma a la vez rigurosa y muy amena, lleno de humor y erudición no-libresca. Absolutamente recomendable. Una parte importante es muy lenguaje-dependiente. En inglés es estupenda, pero no sé como tolerará la traducción.
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glenelgamanaplanacanalpanamaglenelg
5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
Reviewed in Australia on May 24, 2017
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Need to keep putting it down to think about the implications of what has been written. Enjoyable well written treatment of the state of information theory.
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