The Information

May 2, 2011
Overwhelmed as we are with today's unceasing gush of informationâsome essential, some useless, and much falling into the broad middle of the spectrumâa study of how we got here and the innovators who played a part in creating the dazzling web of contemporary communications could not be more timely. Gleick's survey of pioneers of information, from Alan Turing to Claude Shannon, follows the many-layered strands forming the information superhighway. Rob Shapiro, slightly nasal, reads in measured fashion, pausing luxuriously between sentences and paragraphs to allow Gleick's own gush of information to sink in. Shapiro's stateliness makes for an artful contrast with Gleick's study of go-go modernity; listening to the audiobook manages to not add to the feeling of being overwhelmed. A Pantheon hardcover.

Starred review from February 21, 2011
In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannon's neologism profoundly changed our view of the world; his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannon's story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. With his brilliant ability to synthesize mounds of details and to tell rich stories, Gleick leads us on a journey from one form of communicating information to another, beginning with African tribes' use of drums and including along the way scientists like Samuel B. Morse, who invented the telegraph; Norbert Wiener, who developed cybernetics; and Ada Byron, the great Romantic poet's daughter, who collaborated with Charles Babbage in developing the first mechanical computer. Gleick's exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.

January 1, 2011

Think your inbox is jammed now, your attention span overtaxed? It's only the beginning, writes pop-science writer Gleick (Isaac Newton, 2003, etc.) in this tour of information and the theory that goes along with it.

It has been a long progression toward the infoglut of today. The author chooses as a logical if unanticipated starting point the talking drums of Africa, an information technology that delivers a satisfying amount of signal in all the noise. From those drums to Morse code, and indeed to binary signaling, is a pretty short hop—and one that Gleick takes, writing along the way about such things as how Samuel Morse and his partner decided which letters were the most used in English, and therefore merited the shortest sequences of dot and dash. The author tours through the earliest information technologies—the intaglio scratches of stone and bone on prehistoric caves, the emergent ideographs of the first Chinese scripts and so on—before getting into the meatier mathematics of more recent times, which led Charles Babbage, say, to ponder the workings of the first oh-so-clunky computers. As Gleick writes, Babbage surrounded himself with fellow science nerds who agreed to write and send scientific papers to one another every six months, though if a member were delayed by a year, "it shall be taken for granted that his relatives had shut him up as insane." The discussion becomes more complex with the intersection of modern physics. In the emergence of Claude Shannon and Alan Turing's first stirrings of modern information theory, the author's skills as an interpreter of science shine. None of his discussion will be news to readers of Tim Wu's exemplary The Master Switch (2010) or of the old Coevolution Quarterly, but Gleick covers the ground in a way that no other book quite manages to do.

Gleick loves the layered detail, which might cause some to sigh, "TMI." But for completist cybergeeks and infojunkies, the book delivers a solid summary of a dense, complex subject.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2011

We sometimes forget that our information technologies and our desire and ability to communicate have long and complicated histories. Gleick, best-selling author of Chaos: Making a New Science and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, acknowledges this by exploring the history of information, in all its modern ambiguity, and covering ideas, people, and technologies involved in its development. Gleick discusses African talking drums, information theory and its contributions to physics and biology, cryptography, alphabets and scripts, dictionaries, telegraphs, and more. Although accessible and enjoyable, from chapter to chapter the book sometimes feels loose and unstructured, as the author jumps too quickly from one subject to another. Too often he emphasizes biographical information about historical individuals at the expense of a coherent historical account. VERDICT Despite the disjointed narrative, this is recommended for general readers interested in the history of information technology and enamored of the information age who wonder what it means to characterize our era as such.--Jonathan Bodnar, Georgia Inst. of Technology Lib. & Information Ctr., Atlanta

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2011
Acutely sensitive to the human drama involved in pioneering thought and discovery, best-selling science and technology writer Gleick has developed an epic sense of humankinds quest for mastery of information, the vital principle. In this tour de force, the first book to fully chronicle the story of information and how it has transformed human thought and life, Gleick follows the path from the ingenious codes used by African drummers to the invention of the alphabet and writing, which made possible deep analysis and logic, the bedrock for information theory. As Gleick elucidates the roles cryptography, libraries, quantum physics, and molecular biology play in information science and tracks the cresting waves that rapidly delivered the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computer, and Internet, he vividly profiles a compelling cast of geniuses. Theres prescient Charles Babbage and witty, surpassingly gifted Ada Byron King, logic master George Boole, and the too-little-known Claude Shannon, whose elegant solutions include designating the bit as the smallest possibly quantity of information. Gleick is equally illuminating in his explications of such forces key to information as uncertainty, entropy, memes, and randomness. This is intellectual history of tremendous verve, insight, and significance. Unfailingly spirited, often poetic, Gleick recharges our astonishment over the complexity and resonance of the digital sphere and ponders our hunger for connectedness. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Destined to be a science classic, best-seller Gleicks dynamic history of information will be one of the biggest nonfiction books of the year.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)