Between Petrarch and Shakespeare, a civilization remade itself. It recovered the lost learning of antiquity, learned to paint the world as the eye truly sees it, printed the book by the thousand, mapped a globe, dissected a body, imagined the earth in motion around the sun, and asked, with a new and dangerous boldness, what a human being might become.This is the whole sweep of the Renaissance in a single volume: the wealthy, quarrelsome city-states of Italy and the Black Death that...

On a rocky, sea-fractured peninsula at the edge of the ancient world, a small and quarrelsome people invented an astonishing share of the things we still live by: democracy and political theory, philosophy and science, history and the theatre, the Olympic Games and the very idea that the human mind, freely exercised, can understand the world.This is the whole sweep of ancient Greece in a single volume: the lost palaces of Minoan Crete and Mycenae; the dark age and the rebirth of th...

Out of the felt tents of the Mongolian steppe, in a single lifetime, one man forged the largest contiguous empire in the history of the world. Abandoned as a boy to starve in the snow, betrayed by his own clan, the orphan Temujin clawed his way to mastery of the warring tribes of the grass — and then turned the horse-archers of the steppe into a war machine that shattered the walls of China, drowned the cities of Central Asia, and rode to the gates of Europe and the heart of Islam....

In the space of six years, under the pressure of the most terrible war in history, a handful of refugee physicists and an army of secret workers turned an abstract discovery about the nucleus of the atom into a weapon that could destroy a city in an instant — and changed the terms of human existence forever.This is the whole sweep of the Manhattan Project in a single volume: the discovery of fission in a Berlin laboratory on the eve of war; the refugees who warned a reluctant Ameri...

In the space of ten years, a great kingdom took itself apart and tried to build something entirely new out of an idea — that legitimate power flows up from the people, not down from God and a king. The French Revolution was the hinge of the modern world, and it carried, fully formed from the first, both the glory and the horror of the age it began.This is the whole sweep of the Revolution in a single volume: the bankrupt Old Regime and the price of bread; the storming of the Bastil...

For three centuries, from the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 to the slaughter at Stamford Bridge in 1066, a scattering of seafaring peoples from the cold rim of northern Europe did something out of all proportion to their numbers. In their swift, beautiful longships they raided and traded and settled across a quarter of the world — from the monasteries of Ireland to the markets of Baghdad, from the fjords of Norway to the shores of North America five centuries before Columbus — and they left t...

In the space of about two years, between the spring of 1918 and the spring of 1920, a single strain of influenza circled the entire inhabited world. It infected perhaps five hundred million people — one in every three human beings then alive — and it killed somewhere between twenty-five and fifty million of them, possibly far more. More died than in all four years of the First World War that framed it. And then, almost unbelievably, the world chose very nearly to forget.This is the...

On the night of October 4, 1957, a Soviet rocket lifted a polished metal sphere into orbit, and the beep of Sputnik told the world that the space age had begun — and that the Cold War had a new front, in the sky. In barely a dozen years, two superpowers would carry human beings off the Earth for the first time and set their boots upon the Moon.This is the whole sweep, told in a single volume and from both sides: the lonely dreamers and the slave-built V-2 that gave both nations the...

On a bright October morning in 1929, the bull market that had carried America through a decade of dazzling prosperity began to fall, and it did not stop. Within three years a third of the nation's banks had vanished, factories stood silent, and shantytowns of the jobless — bitterly named after the president — spread across the land. The collapse circled the globe, toppling currencies, governments, and, in Germany, the fragile republic that stood between Adolf Hitler and power.This ...

For nearly half a century, two superpowers and the coalitions they led confronted each other across a divided Europe and a contested globe, armed with weapons capable of ending civilization — and the astonishing fact of the age is that the war everyone feared never came.This is the whole sweep, told in a single volume: the breakdown of the wartime alliance and the descent of the Iron Curtain; the Berlin Blockade, Korea, and the nuclear arms race; the thirteen days of the Cuban Miss...

In 1950 a British mathematician asked a simple, dangerous question: can machines think? Three-quarters of a century later, machines write, draw, converse, and reason — and the world is scrambling to understand what it has built. The Intelligence Engine tells the whole story of artificial intelligence, from a wartime code-breaker's thought experiment to the generative systems now in a billion hands.E.B Cohen traces the full arc: the ancient dream of automata and the birth of the fie...

For three thousand years — longer than the span from Cleopatra to today — a single civilization endured on the banks of the Nile, raising the greatest stone monuments the world had ever seen and leaving behind a vision of eternity that still grips the imagination. Kingdom of the Nile tells the whole story of ancient Egypt, from the first farmers of the river valley to the death of the last pharaoh.E.B Cohen traces the full arc: the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Narmer;...