From the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses, an eye-opening road trip through 5,500 years of humans on the go, revealing how transportation inevitably shapes civilization.Hailed for their "colorful, smooth, and wonderfully engaging" writing (Smithsonian), Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted readers and cemented his reputation as one of our leading interpreters of technologies past and present. N...

New York Times Bestseller * The inspiration for the TV series starring Dan Aykroyd“There aren't many books this entertaining that also provide a cogent crash course in ancient, classical and modern history.” -Los Angeles TimesBeer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola: In Tom Standage's deft, innovative account of world history, these six beverages turn out to be much more than just ways to quench thi...

The bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses charts an enlightening history of humanity through the foods we eat.Throughout history, food has done more than simply provide sustenance. It has acted as a tool of social transformation, political organization, geopolitical competition, industrial development, military conflict and economic expansion. An Edible History of Humanity is an account of how food has helped to shape and trans...

The more we ponder, the odder the world can seem.How do footballers get their shirt numbers?Why does having daughters make couples more likely to divorce?How do you move a horse from one country to another?What counts as a journey into space?The keen minds at The Economist contemplate all these questions and more in their quest for the globe's most extraordinary quandaries and conund...

Calling all problem-solvers drawn to the smart, quirky and counter-intuitive.Challenge yourself to join the dots, get your facts straight and sort the genuine from the fake in this puzzle book inspired by the sharpest brains at The Economist.Do stocks with catchy names outperform the market? Is Bohemian Rhapsody really longer than Hey Jude? And can geopolitics affect the popularity of dog breeds? Packed with hidden connections and...

A new edition of the first book by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first "Internet," which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first.The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the ei...

The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.

Throughout human history, certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period.A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century through the lens of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Beer was first made i...

Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted fans and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Now, he returns with a provocative account of an overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel—a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention—Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, re...

Papyrus rolls and Twitter have much in common, as each was their generation's signature means of "instant" communication. Indeed, as Tom Standage reveals in his scintillating new book, social media is anything but a new phenomenon.From the papyrus letters that Roman statesmen used to exchange news across the Empire to the advent of hand-printed tracts of the Reformation to the pamphlets that spread propaganda during the American and French revolutions, Standage chronicles the incre...

The more we ponder, the odder the world can seem.How do footballers get their shirt numbers?Why does having daughters make couples more likely to divorce?How do you move a horse from one country to another?What counts as a journey into space?The keen minds at the Economist contemplate all these questions and more in their quest for the globe's most extraordinary quandaries a...