Summary

Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books 2012.

James Gleick, the author of the bestsellers 'Chaos' and 'Genius', brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality - the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

We live in the information age. But every era of history has had its own information revolution: the invention of writing, the composition of dictionaries, the creation of the charts that made navigation possible, the discovery of the electronic signal, the cracking of the genetic code.

In 'The Information' James Gleick tells the story of how human beings use, transmit and keep what they know. From African talking drums to Wikipedia, from Morse code to the 'bit', it is a fascinating account of the modern age's defining idea and a brilliant exploration of how information has revolutionised our lives.