The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet

The Future Is Now: Solving the Climate Crisis with Today's Technologies

Bob McDonald · 303 pages

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond · 592 pages

"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

Michio Kaku · 389 pages

Free ebook link: brautech.co.za/info/FuturePhysics.pdf

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

Thomas L. Friedman · 528 pages

Friedman discusses how the key to understanding the 21st century is understanding that the planet's three largest forces -- Moore's law (technology), the market (globalization) and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loos) -- are accelerating all at once. And these accelerations are transforming the five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community. Friedman p

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Elizabeth Kolbert · 336 pages

From the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a powerful and important work about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a compelling account of the mass extinction unfolding before our eyes.

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back

Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum · 400 pages

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges -- globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation's chronic deficits, and its patt

The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

Paul Roberts · 400 pages

Petroleum is now so deeply entrenched in our economy, our politics, and our personal expectations that even modest efforts to phase it out are fought tooth and nail by the most powerful forces in the world: companies and governments that depend on oil revenues; the developing nations that see oil as the only means to industrial success; and a Western middle class that refuses to modify its energy-

Green Illusions

Ozzie Zehner · 437 pages

"We don't have an energy crisis. We have a consumption crisis. And this book, which takes aim at cherished assumptions regarding energy, offers refreshingly straight talk about what's wrong with the way we think and talk about the problem. Though we generally believe we can solve environmental problems with more energy--more solar cells, wind turbines, and biofuels--alternative technologies come w

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

Tim Flannery · 357 pages

"The Weather Makers is both an urgent warning and a call to arms, outlining the history of climate change, how it will unfold over the next century, and what we can do to prevent a cataclysmic future. Originally somewhat of a global-warming skeptic, Tim Flannery spent several years researching the topic and offers a connect-the-dots approach for a reading public that has received patchy and mislea

The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World

Paul Gilding · 292 pages

According to the author, the Great Disruption started in 2008, with spiking food and oil prices and dramatic ecological changes, such as the melting ice caps. It is not simply about fossil fuels and carbon footprints. The author claims we have come to the end of Economic Growth, Version 1.0, a world economy based on consumption and waste, where we lived beyond the means of our planet's ecosystems

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

Walter Isaacson · 560 pages

A scientific biography of Jennifer Doudna, a founder and co-developer of the CRISPR gene-editing mechanism, and an examination of what happened after CRISPR hit the marketplace.

Imagine: How Creativity Works

Jonah Lehrer · 279 pages

"Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output? From the best-selling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative 'types, ' Jonah Lehrer demonstrates t

Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

Carl Sagan · 296 pages

In this book, his last, Carl Sagan shows once again his extraordinary ability to interpret the mysteries of life and the majesty of the universe for the general reader. In Billions and Billions Sagan applies what we know about science, mathematics, and space to everyday life as well as to the exploration of many essential questions concerning the environment and our future. Ranging far and wide i

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

Steven Johnson · 288 pages

"Emergence is what happens when an interconnected system of relatively simple elements self-organizes to form more intelligent, more adaptive higher-level behavior. It's a bottom-up model, rather than being engineered by a general or a master planner; emergence begins at the ground level. Systems that at first glance seem vastly different - ant colonies, human brains, cities, immune systems - all

Tomorrowland: Our Staggering Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact

Steven Kotler · 284 pages

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman · 499 pages

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, th

Elon Musk: Inventing the Future

Ashlee Vance · 396 pages

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs -- a real-life Tony Stark -- and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new "makers." Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned

Think Like a Freak

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner · 284 pages

"In their previous book, Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner showed that applying counter-intuitive approaches to everyday problems can bear surprising results. Now, they turn your brain inside-out, teaching you how to think like a freak. The authors analyze the decisions we make, the plans we create and the morals we choose, and they show how their insights can be applied to daily life to make smarte

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 546 pages

"The acclaimed author of the influential bestseller The Black Swan, Nicholas Nassim Taleb takes a next big step with a deceptively simple concept: the "antifragile." Like the Greek hydra that grows two heads for each one it loses, people, systems, and institutions that are antifragile not only withstand shocks, they benefit from them. In a modern world dominated by chaos and uncertainty, Antifragi

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

Matt Ridley · 364 pages

"The New York Times bestselling author of The Rational Optimist and Genome returns with a fascinating, brilliant argument for evolution that definitively dispels a dangerous, widespread myth: that we can command and control our world.The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch--the endless fascination human beings have for design rather than evolution, f

Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

Arthur C. Clarke · 256 pages

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time

Dava Sobel · 192 pages

The dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of one man's forty-year obsession to find a solution to the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day--"the longitude problem." Anyone alive in the eighteenth century would have known that "the longitude problem" was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day-and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailo

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Geoffrey West · 479 pages

"From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleadi

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Michael Pollan · 244 pages

What to eat, what not to eat, and how to think about health: a manifesto for our times"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, the well-considered answers he provides to the que