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The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
Eric Weiner · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorThe Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
Randall E. Stross · 384 pages
Atlas of Cursed Places: A Travel Guide to Dangerous and Frightful Destinations
Olivier Le Carrer · 142 pages
This alluring read includes 40 locations that are rife with disaster, chaos, paranormal activity, and death. The locations gathered here include the dangerous Strait of Messina, home of the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis; the coal town of Jharia, where the ground burns constantly with fire; Kasanka National Park in Zambia, where 8 million migrating bats darken the skies; the Nevada Tri
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon · 304 pages
Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R.
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Marc Levinson · 395 pages
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in t
The Bridge: A Journey Between Orient and Occident
Geert Mak · 155 pages
"Istanbul's Galata Bridge has spanned the Golden Horn since the sixth century AD, connecting the old city with the more Western districts to the north. But the bridge is a city in itself, peopled by merchants and petty thieves, tourists and fishermen, and at the same time a microcosmic reflection of Turkey as the link between Asia and Europe." "Geert Mak introduces us to the woman who sells lotter
Do Not Pass Go
Tim Moore · 346 pages
"Moore is a talented and very funny writer" Daily TelegraphA book that tells the story of London since the thirties through the 28 streets, stations and utililties of the Monopoly board . In the wonderful world of Monopoly it still only cost -50 to buy a house in Islington, you can move around London with the shake of a dice and even park your car for free. In Do Not Pass Go Tim Moore, belying his
The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
Edmund de Waal · 416 pages
"An intimate narrative history of porcelain, structured around five journeys through landscapes where porcelain was dreamed about, fired, refined, collected, and coveted"--
Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest
Douglas Preston · 480 pages
Douglas Preston's Cities of Gold is a riveting account of his journey in the footsteps of Coronado, the legendary 16th-century explorer and conquistador who led the first European expedition through the American Southwest. Preston and a friend, Walter Nelson, set out on horseback across one thousand miles of vast deserts and unknown mountains retracing Coronado's search for the fabled Seven Cities
The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America
Ernest Freeberg · 361 pages
The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but arguably the most important invention of the era was Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb. Unveiled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1879, the light bulb overwhelmed Americans with the sense that they were witnessing the birth of a new age. More than any other invention, electric light marked the arr
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson · 322 pages
"Explores the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. Play has always been more important than most people realize. In this vivid examination of the power of play and delight, Steven Johnson offers a surprising history of popular entertainment. Roving from medieval kitchens and ancient taverns to casinos and shopping malls, he locates the cutting edge of innovation
A six months tour through the north of England
Young, Arthur · 421 pages
Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
Ben Montgomery · 282 pages
"Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangst
Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
Claudio Magris · 416 pages
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
Gerard Russell · 368 pages
Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges o
Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z
Percy Harrison Fawcett · 312 pages
Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women
Catherine Thimmesh · 57 pages
Tells the story of how women throughout the ages have responded to situations confronting them in daily life by inventing such items as correction fluid, space helmets, and disposable diapers.
The Wright Brothers
David McCullough · 583 pages
Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story of the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly. On a winter day in 1903, on the remote Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright, changed history. The age of flight had begun with the first heavier-than-air powered machine carrying a pilot. Far more than a coup
The Great White South: Or with Scott in the Antarctic
Herbert George Ponting · 442 pages
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay
John Gimlette · 363 pages
"Paraguay - the name conjures up all that is most exotic and extreme in South America. It is a place of hellish jungles, dictators, fraudsters and Nazis, Utopian experiments, missionaries and lurid coups. It's the world's greatest importer of Scotch Whisky and was the setting for the bloodiest war mankind has known (eighty per cent of Paraguayans perished). It's not a place for the timid. It doesn
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey
Isabel Fonseca · 322 pages
After the revolutions of 1989, the author lived and traveled with the Gypsies of Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Romainia, and Albania -- listening to their stories and recording their attempts to become something more than despised outsiders. In this book, alongside unforgettable portraits of individuals -- the poet, the politician, the child prostitute-