In The Information, James Gleick, rwice a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, draws together threads from history, biography, and science to tell the long, many-faceted, story of how we arrived at the modern age, where information has become "the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world" (inside left dust cover). Gleick opens at a pivotal moment, 1948 at Bell Labs. The Labs have just invented the transistor, which will revolutionize the hardware side of electronic communication. But, as Gleick tells it, the more significant event is the publication of Claude Shannon's paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." While complex, and mathematically dense, Shannon's paper effectively launched the field of information theory, and soon became a "fulcrum around which the world began to turn" (p. 4).
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