What is Reddit's opinion of How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World?

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Agreed on the Neal Stephenson recommendation. He kind of wraps up a whole lot of details engineering text into a story that's fun to read. I also loved: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson http://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633932/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447804317&sr=8-1&keywords=how+we+got+to+now A great book on innovation and engineering.

https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633932 Here is a reader review about this book.

What a fascinating book! If you like entertaining and interesting, well-written, well-researched, journalist-style non-fiction history, you will be sure to enjoy this. It takes six innovations (glass, clean, light, cold, sound, time) through history, including all the inventors and all the quirks of history that led to the modern day use of these innovations. For instance, glass starts with a meteor strike in the Egyptian desert that results in an extremely rare substance in nature (sand turned to glass in extreme heat) - so rare that it was used in an ornament in King Tut's tomb -- through to the present day use of it virtually everywhere, including, of course, fiber optics. Each chapter is a fascinating journey, filled with interesting, quirky, and brilliant inventors and odd juxtapositions. (The invention of the printing press led to the widespread use of reading material, which made many people realize for the first time that they needed reading glasses). It is in the general genre of Mary Roach (though not as hilarious), Malcolm Gladwell, and Steven Jay Gould. In other words, science and history for the interested, educated, but non-expert reader. You will be sure to bore your friends with all sorts of little factoids gleaned from this book for some time.

It also really reminds me of Steven Johnson's

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World