James Gleick

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born

August 01, 1954 in The United States

gender

male

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http://www.around.com/

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James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He wa...moreJames Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.

He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar.

His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase.

Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post.

Bibliography:
1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501)
1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420)
1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044)
1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X)
2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360)
2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913)
2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954)
2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )(less)

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Books by James Gleick

Average rating: 3.94 · 8,889 ratings · 901 reviews · 12 distinct works

	Chaos: Making a New Science 3.95 avg rating — 3,894 ratings — published 1987 — 27 editions	My rating:
	Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman 4.15 avg rating — 1,791 ratings — published 1992 — 16 editions	My rating:
	The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood 3.92 avg rating — 1,546 ratings — published 2011 — 18 editions	My rating:
	Isaac Newton 3.71 avg rating — 701 ratings — published 2003 — 14 editions	My rating:
	Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything 3.46 avg rating — 537 ratings — published 1999 — 18 editions	My rating:
	What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier 3.17 avg rating — 59 ratings — 5 editions	My rating:
	The Best American Science Writing 2000 by James Gleick (Editor), Jesse Cohen (Series Editor) 3.98 avg rating — 43 ratings — 4 editions	My rating:
	Nature's Chaos 3.75 avg rating — 4 ratings — published 1990 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Kaosu: Atarashii Kagaku O Tsukuru 5.00 avg rating — 1 rating — expected publication 31991	My rating:
	The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman, James Gleick (Introduction) 4.20 avg rating — 444 ratings — published 1964 — 9 editions	My rating:
	Nature's Chaos by Eliot Porter, James Gleick 3.70 avg rating — 20 ratings — published 2001	My rating:
	Chaos: The New Science by John Holte, James Gleick, Ilya Prigogine 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings — 2 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by James Gleick

“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

9 people liked it

“As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.”
― James Gleick

5 people liked it

“When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?”
― James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

5 people liked it

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