From Booklist

Fertile is the field of books about inventions. The very fecundity of works about human ingenuity begs for a less-detailed volume that is more comprehensive in scope, a role Dyson’s satisfyingly fills. In an arrangement partly encyclopedic and partly chronological, Dyson and his two dozen contributors divide all inventions into six periods; the breaks between periods are determined by when a technological era attained its acme, such as refinement of the steam engine (more…)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In the digital marketplace, the most effective price is no price at all, argues Anderson (The Long Tail). He illustrates how savvy businesses are raking it in with indirect routes from product to revenue with such models as cross-subsidies (giving away a DVR to sell cable service) and freemiums (offering Flickr for free while selling the superior FlickrPro to serious users). New media models have allowed successes like Obama’s campaign billb (more…)

From Publishers Weekly

Miller, the accidental memoirist who struck gold with the likable ramble Blue Like Jazz, writes about the challenges inherent in getting unstuck creatively and spiritually. After Jazz sold more than a million copies but his other books didn’t follow suit, he had a classic case of writer’s block. Two movie producers contacted him about creating a film out of his life, but Miller’s initial enthusiasm was dampened when they concluded that his real life needed (more…)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Former foreign editor of Time, Ramo pushes the reader into uncomfortable yet exhilarating places with controversial ways of thinking about global challenges (e.g., studying why Hezbollah is the most efficiently run Islamic militant group). His book, which lays bare the flaws in current thinking on everything from American political influence to the economy, is designed to change the physics of the way we think. Analyzing the failure of the B (more…)

The inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner tells the story of his incredible struggle to design and launch a machine that worked better than all others. When he brought his Dual Cyclone vacuum to market, manufacturers of traditional vacuums responded first with ridicule, then lawsuits, and finally with imitations. By 1997 Dyson’s company was generating annual revenue of over £100 million per year in the United Kingdom, and sales of more than one billion dollars worldwide. (more…)

Review
…An exhaustive compilation of hard-to-find test results…virtually all there is to know about chemical resistance. — Clive Maier, British Plastics & Rubber

The Chemical Resistance series is the world’s largest compilation of chemical resistance data that explains the effect of thousands of reagents, the environment and other exposure media on the properties and characteristics of thermoplastics. Materials/Reagents: Volume 1 covers 91 generic families of thermoplas (more…)