From the New York Times bestselling author of How the World Really
Works, a wide-ranging look at the most fundamental governing principle
of our world: size, whose laws, limits, and peculiarities offer the
key to understanding health, wealth, and even happiness
"No one writes about the great issues of our time with more rigor or
erudition than Vaclav Smil." -- Elizabeth Kolbert
To answer the most important questions of our age, we must understand
size. Neither bacteria nor empires are immune to its laws. Measuring it
is challenging, especially where complex systems like economies are
concerned, yet mastering it offers rich rewards: the rise of the West,
for example, was a direct result of ever more accurate and standardized
measurements.
Using the interdisciplinary approach that has won him a wide readership,
Smil draws upon history, earth science, psychology, art, and more to
offer fresh insight into some of our biggest challenges, including
income inequality, the spread of infectious disease, and the uneven
impacts of climate change. Size explains the regularities--and
peculiarities--of the key processes shaping life (from microbes to
whales), the Earth (from asteroids to volcanic eruptions), technical
advances (from architecture to transportation), and societies and
economies (from cities to wages). This book about the big and the small,
and the relationship between them, answers the big and small questions
of human existence:
The latest masterwork of "an ambitious and astonishing polymath who
swings for fences" (Wired) Size is a mind-bending journey that turns
the modern world on its head.
