As Jerome K. Jerome said, "I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." I concur and heartily recommend Steven Johnson's book based on the PBS show of the same name. How We Got to Now is an opportunity for you to watch other people work, with no obligation whatsoever to do anything yourself. After all, air conditioning and microscopes and the War on Poverty and sewers have all been invented already!
It was truly an unmitigated pleasure to listen to Johnson trace the development of, for example, the technology of glass from its accidental creation in the deserts of North Africa to the experiments involving crossbows that resulted in fiber optics. The ingenuity displayed, the hardships suffered, the sleepless nights and fortunes won and lost that enabled us to read small print and live in Arizona and not die of childbed fever and associate iced tea and lemonade with the summer even though there is no naturally occurring ice at that time... all this and more fits into one slim volume, seven CDs, or 6 episodes on PBS, and is a great relief from these anxious times.
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