THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE ? AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ? Sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them, our modern world would not exist, and the battle to control them will determine our future. ? Finalist for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award

The fiber-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of our electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power our phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information -- what Ed Conway calls "the ethereal world" -- our twenty-first-century lives are still very much rooted in the material.

In fact, we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal. And in Material World, Conway embarks on an epic journey across continents, cultures, and epochs to reveal the underpinnings of modern life on Earth -- traveling from the sweltering depths of the deepest mine in Europe to spotless silicon chip factories in Taiwan to the eerie green pools where lithium originates.

Material World is a celebration of the humans and the human networks, the miraculous processes and the little-known companies, that combine to turn raw materials into things of wonder. This is the story of human civilization from an entirely new perspective: the ground up.

• We started tracking this book on May 23, 2023.
• This book was $14.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 14 times in the past 644 days.
• The current price of this book is $12.99 last checked 15 hours ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past 90 days is $9.99.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $2.99.
• The lowest price to date was $2.99 last reached on September 8, 2024.
• This book has been $2.99 2 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $14.99 last reached on November 12, 2024.
• This book has been $14.99 5 times since we started tracking it.

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 562 Pages
• File Size: 5,732 KB