Harnessing the Wheelwork of Nature: Tesla's Science of Energy

By Thomas Valone

Harnessing The Wheelwork Of Nature: Tesla's Science Of Energy is a straightforward look at Nikola Tesla's iconoclastic dream and scientific ambition for the development and utilization of a wireless transmission of power itself. Investigating Tesla's alternative to transmission lines and how his ideas could have changed (and may yet change) the shape of human civilization itself, Harnessing The Wheelwork Of Nature is a simply fascinating read offering a unique perspective on an idea that may well have found its time at last. Composed of a series of articles contributed by an impressive spectrum of informed and informative writers, the essays are grouped into three sections: History of Tesla's Early Electrical Life; Principles of Wireless Power Transmission; and Miscellaneous Articles and Tesla Reference Material. Simply put, Harnessing The Wheelwork Of Nature is mandatory reading for all students of Tesla's remarkable life and contributions to science.

The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat

By Eric Roston

Carbon atoms lead active lives, as Roston's investigation into their ubiquitous presence attests. Created by nuclear fusion in stars, strewn through space by supernovas, and collecting on earth as a critical element of life, carbon also exercises a variety of roles in technology. Its natural and artificial guises inspire Roston to balance chapters on carbon's function in each realm, for example in defense (carbon in shells and Kevlar) or in combustion (carbon in metabolism and in fossil fuels). Such versatility derives from the carbon atom's atomic structure and chemical behavior, the scientific elucidation of which engages Roston's capacious curiosity, as it has that of the physicists, geologists, molecular biologists, and chemical engineers whose discoveries he describes. A science journalist, Roston mediates technicalities well for a general-interest reader, impressing in particular how carbon cycles geo- and biochemically through earth's natural processes, and how the current increase of carbon dioxide is accelerating the atmospheric cycle. If atomic number 6 could ever write its autobiography, the result might resemble Roston’s engaging presentation. --Gilbert Taylor

Raising Cane in the 'Glades: The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida

By Gail M. Hollander

Over the last century, the Everglades underwent a metaphorical and ecological transition from impenetrable swamp to endangered wetland. At the heart of this transformation lies the Florida sugar industry, which by the 1990s was at the center of the political storm over the multi-billion dollar ecological "restoration" of the Everglades. Raising Cane in the ’Glades is the first study to situate the environmental transformation of the Everglades within the economic and historical geography of global sugar production and trade. Using, among other sources, interviews, government and corporate documents, and recently declassified U.S. State Department memoranda, Gail M. Hollander demonstrates that the development of Florida’s sugar region was the outcome of pitched battles reaching the highest political offices in the U.S. and in countries around the world, especially Cuba—which emerges in her narrative as a model, a competitor, and the regional "other" to Florida's "self." Spanning the period from the age of empire to the era of globalization, the book shows how the "sugar question"—a label nineteenth-century economists coined for intense international debates on sugar production and trade—emerges repeatedly in new guises. Hollander uses the sugar question as a thread to stitch together past and present, local and global, in explaining Everglades transformation.