Describe your latest book.
My new book,
Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, is a sequel of sorts to
How We Got to Now, the book and PBS series I did a few years ago. Like
How We Got to Now,
Wonderland is a history of innovations that helped shape the world we live in today; it's filled with a similar cast of eccentric tinkerers and visionaries and jumps from discipline to discipline and across many historical periods the way most of my books do. But
Wonderland is also trying to make what I think is an important argument about the forces that drive historical change. A surprising amount of big shifts in technology, or science, or politics can be at least partially attributed to activities that started out as purely playful ones...