Antonio García Martínez is an American New York Times Best Selling author and tech entrepreneur. He is a former product manager for Facebook, the CEO-founder of AdGrok and a former quantitative analyst for Goldman Sachs.

Antonio García Martínez

Nir Eyal is an Israeli-born American author, lecturer and investor known for his bestselling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

Jake Knapp is the inventor of the Design Sprint and a New York Times bestselling author. He’s written two books, Sprint and Make Time, and has coached teams at places like Slack, LEGO, IDEO, and NASA on design strategy and time management.

Jake

James Clear is a personal development keynote speaker and New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits. His entertaining talks teach audiences about small habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement.

James

Adam M. Grant is an American psychologist and author who is currently a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania specializing in organizational psychology. He received academic tenure aged 28, making him the youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School.

Adam

Seth Godin is the author of 18 books. He's also the founder of the online workshops altMBA and The Marketing Seminar. Godin has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame.

Seth

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. He was ranked No. 328 on the Forbes 400 in 2018, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.

Peter

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune’s “40 under 40.” He is an early-stage technology investor/advisor and the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers. The Tim Ferriss Show podcast has now exceeded 400 million downloads.

Broderick Stephen Harvey is an American comedian, businessman and entertainer. He hosts The Steve Harvey Morning Show, Family Feud, Celebrity Family Feud, the Miss Universe competition and Fox's New Year's Eve. Harvey began his career as a comedian.

Steve

Arianna Huffington is a Greek-American author, syndicated columnist, and businesswoman. She is the founder of The Huffington Post, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, and the author of fifteen books.

Arianna

Dr. David Sinclair, a Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, is one of the most well-known researchers in the field of rejuvenation. David is Australian-born and released his bestselling book, 'Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To', in 2019.

David

<p>&nbsp;Simon Oliver Sinek is a British-American author and motivational speaker. His first book, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action , was published in 2009; his most recent book, <a href="https://bestbooks.to/book/the-infinite-game_simon-sinek" target="_self">The Infinite Gam</a>e: The Pursuit of Happiness in Its Own Terms , was published in 2017. He has been featured as a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show, TEDx conferences, and at the United Nations Global Compact Leaders Summit.</p>


Simon

John D. Saunders is a Digital Marketing Strategist, entrepreneur and web designer helping startups build profitable websites & digital products. John has worked with global brands including Land Rover, Audi, the NAACP and Google. He is the founder of digital marketing agency, 5Four Digital, as well as blackwallet.org, blackillustrations.com and illustratorhub.com.

John D Saunders

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and former option trader and risk analyst, whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Jocko Willink is an American retired officer of the United States Navy, who served in the Navy SEAL teams. He is also a podcaster and author. His military service saw combat actions in the war in Iraq, where he eventually commanded the SEAL Team 3's Task Unit Bruiser that fought in the bloody battle

Jocko

Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, nonfiction, audio theatre, and films. His works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.

Neil

Vaclav

In 1926, Albert Einstein formulated his famous equation E=mc2, which illustrated that all matter can be described as energy.  It is this principle of energy that pervades every aspect of our lives.  In Energy: A Beginner's Guide , scientist Vaclav Smil explores energy in all its facets—from the inner workings of a human body to what we eat, the car we drive, and new developments in alternative fuels and other energy sources—by shedding light on the science behind global warming and efforts to prevent it.  Regardless of whether you are looking for dinner table conversation or to further your own understanding, this enlightening book will amaze and inform, uncovering the truths and exposing the myths behind one of the most important concepts in our universe. 

Mark Zuckerberg is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding and leading Facebook, Inc. and its namesake social networking website as its chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder.

Mark

Bill Gates is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation.

Bill

Energy

Vaclav Smil Ph.D. (Geography, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of Pennsylvania State University, 1971; RNDr., Charles University, Prague, 1965), is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2010 was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers.

Vaclav Smil offers an interdisciplinary and quantitative account of the human-caused changes to the biosphere, from prehistory to the present day.  The biosphere―the Earth's thin layer of life―dates from nearly four billion years ago, when the first simple organisms appeared.  Many species have exerted enormous influence on the biosphere's character and productivity, but none has transformed the Earth in so many ways and on such a scale as Homo sapiens.  Without harvesting of the biomass, Smil points out, there would be no story of human evolution and advancing civilization. 

Harvesting the Biosphere

As we continue to live in the 21st century, our modern world consumed unprecedented amounts of materials in the past.  Now, even though our production methods are becoming more and more efficient, it is hard to imagine a time when our demand for materials will stop growing.  This book examines the ways modern economies depend on materials and how we can reduce the amount of resources we use. 

Making the Modern World

The period from 1867 to 1914 was a time of great progress.  The synergy of fuels, science, and technical innovation spawned an exciting age.  Dynamite, the telephone, photographic film, and light bulbs were only the beginning.  Then came electricity-generating plants, electric motors, steam turbines, the gramophone, cars, aluminum production, air-filled tires, and prestressed concrete.  And that was just the 1880s! Soon followed airplanes, tractors, radio signals and plastics, neon lights, and assembly line production.  This book is a systematic interdisciplinary account of these developments and their effects on people's lives. 

Creating the Twentieth Century

The industrial synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen has been of greater fundamental importance to the modern world than the invention of the airplane, nuclear energy, space flight, or television.  Dr.  Smil is the world's authority on nitrogenous fertilizer.  In Enriching the Earth, he begins with a discussion of nitrogen's unique status in the biosphere, its role in crop production, and traditional means of supplying the nutrient.  He then looks at various attempts to expand natural nitrogen flows through mineral and synthetic fertilizers. 

Enriching the Earth

In this provocative book, scientist Vaclav Smil takes a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at the natural and human-produced catastrophes we may be facing in the next fifty years—both at unpredictable events and long-term trends that could have global significance.  Smil looks at rare but cataclysmic events—world-changing events, like major volcanic eruptions, as well as smaller-scale ones such as terrorist attacks.  He also looks at global trends—the transition from fossil fuels to other energy sources; the world's growing population; and the emergence of new technologies. 

Global Catastrophes and Trends

A systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Growth has been both an unspoken and an explicit aim of our individual and collective striving.  It governs the lives of microorganisms and galaxies; it shapes the capabilities of our extraordinarily large brains and the fortunes of our economies.  Growth is manifested in annual increments of continental crust, a rising gross domestic product, a childs growth chart, the spread of cancerous cells.  In this magisterial book, Vaclav Smil offers systematic investigation of growth in nature and society, from tiny organisms to the trajectories of empires and civilizations. Smil takes readers from bacterial invasions through animal metabolisms to megacities and the global economy.  He begins with organisms whose mature sizes range from microscopic to enormous, looking at disease-causing microbes, the cultivation of staple crops, and human growth from infancy to adulthood.  He examines the growth of energy conversions and man-made objects that enable economic activities--developments that have been essential to civilization.  Finally, he looks at growth in complex systems, beginning with the growth of human populations and proceeding to the growth of cities.  He considers the challenges of tracing the growth of empires and civilizations, explaining that we can chart the growth of organisms across individual and evolutionary time, but that the progress of societies and economies, not so linear, encompasses both decline and renewal.  The trajectory of modern civilization, driven by competing imperatives of material growth and biospheric limits, Smil tells us, remains uncertain. 

Growth

Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate (Vaclav Smil, 2008) debunks the most common fallacies to make way for a constructive, scientific approach to the global energy challenge.  When will the world run out of oil? Should nuclear energy be adopted on a larger scale? Are ethanol and wind power viable sources of energy for the future? Vaclav Smil advises the public to be wary of exaggerated claims and impossible promises.  The global energy transition will be prolonged and expensive—and hinges on the development of extensive new infrastructure.  Established technologies and traditional energy sources are persistent and adaptable enough to see the world through that transition. 

Energy Myths and Realities

This book, based on the best international and national statistical sources, examines how economies and nations around the world are striving to move away from traditional energy sources, examines the unfolding decarbonization process, supplies readers with an in-depth evaluation of recent and near-term advances in energy production technology and implementation, and looks at problems with intermittent energies and national transition plans. 

Energy Transitions

 In Prime Movers of Globalization, author Vaclav Smil gives a history of two key technical developments that have driven globalization: diesel engines and gas turbines.  Engineered by Rudolf Diesel in the 1890s and Frank Whittle and Hans-Joachim Pabst von Ohain in the 1930s, high-compression non-sparking internal combustion engines power everything from trucks to jets.  Gas turbines—air-breathing jet engines like those pioneered by Whittle and von Ohain—have enabled aircraft to travel almost anywhere on the planet within twenty-four hours. 

Prime Movers of Globalization

<p>We are surrounded by living organisms.  In fact, Earth's biosphere exists as a thin surface layer of life forms blanketing the planet's land and oceans.  This thin layer has its own life cycle, energy generation system and chemical cycles.  This book tells the story of Earth's biosphere from its origins to its near and long-term future.  By combining an introduction to basic physical principles with discussions of complex interactions between various levels of nature, this innovative book explains how the biosphere operates as a whole—from the smallest microbes up to animals and plants, from minerals and fluid to atmospheric conditions on Earth or on other planets elsewhere in the universe that might harbor life. </p>


The Earth's Biosphere

An investigation of the America-Rome analogy that goes deeper than the facile comparisons made on talk shows and in glossy magazine articles. Americas post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful.  Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire.  In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail, going deeper than the facile analogy-making of talk shows and glossy magazine articles.  He finds profound differences. Smil, a scientist and a lifelong student of Roman history, focuses on several fundamental concerns: the very meaning of empire; the actual extent and nature of Roman and American power; the role of knowledge and innovation; and demographic and economic basics―population dynamics, illness, death, wealth, and misery.  America is not a latter-day Rome, Smil finds, and we need to understand this in order to look ahead without the burden of counterproductive analogies.  Superficial similarities do not imply long-term political, demographic, or economic outcomes identical to Romes. 

Why America Is Not a New Rome

Energy drives our universe.  It causes the sun to shine and planets to rotate, it fuels living things' growth, and it helps civilizations develop.  Ecologist Vaclav Smil is an expert on energy.  He starts Energies with a look at the sun and Earth, moves on to plants and animals, then discusses people and food.  Next he describes how preindustrial societies used energy, then moves on to discussing fossil-fueled civilizations.  He ends by talking about motion and information. 

Energies

Meat eating is a controversial subject, but for many it is a necessary part of our diets.  This book examines the benefits and downfalls of meat consumption in order to come to an informed decision on the issue.  This book looks at modern production systems, their efficiencies, outputs, and impacts.  The major global trends of meat consumption are described in order to find out what part its consumption plays in changing modern diets in countries around the world.  The heart of the book addresses the consequences of the massive carnivory of western diets, looking at the inefficiencies of production and at the huge impacts on land, water, and the atmosphere.  Health impacts are also covered, both positive and negative. 

Should We Eat Meat?

Energy at the Crossroads is an objective, comprehensive, and accessible examination of today's most crucial problem: preserving the environment in the face of society's insatiable need for energy.  With this book, author Vaclav Smil offers a comprehensive, accessible guide to viable methods to reduce energy consumption and find alternative sources of power production in the twenty-first century.  After a century of unprecedented production growth, technical innovation, and expanded consumption, the world faces a number of critical energy challenges arising from unequal resource distribution, changing demand patterns, and environmental limitations. 

Discover the Best Books Written by Vaclav Smil

Best author’s book

Energy

Written books

Harvesting the Biosphere

Making the Modern World

Creating the Twentieth Century

Enriching the Earth

Global Catastrophes and Trends

Growth

Energy Myths and Realities

Energy Transitions

Prime Movers of Globalization

The Earth's Biosphere

Why America Is Not a New Rome

Energies

Should We Eat Meat?

Energy at the Crossroads

Energy

Similar authors

Antonio García Martínez

Nir Eyal

Jake Knapp

James Clear

Adam Grant

Seth Godin

Peter Thiel

Tim Ferriss

Steve Harvey

Arianna Huffington

David Sinclair

Simon Sinek

John D Saunders

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Jocko Willink

Neil Gaiman