Americana

From the Mayflower and the Virginia Company to the internet and mobile technology, Bhu Srinivasan tells four centuries of American history as a sequence of Next Big Things, the inventions, methods and industries that pushed the country ahead. Its subjects include the telegraph, the railroad, guns, radio, banking, flight, suburbia and sneakers. Along the way he shows how Andrew Carnegie went from telegraph messenger boy toward a steel empire, how Remington turned from guns to typewriters after the war, how the Mafia mirrored consolidation and regulation in legitimate business, and how a 1950s infrastructure bill set off events that produced KFC. The Economist named it one of the best books of 2017.

Chamath Palihapitiya told Bhu Srinivasan on X that his book was amazing.