Tubes

<p>An engaging narrative tour behind the scenes of our everyday lives to see the dark beating heart of the Internet itself.<br/><br/>We are all connected now. But connected to what exactly? In <i>Tubes</i> journalist Andrew Blum takes readers on a fascinating journey to find out.</p><p></p><p>When former Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska famously described the Internet as a series of tubes he seemed hopelessly foolishly trapped in an old way of knowing the world. But he wasn't wrong. After all as Blum writes the Internet exists: for all the talk of the placelessness of our digital age the Internet is as fixed in real physical places as any railroad or telephone ever was. It fills enormous buildings converges in some places and avoids others and it flows through tubes under ground up in the air and under the oceans all over the world. You can map it you can smell it and you can even visit it--and that's just what Blum does in <i>Tubes</i>.</p><p></p><p>From the room in Berkeley where the Internet flickered to life to the busiest streets in Manhattan as new fiber optic cable is laid down; from the coast of Portugal as a 10000-mile undersea cable just two thumbs' wide is laid down to connect Europe and West Africa to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest where Google Microsoft and Facebook have built monumental data centers--Blum visits them all to chronicle the dramatic story of the Internet's development explain how it all works and capture the spirit of the place/</p><p></p><p>Like Tracy Kidder's classic <i>The Soul of a New Machine</i> or Tom Vanderbilt's recent bestseller <i>Traffic</i> <i>Tubes</i> combines deep reporting and lucid explanation into an engaging quest to understand the everyday world we live in.</p>