How We Got to Now | Audiobook Reviews

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

By: Steven Johnson / Narrated By: George Newbern

Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins

Oh how I do so love Steven Johnson! This one neither disappoints, nor does it go off on a meandering tangent in the end. Rather, it’s one looooong meandering and delightful tangent!!!

Here’s what I love about Steven Johnson—he makes history (Which I love anyway!) even more interesting, plus he adds touches of humor and irreverence. So huzzah for that!

Here’s what I love about How We Got to Now—it’s one long drawn out tangent. One thing is kinda sorta just there, it’s tweaked once, that tweak is tweaked, the result leads to another very different tweak, and suddenly: Where you have a simple comet striking to begin with, you later have literacy and people needing reading glasses. It’s aaaaaalllll oh so related!

Sounds confusing, you say?

Nope, it’s not, and not by a long shot. Johnson absolutely revels in this Social/Scientific game of Six-Degrees of Kevin Bacon. He takes six things that just kinda sorta ARE, and he shows us how they developed to change the world, how we couldn’t live without them today.

Six things that kinda sorta just ARE: Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, and Light. Glass begets literacy cuz after Gutenberg chucked out his Bible and the printing presses started chucking out treatises and pamphlets, people wanted to read. But then they discovered they couldn’t read cuz they’d never realized they’d been farsighted the entire time—spectacles, anyone?

Cold? Starts with one valiant and daring young entrepreneur using the empty ships going to the Caribbean and loading them with ice. Suddenly there’s ice cream in Havana. And later there’s flash-freezing that makes the way we eat dinner very different. Not to mention? Can a person reeeeeeally live in Phoenix? WithOUT air conditioning? Certain places on our planet wouldn’t be inhabitable; no migrations to desert places, Sir!

Sound? From cavemen coming together to chant in certain acoustically significant areas, we’re taken to jazz on the radio causing culture waves. Clean? Chlorine in water cut deaths from disease down 74%. Time? Galileo pondered a swinging lamp, the rhythm, the timing. Later, watches would be an absolute necessity whenst the Industrial Revolution came around as people suddenly had jobs they needed to get to. Light? How ‘bout the flash being developed for photography, thereby making it possible to show the squalor and horrific living conditions of tenements in the big city, starting social reforms?

You gotta love it! Everything Johnson puts out is soooo waaaay Out There, but it all absolutely makes sense when he jumps off one ledge and doesn’t crash to the ground but finds himself on another ledge instead. Along the way he kinda sorta posits that it’s not great men/geniuses who are responsible for great things; rather it’s hard work, steady toil, attempts after attempts. There is no such thing as a Light Bulb Moment cuz the light bulb had been worked on for eeeeeeons before Edison hemmed and hawed his way into a tiny …er… eureka…? … moment. All the achievements we’ve been taught in school are misleading. Edison’s genius wasn’t in creating the light bulb, it was in developing teams for research and development. Plus, the guy was the first to offer stock options instead of pay.

I woulda thunk this bit of Nonfiction would be more apt for someone like Sean Pratt. I’m used to George Newbern doing Bio/Memoirs even tho’ scrolling around on Audible I see Newbern does fiction also. So how’d the guy do? Verrrrrry well! He doesn’t make this prancing around through history at all dry, and every now and then he adds the odd inflection in a way that made me feel like he was really really familiar with the text. The man can sometimes have a dry delivery, sometimes lacking in varied tones, but I was tickled pink with how he made each Whazza? Moment into a low-key But Of Course Moment. I wouldn’t say it was a delightful delivery—that’s not Newbern’s style or forte—but it was appealing.

Then Johnson came to the end and instead of going off with some weird aaaaalmost-political commentary (Think: The Ghost Map!), he wrapped it all up with Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace being before her time and developing software during the Victorian era—combining her skill in mathematics and numbers with the romantic sensibilities she inherited from her father: Yes, she could see what a computer could do with calculations, but she also projected that it could offer an aesthetic appeal with music, art, creativity coming to the fore. Dunno, how all that fit in with the six innovations other than by being the seventh, but it was a nice way of tying everything together, the hard work, the meeting of the right people at the right time, the being in the right place within your own life to create, think, and achieve. Plus, Ada Lovelace is, ya know, a woman, so huzzah for that too!

Just a delightful way to learn and to think about history and to consider what we judge to be common. NOTHING in this world is commonplace, it turns out—EVERYTHING could’ve turned out quiiiiiiite differently in different times, through different people, in different contexts.

Me? I’m still stuck on the social reforms set in motion from flash photography. All so neat.

But I’ve gotta admit: As awesome as radio is? I still don't like jazz, culture boon withstanding…

Yeh yeh yeh I’m a toad… No offense to toads…