This is a lovely, sweeping history of information theory and technologies. What I love about it is also a point of criticism: Eclecticism is what makes this such a beautiful treatment, moving between mathematics, engineering, physics and genetics. But despite opening with African drumming languages, he increasingly focuses on the genesis of computing out of Europe and the U.S. I think it might also have been more interesting to address the other ways humans attempted to convey information over a distance beyond the first couple of chapters of semaphore, fire signaling, etc.