The Curious Family Library · 7 books
Short books that make one big idea clear
A cancer drug, the power grid, the internet, your immune system, a year on a dairy farm. Every chapter is broken into sections, each its own page, and every book downloads as PDF or EPUB.
A Year on a Dairy Farm
Twelve Months on a Finger Lakes Dairy
Twelve months on a working Finger Lakes dairy, told month by month — a February barn before dawn, a March calving, the milk check that has to add up,…
14 chapters · 23 sections · 34k words
How Cars Work
For Curious Passengers
How a car works across three eras — the purely mechanical car of the 1960s (suck, squeeze, bang, blow), the computerized car of the 1990s that…
13 chapters · 39 sections · 24k words
How the Lights Stay On
How the Electric Grid Really Works
Why the electric grid is the most astonishing machine you never think about — power made and used in the very same instant, the blackouts that taught…
18 chapters · 31 sections · 43k words
How the World Got Wired
A Brief History of the Internet
The whole arc of the internet in twenty-two short chapters — from a 1945 “memex” and the first packet, through the web given away, the dot-com crash,…
24 chapters · 105 sections · 62k words
Self & Other
A Field Guide to Your Immune System
A field guide to the body's defenses — the first responders and specialists, how it remembers and learns tolerance, and what goes wrong in…
21 chapters · 57 sections · 62k words
The Invisible Trillion
Chips, data centers & the things you can't see
How a grain of sand becomes a microchip in the world's most precise factories, what a data center actually is, and the honest costs of it all —…
19 chapters · 114 sections · 75k words
The Pill That Could
The first targeted cancer drug
The decades-long story of Gleevec — from the Philadelphia chromosome and a single rogue gene to the first pill that turned a fatal leukemia into a…
13 chapters · 46 sections · 51k words