Weaving together stories from elite science, cutting-edge technology, and popular culture, Fleming examines issues of health and navigation in the 1830s, drought in the 1890s, aircraft safety in the 1930s, and world conflict since the 1940s.

A collection of curious tales questioning the ownership of airspace and a reconstruction of a truly novel moment in the history of American law, Banner’s book reminds us of the powerful and reciprocal relationship between technological innovation and the law.

This 150 page journal makes a great gift for any air traffic controller. Jot down your thoughts and experiences about keeping the skies safe.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times With a new afterword by the author That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system—and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare—allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas. When fused with big-data analysis techniques, this network can be used to watch everything simultaneously, and perhaps even predict attacks before they happen. In battle, Gorgon Stare and other systems like it have saved countless lives, but when this technology is deployed over American cities—as it already has been, extensively and largely in secret—it has the potential to become the most nightmarishly powerful visual surveillance system ever built. While it may well solve serious crimes and even help ease the traffic along your morning commute, it could also enable far more sinister and dangerous intrusions into our lives. This is closed-circuit television on steroids. Facebook in the heavens. Drawing on extensive access within the Pentagon and in the companies and government labs that developed these devices, Eyes in the Sky reveals how a top-secret team of mad scientists brought Gorgon Stare into existence, how it has come to pose an unprecedented threat to our privacy and freedom, and how we might still capitalize on its great promise while avoiding its many perils.

The “must read” story of America’s first high-altitude aviation program and one of its pilots (Francis Gary Powers Jr.). William “Greg” Gregory was born into a sharecropper’s life in the hills of North Central Tennessee. From the back of a mule-drawn plow, Greg learned the value of resilience and the importance of determined living. Refusing to accept a life of poverty, he found a way out: a work-study college program that made it possible for him to leave farming behind forever. While at college, Greg completed the Civilian Pilot Training Program and was subsequently accepted into the US Army’s pilot training program. Earning his wings in 1942, he became a P-38 combat pilot and served in North Africa during the summer of 1943—a critical time when the Luftwaffe was still a potent threat, and America had begun the march northward from the Mediterranean into Europe proper. Following the war, Greg served with a B-29 unit, then transitioned to the new, red-hot B-47 strategic bomber. In his frequent deployments, he was always assigned the same target in the Soviet Union: Joseph Stalin’s hometown of Tbilisi. While a B-47 pilot, Greg was selected to join America’s first high-altitude program, the Black Knights. Flying RB-57D aircraft, he and his team flew peripheral “ferret” missions around the Soviet Union and its satellites, collecting critical order-of-battle data desperately needed by the US Air Force at that time. When the program neared its design end—and following the Gary Powers shoot-down over the Soviet Union—Greg was assigned to command of the CIA’s U-2 unit at Edwards AFB. Over this five-year command, he and his team provided critical overflight intelligence during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam buildup, and more. He also became one of the first pilots to fly U-2s off aircraft carriers in a demonstration project. Spying from the Sky is the in-depth biography of William Gregory, who attended the National War College, was assigned to the reconnaissance office at the Pentagon, and was named vice-commandant of the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) before retiring from the force in 1972.

It is difficult to believe that our planet has been weaponized before our very eyes, but that is exactly what has happened. First, we were seduced by the convenience of a wireless world; then, atmospheric weather experimentation in the guise of carbons “climate change” converted the air we breathe into an antenna. Now, the geo-engineering we’ve been subjected to for two decades is being normalized as the “Star Wars” Space Fence rises around and within us. Is this the Space Age we were promised?