That's why Smil's recent book "Numbers Don't Lie– 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World" is such a joy. It is not an engineering manual, but a romp through Smil's brain.

Vaclav Smil unravels a term oft assumed simple, offering readers the opportunity to understand energy’s vast and nuanced place in both past and present society.

Published in May 2022 The best book I’ve read this year about the future is Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works. The irony is that Smil is an avowed antifuturist, repeatedly noting that he ...

Vaclav Smil was born in 1943, during World War II, in Czechoslovakia, in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. As a teenager, Smil’s parents expected him to chop wood, every four hours ...

Bill Gates’s favorite author is Vaclav Smil, a Canadian academic who writes dense books that aren’t typically beach reads—say, a 660-page treatise on the idea of growth, or an encyclopedic ...

On mega-universities, expanding endowments and prolific authors. Size: How It Explains the World by Vaclav Smil Published in May 2023 According to the prolific Vaclav Smil, one way to understand the ...

Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure by Vaclav Smil Published in February 2023 What sort of book might Vaclav Smil write if he turned his attention to higher education?

Published in March 2021. Can reading Vaclav Smil’s Grand Transitions help us think about the future of higher education? My latest obsession is the university of 2050. The reasons have to do with ...

A conversation with scientist Vaclav Smil, author of Growth — a dense treatise that covers everything from “microorganisms to megacities.” By David Wallace-Wells book excerpt Sept. 24, 2019 ...

Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure Vaclav Smil. MIT, $24.95 (208p) ISBN 978-0-262-04805-7 ...

Vaclav Smil reminds us that despite the onslaught of popular techno-pundits claiming otherwise, immense and rapid progress in one realm does not mean immense and rapid progress in all realms.