"The story of civilization from an entirely new vantage point--the six raw materials that have shaped and will continue to shape humanity's destiny. Sand, iron, salt, oil, copper and lithium: The struggle for these fundamental materials has created empires, razed civilizations, and fed our ingenuity and our greed for thousands of years. It is a story that is far from finished. Though we are told we now live in a weightless world of information, we...

Tough choices loom if the world wants to go green. The United States and other countries must decide where and how to procure the materials that make our renewable energy economy possible. To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earths, and nickel. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate...

"Jedediah "Jedd" Colter is a man with big dreams that go beyond the mountains of North Carolina. When he's offered a job of guiding the recently formed California Enterprise Company of Tennessee from Knoxville to the gold fields of California, Jedd knows that the opportunity is too good to refuse. The Sadler brothers promise him a cut of the fortune that mining brings them, but their real plan is to hit pay dirt by becoming merchants and cheat Jedd...

"#1 New York Times bestselling author Johanna Lindsey takes you on a captivating adventure in 1880s Montana where passions and gold fever run high as an American heiress turns to a rugged mountain man to help her locate her father's fortune. Summoned back to Philadelphia from the social whirl in London, Violet Mitchell never expected to find her brothers living on the edge of financial ruin while their father seeks new wealth in Montana's gold fields....

Colorado, 1888. While protecting a powerful mine owner with many enemies, Quill McKenna hires bounty hunter Calico Nash to help guard his boss's daughter, but is unable to control his attraction to her as death threats come thick and fast.

The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes, a land of howling wind and infernal sand. In this barren home, siblings Conner, Rob, Palmer and Violet daily carve out a future. They live in the shadow of their father and oldest sister, Vic, two of the greatest sand divers ever to comb the desert's depths. But these branches of their family tree are long gone, disappeared into the wastes beyond, leaving the younger siblings...

Told in four voices, four prisoners, including undocumented seventeen-year-old Rania, rebel against the corrupt and xenophobic government of the New American Republic that exploits undocumented immigrants in deadly labor camps to mine a world-changing chemical.

Brown's focus on the legendary mines at Potosí and comparison of its operations to those of other mines in Latin America is a well-written and accessible study that is the first to span the colonial era to the present.

For more then twenty years, tons and tons of metallic and electronic waste from all around the world has been transported to a Chinese town called Fengjang, in the south of Shanghai. Around 50,000 migrant workers have formed a real army to dismantle these metallic wastes. These green soldiers decompose, cut, split and recycle, with the most rudimentary means, almost 2 million tons of garbage every year. To remain and assume the minimum materials that...