FT Business Book of the Year

Best business books

All the books longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award

The Powerhouse by Steve LeVine

The Powerhouse

The Powerhouse is a real-time, two-year thrilling account of big invention, big commercialization, and big deception. It exposes the layers of competition and ambition, aspiration and disappointment behind this great turning point in the history of technology. — Penguin, Random House

Synopsis

A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery.
It will power the electric car, relieve global warming and catapult the winner into a new era of economic
and political mastery. Can the United States win?

Steve LeVine was granted unprecedented access to a secret federal laboratory outside Chicago, where a group
of geniuses are trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists almost all foreign
born are not alone. With so much at stake, researchers in Japan, South Korea and China are in the same pursuit.
The drama intensifies when a Silicon Valley start-up licenses the federal laboratory’s signature invention with
the aim of a blockbuster sale to the world’s biggest car makers.

The Powerhouse is a real-time, two-year thrilling account of big invention, big commercialization and big
deception. It exposes the layers of competition, ambition, aspiration and disappointment behind this great
turning point in the history of technology.