The latest translations of my books include How to Feed the World in Czech, Japanese and Spanish; Size in Portuguese; and How the World Really Works in Arabic and Croatian.
The latest translations of my books include Energy and Civilization in Italian and Polish; How the World Really Works in French and Italian; How to Feed the World in French; and Invention and Innovation in Polish.
Penguin Books will publish Speed: How It Explains the World on November 27, 2025. This book, a companion volume to my Growth and Size, is a systematic analysis of speed, from wind erosion to hunting cheetahs, from Boeing 747s to America’s war time industrial mobilization to the speed of global energy decarbonization.
The latest translations of my books include Grand Transitions in Korean, Growth and Numbers Don’t Lie in Turkish, How the World Really Works in Japanese, Invention and Innovation in Ukrainian, and Size in Chinese.
The latest translations of my books include Energy and Civilization in Czech, How to Feed the World in Korean and Slovak, Invention and Innovation in Spanish and Slovenian, Making the Modern World in Czech and Should We Eat Meat in Spanish.
Fifty years ago, in May 1975, I finished the first draft of my first book, and China’s Energy was published in 1976. In April 2025 Creating and Transforming the 20th Century became my 50th published book (including new revised, updated and expanded editions). The following publishers brought out the original English editions: The MIT Press (17 books), Oxford University Press (6), Viking, One World and Wiley (4 each), Praeger and M.E. Sharpe (3 each), Plenum, Routledge and Westview (2 each) and the American Enterprise Institute, Elsevier and the Scientific American Library had each published one of my books.
Twenty five of these 50 books have been translated into the total of 30 languages including Albanian, Arabic, Chinese (complex), Chinese (simplified), Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Translations leaders are How the World Really Works (26 languages), Numbers Don’t Lie (25 languages), Size (13 languages), Energy and Civilization (8 languages), How to Feed the World (6 languages) and Growth (5 languages).
All my books are interdisciplinary, countering the modern trend toward increased specialization, and their content and analyses have been inevitably limited by my capability to master many specific components. Energy, an inherently multidisciplinary subject, has been the topic of more than 20 books. They range from systematic examinations of energy in nature and society and energy in civilization’s history to more specific inquiries about energy transitions, biomass energies, energy cost of food production, natural gas, oil, power density, diesel engines and gas turbines.
Eight books deal with food production, its energy and material requirements, its impacts on the environment, and with diets, health and dietary transitions. Eight books focus on the history of technical inventions and advances; six on the Earth’s biosphere, its productivity and its biogeochemical cycles; five on China’s energy, environment and population; three books deal with fundamental topics of growth (in all its forms), size and grand historical transitions. Finally, there are also books on ancient Rome, history of iron and steel making, material requirements of modern civilization and the two of my bestsellers, Numbers Don’t Lie and How the Modern World Really Works.
Oxford University Press published Creating and Transforming the 20th Century: This is a combined, revised, updated and expanded edition of the two volumes originally published separately by the OUP in 2005 and 2006.
Energy and Civilization in Arabic, Hungarian and Russian; How to Feed the World in Italian; How the World Really Works in Japanese; Numbers Don’t Lie in Arabic and Russian; Size in Greek and Slovenian; and Oil in Chinese and Czech.
What it will really take to feed the world?
In his latest book, one of my favorite authors argues that solving hunger requires more than producing more food.
In the introduction to his latest book, How to Feed the World, Vaclav Smil writes that “numbers are the antidote to wishful thinking.” That one line captures why I’ve been such a devoted reader of this curmudgeonly Canada-based Czech academic for so many years. Across his decades of research and writing, Vaclav has tackled some of the biggest questions in energy, agriculture, and public health—not by making grand predictions, but by breaking down complex problems into measurable data.
See the full review on What It Will Really Take to Feed the World.
Viking in New York published the US edition of How to Feed the World.
