Contact Light: The Bookshelf is a podcast about ambition. About the long, strange country between an idea and its arrival in the world. Each week, host Mark Zwinderman picks up a book and finds the audacious attempt inside it. Real or fictional, ancient or modern, large or small. From the Norman Conquest to the deck of an Antarctic ship that's about to be crushed by ice. From the bunkers of Stalingrad to the streets of a city being built on a clay pit in Cornwall. Ten minutes per episode. One book. One ambition. One pattern that appears, once you start looking for it, in places you didn't expect.