Tag: nonfiction

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Review

“The Silk Roads”

Peter Frankopan

Just like my last book review, I’ve got two thoughts; apparently it’s always two things with me. This time, it was two things that I actually did learn about in history class that this book helped me understand better than the classes ever did.

First, the American Revolution. As the output of the American education system, I’m well aware that it, basically, got started because Britain raised taxes on the colonies in what would become the US, and we all got mad about it.1 What this book pointed out is why Britain increased taxes — because, of course, they had to know it wouldn’t be popular, so it wouldn’t have been just for funsies, there had to be a reason. The reason, it turns out, was that they had just bailed out the British East India Company, and big bailouts require funding. Why did they bail out the British East India Company? Because the BEIC’s revenues from India had suddenly collapsed! Why did those revenues suddenly collapse? To summarize, because the company realized that, thanks to the magic of colonialism, the could just… not pay a living wage! To anyone! And so they didn’t. And then millions of people starved. (To those following along at home, the moral of the story is that you should pay people a living wage. And also, y’know, not do coercive labor practices in any way, shape, or form.)

Secondly, and let’s just go ahead and say right now that it’s not gonna get lighter in tone, was World War II. I very specifically remember thinking, in not only high school but also college-level history classes, “how did Hitler think invading Russia was going to go well, it’s like the canonical way to end a European empire.” It was never really explained, the best I ever got was mumbling about his egomaniacal tendencies and the need for “Lebensraum.” Which, to be fair, were factors. But this book did a lot better a job explaining a key thing: crops. The goal wasn’t to invade Russia, it was to take Ukraine—the bread basket of the USSR. And the issue wasn’t egonomanicism or greed, it was that Germany didn’t have enough food. Also on the list of things that can cause massive starvation: declaring war on everyone, dumping your entire economy into war matériel, and conscripting every farm worker with a Y chromosome. Plants may generally be able to grow themselves, but they don’t harvest themselves.

The book had a whole lot of other interesting stuff. I knew (and, let’s be real, still know) very little about Asian history, so a whole heck of a lot of this was new to me. The bits above are what I called out because they were revelatory moments about things I already knew about. A different form of learning to “this is brand new information” types of things. I found the book quite approachable, and the chapters were broken up fairly well—not tiny chunks, each one is still gonna take some time to get through, but reasonable enough. The naming pattern definitely got stretched thin after a while, but that’s probably less of an issue if you’re reading a print copy instead of the ebook where the chapter title is always visible at the top of the screen.

All in all, a good read, and I recommend it, Check it out!2

  1. “No taxation without representation” does point out that the lack of representation was also a key issue, but it’s not as relevant to my realization here. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Modern Software Engineering”

David Farley

Over the course of reading this book, I kept coming back to two thoughts.

Firstly, I think Farley undersells the advances that programming languages have made. He has a point that the level of bikeshedding about languages that programmers are capable of is too much, but treating it as completely nothing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Take an example close to my heart: comparing Objective-C and Swift, there have been some significant advances. The introduction, and use throughout the language and libraries, of optionals has functionally eliminated null-pointer exceptions. Memory management bugs are a massive category of problems, across all sorts of software. Look at Heartbleed, for example. If you’re using Swift idiomatically, and avoiding the (hilariously named) UnsafePointer stuff, this sort of problem cannot happen.1

Secondly, this book felt like the moment where in my mind I went “oh, we are getting there.” He makes a point early on that software engineering as a field has different standards of success than other engineering disciplines. Again, an example: this morning, I woke up to a truly terrible software bug in an app I use that had deleted several years worth of data. This is a bad bug, and I’m personally quite upset about that loss, but it’s not as bad as, say, the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse. Subjectively, it feels like software as a whole has a lower bar for “is this okay to produce” than the other, physical engineering disciplines.

Where this book changed my opinion is in starting to feel like the field is beginning to coalesce around some standards. We’re nowhere near the level of “you have to use these techniques, and if you don’t you can lose your Software Engineering License and be prohibited from working professionally in the field,” but some of those techniques are taking shape.2 Farley’s argument is that the core of it is fast feedback, allowing for tight iteration loops, and from that it logically follows that test-driven development is the best option.

And yes, I’m sold! Just the other day, while doing some tinkering on a personal project, I found several bugs I’d created — because the tests I wrote before I started writing the code failed. That’s such a nice way to do things. And now, having written both the code and the tests, I feel much more comfortable with the idea of “oh, I’m going to need to reuse some of this logic somewhere else, I’ll just pull it out into a separate chunk.” I don’t have to spend an hour thinking through “what might break from this,” or testing things out. I just do it, run the tests, and know that I’m good.

As to the book itself: he’s hammering the same points over and over, as these sorts of books tend to do. I found it a generally good read, and took many notes for the book club discussion, but I don’t know that it was particularly world-changing… or if anyone else will have the same “eureka” feeling from it that I did. That moment came with a very clear sense of “all the other stuff I’ve read and done leading up to now came together into this idea.” It’s not a bad book, though, and could be a pretty good starting point if you’re just getting into the “read about the field” kind of thing, so check it out.3

  1. And I’m also setting aside the type checker, which is, for all intents and purposes, a form of mandatory unit testing imposed at compile time. Writing Swift, you don’t have to safety-check your inputs to make sure they’re the right types; the language does it for you. ↩
  2. I do absolutely believe that software engineers should be forming some kind of industry group and establishing shared standards for what “software engineering” actually means. ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Blindspots Between Us”

Gleb Tsipursky

This is one of those books where I wind up with a whole bunch of notes. Cognitive science: it’s neat stuff!

As with most of my reading, I have no idea when, where, or why I got this book; based on the title, I wasn’t quite expecting cognitive psychology, particularly not in a self-help sort of manner. Broadly, each segment is “here’s this problem that you have, because you’re a human and that’s just how human brains work; here’s some approaches you can take to mitigate that problem.”

The word ‘mitigate’ is important in there, though: there’s not a magic solution to any of these biases.1 The best you can do is be aware of these evolutionary foibles and try to catch yourself when they’re happening.

A thought that kept coming to mind, all the way through this book, was how much it reminded me of some of the excerpts of Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem? that I’ve read. In his case, he uses a division between a Scientist Brain and a Caveman Brain, roughly; here, it’s the Autopilot System and the Intentional System. I tend to think of it as a three-part split, between lizard brain, monkey brain, and person brain, although that does present the issue of the person brain being outnumbered by the other two. On the other hand, maybe you should feel a bit outnumbered; the person brain is the slow one, whereas monkey and lizard brain are progressively faster.

Regardless, there’s a split between your higher-order thinking, stuff that makes it possible for us to, y’know, gestures at modern civilization, and the lower-order stuff that kept us alive through the majority of human history, before all the conveniences of modern life. Evolution is slow to change, and hasn’t even begun to catch up to what life is like now; and, back in the caveman days, the caveman who stopped to contemplate the social implications of running from the oncoming lion had lower odds of survival than the one who was in a dead sprint before the expensive, slow higher-order consciousness had even parsed that particular blur as “lion.”

This book is basically a list of ways that those monkey-brain reflexes trip us up in modern life, and hints for helping your person-brain deal with it. Which is, overall, quite a useful thing to be able to do! As a book, I mostly enjoyed reading it—it does have Self-Help Book Syndrome, wherein it provides a bunch of examples that are occasionally useful but mostly just come across as stilted and unhelpful—and recommend it. Check it out.2

  1. Well, as of this writing there isn’t. By the time you’re reading this, maybe we figured out some kind of brain implant technology that makes us all better at thinking about stuff. I can dream. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“How to Read Literature Like a Professor”

Thomas C. Foster

If you pay attention to my reviews, you may notice a dearth of “literature” as a genre. This was my attempt to begin working on rectifying that; sadly, I don’t think it will have worked. This sort of literary analysis, tearing apart every decision the author made to try to find the symbolism behind it, just isn’t my cup of tea.

Which isn’t to say that this wasn’t a good book! I quite liked the way it served as an overview of the topic, to begin with. Beyond that, there were a couple things that really stood out to me as something of throughlines to the book.

First, that, roughly put, meaning is in the eye of the beholder. We each bring our own personal history, our own preconceptions and biases, to our reading. The things that strike me as meaningful are going to be different than the things that strike my sister as meaningful, but the two of us are likely to have more overlap than I would with someone reading the same thing in their home in Hong Kong.

Secondly, a professorial reiteration of the idea that there’s nothing new. It’s one big melting pot; in the same way that each reader has their own approach to the same book, each other has their own approach to the same ur-story underneath everything.1

So, overall, a useful introduction to/reminder of literary analysis as a concept. I remain… not sold on the whole field, but to each their own! If it’s of interest to you, this is a pretty good place to start.2

  1. This also, I felt, made an excellent addition to the arguments in favor of transformative works as a thing. If all of fiction is just remixes of earlier fiction, then what difference is there, really, between a fanfic and Dante’s Inferno? One is older, is all, and has attained respectability over time. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Perfect Software And Other Illusions About Testing”

Gerald M. Weinberg

Another book club entry, and a shorter one than usual, it feels like. I think the core concept is a good one to hold on to: testing everything is impossible, so you should be aware of what tradeoffs you’re choosing, and pick the ones that best meet your needs.

There’s some places in the book where, coming at it with Programmer Brain, I was annoyed at how long it took to explain something. Like yes, of course, you can’t test every possible system state, even just looking at a single small program there’s likely to be thousands of possible states, and that’s without addressing all the additional states created by the fact that programs don’t exist in isolation. The system they’re running on can impact them; the person using them can have a varying level of knowledge on using the program or the system; the program can be left continuously running for a long time, getting into ever more-complex possible states; heck, even cosmic radiation can impact program state.1

That complaint aside, there’s still a lot of useful ideas in there. Remember, the testers are not the enemy! But neither are they infallible. They are, in point of fact, people. Have empathy for them.

In all, a good, and reasonably quick, read about the software development process. Give it a go if that’s your type of thing.2

  1. Seriously, cosmic rays flipping bits inside RAM (or on various forms of longer-term storage media) is a real problem! ↩
  2. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“Bad Gays”

Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller

This is a fun concept for a book: take the concept of “let’s talk about the forgotten gays of history” and focusing, instead of on the heroic ones, the villainous ones. I thought the choice of Hadrian for the cover art was weird, but the chapter on him… sorta explained that, and sorta didn’t? Like, my reading is that he was definitely a toxic boyfriend, but not particularly a villain beyond that, unless you want to count the inherent villainy of being a Roman emperor. And even then, by Roman Emperor Standards, he wasn’t actually all that bad.1

I have, in the past, bounced off books for being too academic in style, and this feels like it’s right around the upper edge of what I can tolerate in that way. It’s an interesting telling of the history, with a fair amount of citations throughout, but where I started to lose interest was where it got deep into… queer theory? Historiography? Something like that. Not a book to read when your brain is tired and you just want to gently process words, there’s too many moments demanding of deep thought for that. But then, sometimes that’s what you’re in the mood for.

Overall, though, I enjoyed the read! It’s a fun, if sometimes disheartening and depressing, skim through a specific subset of history. Give it a go.2

  1. This is, admittedly, a pretty low bar. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Thing Explainer”

Randall Munroe

This was a really interesting book to read. The quick summary is that it explains things! (It’s a well-chosen title.) The trick is that it does so using line art and the 1,000 most-common words, in the style of Simple English Wikipedia. It’s a mix of genuinely useful information, decontextualization that feels like Strange Planet, and a surprisingly similar feeling to trying to read a book in a language in which you are not fluent. For as short a book as it is, it took me a long time to read it; I could only get through a few pages at a time, and then I had to go take a break to let my brain recover.

It is, however, quite fun to read. You’ll learn some things, and at the same time you’ll have a few moments of feeling proud of yourself for figuring out what the heck it’s trying to convey. It’s an educational puzzler. I had a lot of fun with it; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”

Dr. Walter Rodney

This is one of those books that I feel underprepared to read. Human interests are fractal; every topic is full of so much more detail and history than you’d ever expect. And this is a book from deep within a topic area. There’s a lot of assumed prior reading that I just don’t have.

The general thesis is pretty simple to state: through slavery and colonization, Europe took the resources of Africa to fuel its own development, and in so doing, slowed the development of—or, roll credits, underdeveloped—Africa.

And that point is made quite well throughout. There’s a lot of the history of the relationship between Europe and Africa, and it’s a whole lot of interesting, useful information. The one point that really lodged in my head was population numbers over time: using the (very) rough census data available, the extrapolated populations of Europe, Asia, and the Americas just kept growing over time; Africa’s population stayed stable for a couple of centuries. Gee, do you think there’s something environmentally unique about Africa that meant this gigantic landmass with plenty of arable land was just immune to natural population growth? Or could it perhaps be that people kept showing up with empty ships and leaving with ships full of slaves?

And the population numbers were already something I hadn’t known about, but the larger point made is that having a permanent population drain is a massive detriment to a region’s ability to develop. Every person taken away isn’t just a person taken away, they’re a whole set of possible futures cut off. Every interaction they could’ve had with someone else, every possible invention they could’ve come up with… every child they could have had, and every interaction and invention and child that child could’ve had, expanding on into the future. A massive amount of potential, stolen away… over and over, constantly, for centuries. It’s a hell of an impact, and the way Dr. Rodney talks about it really drives that point home. For that alone, this book is well worth the read.

There’s two part of the book that didn’t hold up well. Firstly, it was written in the 1960s, and has a lot to say about the future of socialism, with the unfortunate outcome of pointing to the USSR and North Korea as shining examples of development. That… aged poorly.

The other issue is a lot more mechanical, and hopefully just an issue of the specific edition I was reading: it had, very clearly, been run through OCR software at some point, and was reprinted based on that without an editing pass. It’s a tad headache-inducing to have to deliberately blur your vision at times so you can figure out what word was supposed to be there, based on the shape, instead of whatever word actually wound up there. Whatever OCR software was used, it was very bad at distinguishing between the characters f/l/t, as well as c/e, and the editing pass appears to have been “paste it into Word, hit ‘spell check,’ accept the first suggestion for everything.” Not great, Bob!

All in all, I found this to be an interesting read, and can heartily recommend it. Maybe… avoid this specific edition, though.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“His Majesty’s Airship”

S.C. Gwynne

The extent of my knowledge of dirigibles, prior to reading this book, basically consisted of “they’re cool in steampunk, the Hindenburg going up like a struck match the size of a building made sure we don’t use them in real life, and I kinda hope we’ll be able to make them actually viable with modern technology sometime soon.” Which is, to be fair, probably between one and two more pieces of knowledge above average for the topic. I stand by two of them, and the third is also fairly accurate, but now the Hindenburg thing is supplemented with “it wasn’t even remotely the first time something like that happened, it was just the first time it happened on camera.” And boy, did that ever make a difference. Turns out it’s a lot less visceral to read about an airship crash than it is to watch it happen.

For a quick summary, rigid airships looked like they had a solid chance at being the New Big Thing for a while there. Zeppelin had some entertaining failures, weirdly became a national hero for having stuff go catastrophically wrong but in a way that everyone could be jingoistic about, and then The Great War began and it was already pretty dang obvious that air superiority was very important. Hey, look, this guy has been building these giant airship things, and had specifically envisioned them as being terror weapons the whole time! And so began the first blitz of London.

The word “terror” in there is doing a lot of important work, because as just regular ol’ weapon weapons, they were kinda hilariously inept. They had no idea where they were, most of the time—there’s a great line in the book about how they missed London (and valuable military/industrial targets) so often that people were starting to wonder if they were deliberately attacking crops in the fields. Hint: they were not, it’s just that airships are hard to steer.

War ends, British empire is the biggest empire to ever empire, and boy howdy would it be nice if we could just fly everywhere instead of waiting for boats to go the long way, eh? Politics happens, the British government throws millions of pounds at developing their airship, R101, it makes a triumphant first flight! No, wait, scratch that, it makes a triumphant first departure, heading off for a journey to show off just how fast you can get to India from London with an airship, and makes it as far as… France before it, quite literally, crashes and burns.

All told, the story is quite interesting. Some historians try to position themselves as without bias; Gwynne… does not. I had to copy down a quote from where he really shows what he thinks of this whole ‘airship’ concept: “In spite of what appears in retrospect to be excruciatingly obvious—the lethal impracticality of the big rigids—the idea did not die, and airships did not disappear.” (80) Tell us how you really feel, mate!

I read through it being quite entertained by that stance, because as I said at the start, I’m optimistic that we may one day be able to make this technology work. Not to get too Diamond Age about it, but I kinda suspect that nanotechnology and possibly building, like, something like an aerogel but filled with hard vacuum would work better than “an amount of hydrogen that could power a city for a day or two”. The fact that their best storage mechanism was cow intestines also says something about the sum total of manufacturing technology available at the time.

Really, a lot of what went wrong has more to do with management than technology. The head of the program, a politician who had built his entire brand around this project? Not gonna be super excited with delaying things for safety. The manager of the program who’s supposed to report to him being the kind of guy who passes on all the good news and buries the bad? Bad thing to have around when the thing you’re building is a gigantic bomb that you shove passengers into.

This was, overall, a very readable history book. I had a good time going through it, even if I did roll my eyes occasionally at the author and frequently at the people running the show.1 It’s worth your time to hear about this whole fascinating bit of history that tends to get forgotten by the flashier events that happened around it. Check it out.2

  1. Seriously, after the second time that the ‘admiral’ drunkenly overrules the captain of the ship and insists that he will do the landing, and then does the airship equivalent of scraping off the landing gear—maybe fire the guy? Just a thought. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Dairy Free”

Angela Litzinger

I went through this in two sittings, and sorta split it into the two key components as I was doing so.

The first part is, broadly, the ‘introduction,’ but while there’s a couple pages of usual “introduction to this book” type material, what it really works out to is an introduction to the dairy-free life. And, really, it’s the thing I wish I’d had available when I was just starting to figure out this “if I stop eating any dairy I’ll stop being sick all the time!” thing. There’s a line in there about taking six months to just sorta get used to it and start feeling confident in doing so, and that really struck me, sitting as I am on the other side of that line. Having that reassurance back at the beginning would’ve been helpful, as well as the general tips and tricks on how to do it. Although, admittedly, this is written from the perspective of someone with a severe dairy allergy, whereas I’ve just got a severe cow’s-milk intolerance, so some of the things I can ignore. I don’t need a recipe for a non-dairy goat cheese, both because I don’t actually care for the categorical ‘goat cheese’ taste… and I can just eat actual goat cheese, so long as it’s fully goat and not a blend.

The second part is the recipes, and this is where I played myself, a bit. “I’ll just read a little bit of this before bed,” I thought. Like a fool. Instead of some relaxing browsing to wind down, I instead sat there jotting notes about which recipes I’d like to try and what pages they were on. There was an audible gasp when I got to the ricotta recipe, and when I later got to béchamel I drew an arrow across the page, an excited “lasagne!!!” for emphasis. Because whilst I have mostly gotten used to this whole thing, the process of—to paraphrase the book—mourning the foods I grew up eating and can no longer have would certainly have been easier if there were slightly-higher-effort versions of some of my favorite comfort foods that I can still eat.

So hey, this is a super cool cookbook! If you’ve got a dairy allergy, or intolerance, or want to go vegan but just can’t survive without ice cream or lasagne, check it out.1 There’s a great deal of gluten-free and nut-free variations, too, making it a great resource for anyone trying to maintain an allergy-sensitive kitchen.

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Coming into the Country”

John McPhee

There are three ‘books’ within this book, and each tell a different part of McPhee’s experience of Alaska. The first is what feels, to me, the most like McPhee: out in the wilds, on a trip with folks who know the area better than he does, and generally just writing up how he felt going through that experience. I quite enjoyed some of his remarks about this one — Alaska, being so remote, seems to have worried him more than, say, the Grand Canyon did. “I am mildly nervous about that, but then I am mildly nervous about a lot of things.” (13)

I laughed more, in reading this, than I recall doing with his other books. Maybe I’m just starting to get more of his sense of humor, or maybe I just don’t tend to remember the comedy in comparison to everything else. But there’s little lines that just caught me, like “In a sense—in the technical sense that we had next to no idea where we were—we were lost.” (44)

The second book is about the project to relocate the capital of Alaska from Juneau. While reading it, I refused to let myself actually check my memory to see if Juneau is, in fact, still the capital of Alaska. Spoilers! I felt a sudden kinship to Charles Marohn as McPhee shared his opinion of Anchorage: “Almost all Americans would recognize Anchorage, because Anchorage is that part of any city where the city has burst its seams and extruded Colonel Sanders.” (130) Which really evokes an image!

The last part, the titular essay, is the longest of the three. In short, he went up into “the Country” — the most remote part of Alaska, Yukon territory — and hung around the town of Eagle, getting to know, so far as I can tell, everyone there, and in the neighboring “Indian Village.” This is the part that’s going to keep rattling around in my head for a long time, I expect. So much of it still feels entirely relevant today—it’s that same sense of encroached-upon white entitlement that continues to shape American politics. You have the people living in Eagle, complaining about the Native Claims Settlement Act, because it means the land surrounding their town now belongs to the natives… without a thought for the fact that said natives have been there a hell of a lot longer. (Nor is there a moment’s thought, by them, about the fact that, thanks to the “everything within five miles of a (white) town remains the property of that town” clause means that the native village, itself, is legally the property of the town of Eagle.) You get miners, incensed that the EPA wants them to install settlement ponds so that their mine tailings will stop killing all the fish downstream, repeating over and over that they’re ‘not doing anything nature doesn’t do’… which they have to shout over the sound of the hydraulic mining rig that’s applying 10,000 years of erosion per minute to a formerly-pristine valley.

While McPhee himself winds up with an appreciation for the folks eking out a living in the Yukon territory, I must admit that I didn’t. I am, admittedly, reading about them 50 years later, with the changed modern perspective, but all it does is remind me of the staggering selfishness inherent in that whole survivalist/libertarian style. But then, at least one person he interviewed agrees… about the folks living outside Eagle, at least:

“They are unrealistic romanticists, and some are just plain stupid. They are devoid of values—materialistic, selfish people. We are constituents of a society grounded in law. They flout the law to live their romantic life style. They harvest moose, bear, fish—whatever they can get their hands on that they can fit in a pot—without regard for season or for sex, or for the law. Anything that walks, crawls, flies, or swims is fair game to them. They are interlopers. Every time they kill a moose or bear and toss it int the pot to feed their dogs, they deprive me of the opportunity to see that moose or bear. When I see something, I leave it to the person after me to see. Frankly, it just tees me off. I consider them to be a god-damned curse.”

“They’re a public nuisance.” (263)

As ever, I love a McPhee book. This one, in particular, feels like it’s of its time, anchored in the sweeping changes coming through Alaska in the 1970s; like any of the others, though, it doesn’t feel dated but rather like a time capsule. A flashbulb memory of a time and place, frozen so that we can visit it. Go check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Culture Code”

Daniel Coyle

I’ve been enjoying that the book club at work seems to bounce back and forth between books that are Very Programmer-Oriented and things that aren’t at all specific to programming. This time, it’s the latter, despite the word ‘code’ in the title: The Culture Code is, in fact, more of a management book.

The focus is, as you might expect, on culture. What is a culture of success/productivity/various-other-positive-buzzwords? How do you create one?

Very broadly, the answers are: “one in which people feel safe and can feel vulnerable, and do is in the pursuit of a shared goal”. As for creating that environment, well, that’s what the rest of the book is about. And, generally, the tips boil down to “show people that these things are the case.” Make people feel safe by showing that they belong, that they are part of the in-group of this culture. Demonstrate that it’s okay to be vulnerable by making yourself vulnerable, showing your weaknesses. And reiterate the shared goal… mostly through use of little catchphrases, seems to be the advice there. It does feel a little trite, but then, having those little catchphrases repeated over and over does seem to hammer them into one’s head.

I actually did find there to be a good bit of value in this book, but in that “useful self-help book” way, where there’s the broad topic that you could’ve fit on an informational pamphlet, and then there’s the rest of the advice, which is scattered around in a way that feels almost like one of those little daily desk calendar things. My pull-quotes notebook lost several pages to this book.

So, overall, I found this a good book to read! I think it is, perhaps, uniquely well suited to be a Workplace Book Club read, and could happily suggest it as the first book for starting one of those up if you don’t have one already. Give the book a go.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“In the Beginning Was the Command Line”

Neal Stephenson

My coworker mentioned this to me as we were discussing Snow Crash and Diamond Age, and did a great job of selling it with the summary “Microsoft and Apple are competing car dealerships on opposite corners, and then over on the other side of the street there’s a hippie commune giving away tanks for free.” Which, yes, really is an extended metaphor in this essay, and it really does make sense in Stephenson’s telling of it.

I’ll warn you right now that the word “essay” is rather underselling it — even with the scroll bar over there to warn me, it took me far too long to realize quite how big a chunk of writing this piece is. It’s novella-length.1

And in that span, it covers a whole lot of ground. It’s the history of computation, dating from before “a computer” was a machine at all, all the way back to the electromechanical teletype machines connected to the telegraph system. It’s a discussion of the psychology and business of selling operating systems. It’s an exploration of human nature, and choice, and culture. And it contains some truly wonderful lines, though my favorite standout quote has to be:

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.

There are parts of this essay which are certainly dated. There are parts that seem utterly incorrect, in retrospect. There are also things that feel eerily prescient. Stephenson has always been that kind of wonderful science fiction writer, able to pull things together like that.

So hey, take an afternoon, and go read about the command line. Stanford has helpfully provided it online.

  1. Specifically, 36,329 words. How did I check that? With the wc command-line tool that Stephenson mentions — that is, in fact, the exact part of the essay where I went “I wonder how long this whole thing is?” ↩
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Review

“How To”

Randall Munroe

This book is an exercise in decontextualization. It’s what happens if you take a Roko’s Basilisk style AI and ask it questions; you get things that are technically correct answers, but have left out all the context of, broadly, “being a human.” And, as always with Munroe, it’s hilarious.

For a general idea of what the book is like, one of the early chapters is “how to throw a pool party,” and consists almost entirely of instructions on how to build a pool. Said instructions include notes about how thick you would have to make the walls of an above-ground pool so that the water doesn’t burst out—if you were using Gruyere as the wall-building material. As it explains how the best bet for rapidly filling a pool, ignoring all costs, is to order tens of thousands of plastic water bottles and an industrial shredder—conveniently, the industrial-grade ones include the ability to separate out plastic shreds from liquids, which is probably quite useful to recycling facilities, and in the case of filling a pool means you should install it backwards—there’s an aside about the fact that using an atomic bomb is not an effective way to open water bottles.1

There’s also some neat guest appearances; Chris Hadfield answers a great many questions about… let’s call it flying a plane, as that’s the inspiration for most of the questions. Serena Williams makes an appearance, demonstrating that in the event of the drone apocalypse, she doesn’t need to worry.2

As with all of his books, “How To” is a delight to read, and I highly recommend it. Check it out.3

  1. One of my favorite jokes used in the book is the repeated instances of “this is a ridiculous question, and so of course the United States military studied it during the Cold War.” ↩
  2. I spent the entire chapter with this tweet stuck in my head: Screenshot of a quote tweet. The original tweet, from YouGov, reads “One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams”. The quote tweet, from Jason, reads “Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She'd be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly” ↩
  3. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
Categories
Review

“SPQR”

Mary Beard

Very much inspired by my reading of the history of the Byzantine Empire, I realized that I also don’t know much about the history of Rome aside from the bits that you pick up by cultural osmosis, growing up here in the West. Bookstores are great for things like this, where you don’t know what specifically you want to read, but you do know the general topic—just wander over to that section and browse, and see what catches your eye! Which is how I arrived at this book.

I mostly enjoyed the read. I filled five or six pages of a memo book with quotes as I was reading, things that stood out to me, which I somewhat did with the thought in mind of pulling some of them for writing this review, but now that I’m doing the writing, I don’t think I’m actually going to follow through on the idea. Suffice it to say, it was well-written, and generally an enjoyable read. Easier to read than Norwich’s work was, at least, aided in part by being a single volume instead of three, and thus feeling like more of a general overview than the curriculum notes for a four-year course of study.

The reason that I don’t want to go for my notebook, though, is that I have one main thought that I’ve kept circling around for the entire second half of the book: the study of history is not neutral. By studying, and teaching, and writing about history, we impose our own views upon it; we, as humans, are not able to view any objective truth. We are subjective creatures. And this thought kept circling around and around in my mind from the moment the word “friend” was used.

Friendship is a fine thing! Lots of people have friends, it’s one of those fundamental human experiences that historians should keep an eye out for. It is not, however, the only thing, and sometimes calling someone a ‘friend’ is a disservice. In this case, when the source material you are citing is a man referring to another man as his “same-gender partner”, discarding that in favor of “friend” is wrong. We have a word for that: erasure.

There is a reason that a through line in anti-LGBTQ sentiment is “these things didn’t used to exist,” and that reason isn’t that said things actually didn’t used to exist; it is that historians over the last couple of centuries have gone to great lengths to pretend they didn’t, to bury or destroy any evidence that they did. And yes, there is an argument to be made that we shouldn’t try to paint historical figures with our modern terminology—but then, that argument only seems to come up when we’re talking about whether or not a historical figure can be called queer.

Historians are, historically, extremely eager to find any possible heterosexual explanation for things, even when doing so requires extensive leaps in logic. Some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for men? Well, you see, back then cultural morays about how much affection men could platonically show other men were different. Alexander the Great was so distraught at the death of the man he loved that he demanded he be deified, and that when he himself died, he be buried in the same tomb? They were just the best of friends. President Buchanan was so visibly in a relationship with Senator King that their nicknames in DC were “Uncle Fancy and Aunt Nancy”? Say, is that is why my history classes sorta just didn’t talk about President Buchanan at all? Nevermind, don’t worry, there’s a perfectly straight explanation for this — it’s just gals being pals.

Once that thought was in my mind, it was hard to let go of it and not read this book in a queer-history light, and boy, does it ever not hold up well to that sort of inspection. The only clear mentions of homosexuality at all are a passing remark about a Senatorial insult being someone ‘enjoying nubile slave boys to an uncouth amount,’ and some mention of Hadrian—which is itself rather unavoidable when talking about Hadrian.1

So, here’s my summary: this is a good overview of Roman history, but it is, like all studies of history, flawed. It got me to break my usual “no writing in books” rule, and correct the word “friend” to “boyfriend” out of something akin to spite; but it also gave me pages of interesting quotes about Rome and the Empire, and taught me a great deal that I didn’t know. Plusses and minuses. It’s worth a read.2

  1. Although, having said that it’s unavoidable, I immediately noticed that the Wikipedia info-box on Hadrian lists three different burial sites for him, but somehow doesn’t have room for the name of the man he loved so much that he had thousands of statues carved in his image all across the Roman Empire, so, modern historians haven’t improved. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩