December 2004

Fallaci, Oriana. La Force de la Raison. Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2004. ISBN 2-268-05264-8.

If, fifty years from now, there still are historians permitted to chronicle the civilisation of Western Europe (which, if the trends described in this book persist, may not be the way to bet), Fallaci may be seen as a figure like Churchill in the 1930s, willing to speak the truth about a clear and present danger, notwithstanding the derision and abuse doing so engenders from those who prefer to live the easy life, avoid difficult decisions, and hope things will just get better. In this, and her earlier La rage et l'orgueil (June 2002), Fallaci warns, in stark and uncompromising terms verging occasionally on a rant, of the increasing Islamicisation of Western Europe, and decries the politicians, church figures, and media whose inaction or active efforts aid and abet it. She argues that what is at risk is nothing less than European civilisation itself, which Islamic figures openly predict among themselves eventually being transformed through the inexorable power of demographics and immigration into an Islamic Republic of “Eurabia”. The analysis of the “natural alliance” between the extreme political left and radical Islam is brilliant, and brings to mind L'Islam révolutionnaire (December 2003) by terrorist “Carlos the Jackal” (Ilich Ramírez Sánchez). There is a shameful little piece of paper tipped into the pages of the book by the publisher, who felt no need for a disclaimer when earlier publishing the screed by mass murderer “Carlos”. In language worthy of Pierre Laval, they defend its publication in the interest of presenting a «différent» viewpoint, and ask readers to approach it “critically, in light of the present-day international context” (my translation).

 

Marasco, Joe. The Software Development Edge. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 2005. ISBN 0-321-32131-6.

I read this book in manuscript form when it was provisionally titled The Psychology of Software Development.

 

Godwin, Robert ed. Freedom 7: The NASA Mission Reports. Burlington, Ontario, Canada: Apogee Books, 2000. ISBN 1-896522-80-7.

This volume in the superb Apogee NASA Mission Reports series covers Alan Shepard's May 5th, 1961 suborbital flight in Freedom 7, the first U.S. manned space flight. Included are the press kit for the mission, complete transcripts of the post-flight debriefings and in-flight communications, and proceedings of a conference held in June 1961 to report mission results. In addition, the original 1958 request for astronaut volunteers (before it was decided that only military test pilots need apply) is reproduced, along with the press conference introducing the Mercury astronauts, which Tom Wolfe so vividly (and accurately) described in The Right Stuff. A bonus CD-ROM includes the complete in-flight films of the instrument panel and astronaut, a 30 minute NASA documentary about the flight, and the complete NASA official history of Project Mercury, This New Ocean, as a PDF document. There are few if any errors in the transcriptions of the documents. The caption for the photograph of Freedom 7 on the second page of colour plates makes the common error of describing its heat shield as “ablative fiberglass”. In fact, as stated on page 145, suborbital missions used a beryllium heat sink; only orbital capsules were equipped with the ablative shield.

 

Lundstrom, David E. A Few Good Men from Univac. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. ISBN 0-262-12120-4.

The author joined UNIVAC in 1955 and led the testing of the UNIVAC II which, unlike the UNIVAC I, was manufactured in the St. Paul area. (This book uses “Univac” as the name of the company and its computers; in my experience and in all the documents in my collection, the name, originally an acronym for “UNIVersal Automatic Computer”, was always written in all capitals: “UNIVAC”; that is the convention I shall use here.) He then worked on the development of the Navy Tactical Data System (NTDS) shipboard computer, which was later commercialised as the UNIVAC 490 real-time computer. The UNIVAC 1107 also used the NTDS circuit design and I/O architecture. In 1963, like many UNIVAC alumni, Lundstrom crossed the river to join Control Data, where he worked until retiring in 1985. At Control Data he was responsible for peripherals, terminals, and airline reservation system development. It was predictable but sad to observe how Control Data, founded by a group of talented innovators to escape the stifling self-destructive incompetence of UNIVAC management, rapidly built up its own political hierarchy which chased away its own best people, including Seymour Cray. It's as if at a board meeting somebody said, “Hey, we're successful now! Let's build a big office tower and fill it up with idiots and politicians to keep the technical geniuses from getting anything done.” Lundstrom provides an authentic view from the inside of the mainframe computer business over a large part of its history. His observations about why technology transfer usually fails and the destruction wreaked on morale by incessant reorganisations and management shifts in direction are worth pondering. Lundstrom's background is in hardware. In chapter 13, before describing software, he cautions that “Professional programmers are going to disagree violently with what I say.” Well, this professional programmer certainly did, but it's because most of what he goes on to say is simply wrong. But that's a small wart on an excellent, insightful, and thoroughly enjoyable book. This book is out of print; used copies are generally available but tend to be expensive—you might want to keep checking over a period of months as occasionally a bargain will come around.

 

Lileks, James. Interior Desecrations: Hideous Homes from the Horrible '70s. New York: Crown Publishers, 2004. ISBN 1-4000-4640-8.

After turning your tastebuds inside out with The Gallery of Regrettable Food (April 2004), Lileks now tackles what passed for home decoration in the 1970s. Seldom will you encounter a book which makes you ask “What were they thinking?” so many times. It makes you wonder which aspects of the current scene will look as weird twenty or thirty years from now. Additional material which came to hand after the book was published may be viewed on the author's Web site.

 

Bovard, James. The Bush Betrayal. New York: Macmillan, 2004. ISBN 1-4039-6727-X.

Having dissected the depredations of Clinton and Socialist Party A against the liberty of U.S. citizens in Feeling Your Pain (May 2001), Bovard now turns his crypto-libertarian gaze toward the ravages committed by Bush and Socialist Party B in the last four years. Once again, Bovard demonstrates his extraordinary talent in penetrating the fog of government propaganda to see the crystalline absurdity lurking within. On page 88 we discover that under the rules adopted by Colorado pursuant to the “No Child Left Behind Act”, a school with 1000 students which had a mere 179 or fewer homicides per year would not be classified as “persistently dangerous”, permitting parents of the survivors to transfer their children to less target-rich institutions.

On page 187, we encounter this head-scratching poser asked of those who wished to become screeners for the “Transportation Security Administration”:

Question: Why is it important to screen bags for IEDs [Improvised Explosive Devices]?

1. The IED batteries could leak and damage other passenger bags.
2. The wires in the IED could cause a short to the aircraft wires.
3. IEDs can cause loss of lives, property, and aircraft.
4. The ticking timer could worry other passengers.

I wish I were making this up. The inspector general of the “Homeland Security Department” declined to say how many of the “screeners” who intimidate citizens, feel up women, and confiscate fingernail clippers and putatively dangerous and easily-pocketed jewelry managed to answer this one correctly.

I call Bovard a “crypto-libertarian” because he clearly bases his analysis on libertarian principles, yet rarely observes that any polity with unconstrained government power and sedated sheeple for citizens will end badly, regardless of who wins the elections. As with his earlier books, sources for this work are exhaustively documented in 41 pages of endnotes.

 

Holmes, W. J. Double-Edged Secrets. Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, [1979] 1998. ISBN 1-55750-324-9.

This is the story of U.S. Naval Intelligence in the Pacific theatre during World War II, told by somebody who was there—Holmes served in the inner sanctum of Naval Intelligence at Pearl Harbor from before the Japanese attack in 1941 through the end of the war in 1945. Most accounts of naval intelligence in the war with Japan focus on cryptanalysis and use of the “Ultra” information it yielded from Japanese radio intercepts. Holmes regularly worked with this material, and with the dedicated and sometimes eccentric individuals who produced it, but his focus is broader—on intelligence as a whole, of which cryptanalysis was only a part. The “product” delivered by his shop to warfighters in the fleet was painstakingly gleaned not only from communications intercepts, but also traffic analysis, direction finding, interpretation of aerial and submarine reconnaissance photos, interrogation of prisoners, translations of captured documents, and a multitude of other sources. In preparing for the invasion of Okinawa, naval intelligence tracked down an eighty-year-old seashell expert who provided information on landing beaches from his pre-war collecting expedition there. The total material delivered by intelligence for the Okinawa operation amounted to 127 tons of paper. This book provides an excellent feel for the fog of war, and how difficult it is to discern enemy intentions from the limited and conflicting information at hand. In addition, the difficult judgement calls which must be made between the risk of disclosing sources of information versus getting useful information into the hands of combat forces on a timely basis is a theme throughout the narrative. If you're looking for more of a focus on cryptanalysis and a discussion of the little-known British contribution to codebreaking in the Pacific war, see Michael Smith's The Emperor's Codes (August 2001).

 

Sharpe, Tom. Wilt in Nowhere. London: Hutchinson, 2004. ISBN 0-09-179965-1.

Tom Sharpe is, in my opinion, the the greatest living master of English farce. Combining Wodehouse's sense of the absurd and Waugh's acid-penned black humour, his novels make you almost grateful for the worst day you've ever had, as it's guaranteed to be a sunny stroll through the park compared to what his characters endure. I read most of Sharpe's novels to date in the 1980s, and was delighted to discover he's still going strong, bringing the misadventures of Henry Wilt up to date in this side-splitting book. The “release the hounds” episode in chapter 13 makes me laugh out loud every time I read it. A U.S. edition is scheduled for publication in June 2005. There are numerous references to earlier episodes in the Wilt saga, but this book can be enjoyed without having read them. If you'd like to enjoy them in order, they're Wilt, The Wilt Alternative, Wilt on High, and then the present volume.

 

Nisbett, Richard E. The Geography of Thought. New York: Free Press, 2003. ISBN 0-7432-5535-6.

It's a safe bet that the vast majority of Westerners who have done business in East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea), and Asians who've done business in the West have come to the same conclusion: “Asians and Westerners think differently.” They may not say as much, at least not to the general public, for fear of being thought intolerant, but they believe it on the evidence of their own experience nonetheless.

Psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and his colleagues in China and Korea have been experimentally investigating the differences in Asian and Western thought processes, and their results are summarised in this enlightening book (with citations of the original research). Their work confirms the conventional wisdom—Westerners view the world through a telephoto lens, applying logic and reductionism to find the “one best way”, while Asians see a wide-angle view, taking into account the context of events and seeking a middle way between extremes and apparent contradictions—with experimental effect sizes which are large, robust, and reliable.

Present-day differences in Asian and Western thought are shown to be entirely consistent with those of ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, implying that whatever the cause, it is stable over long spans of history. Although experiments with infants provide some evidence for genetic predisposition, Nisbett suspects that a self-reinforcing homeostatic feedback loop between culture, language, and society is responsible for most of the difference in thought processes. The fact that Asian-Americans and Westernised Asians in Hong Kong and Singapore test between Asian and Western extremes provides evidence for this. (The fact that Asians excel at quintessentially Western intellectual endeavours such as abstract mathematics and theoretical science would, it seems to me, exclude most simple-minded explanations based on inherited differences in brain wiring.)

This work casts doubt upon Utopian notions of an End of History in which Western-style free markets and democracy are adopted by all nations and cultures around the globe. To a large extent, such a scenario assumes all people think like Westerners and share the same values, an assumption to which Nisbett's research offers persuasive counter examples. This may be for the best; both Western and Asian styles of thought are shown as predisposing those applying them to distinct, yet equally dangerous, fallacies. Perhaps a synthesis of these (and other) ways of thinking is a sounder foundation for a global society than the Western model alone.