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The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
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Technology

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Beyond nerd chic We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity’s relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate a crop of recent books that cover the past, present, and future of high-tech industries.

Case in point: Folks can launch their own satellites now. One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven, author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million.

Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company’s inner workings from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson’s entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital’s culture of discovery with the feudal, unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts.

What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital’s success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science.

If Orbital’s story offers inspiration, another new book offers exactly the opposite. When you see an airplane crashing from a clear blue sky, you just have to watch. When you encounter one of the great triumph-to-disaster stories in the history of American business the rise and fall of Apple Computer Inc. you just have to read on.

Michael S. Malone’s Infinite Loop: How The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (Currency/Doubleday, $27.50, 0385486847) is the stuff of a corporate horror movie, replete with moments of terrible Scooby-Doo inevitability. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak might as well be the teenaged couple wandering through the spooky factory, about to pry open the icebox door to see what’s making the noise inside. You want to put hands over eyes and scream: Wozniak, no! Don’t give away blocks of your founders’ stock to 30 buddies on a whim! Jobs, no! Don’t shoot down CEO John Sculley’s idea of making the Macintosh IBM-compatible! This is the tale of a company that had it all and blew it. Early in the personal computer age, Apple had superior technology on its side. Its customers displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the creative energy that made U.S. high-tech industries the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life. Success thoroughly ruined their magic and nearly ruined the company.

Malone tries to cut through the Silicon Valley mythology that now surrounds the company’s beginnings in the garage of Jobs’s Santa Clara, California home, and he makes a special effort to recognize key players in its first years who have not shared the limelight since. Malone was an insider for part of Apple’s early journey and covered the company as a journalist at other times. He brings to this account an authority and an evident big-picture understanding that lay to rest any conflict-of-interest concerns. Still, his disgust with Steve Jobs fairly oozes from these pages. There is a grudging tone to his rather passing acknowledgment that a more grown-up Jobs (now a wise old man of 43) has presided over quite a turnaround at Apple since he engineered a boardroom coup and returned to the helm in 1997. The book went to press in October 1998, just as the new iMac line of PCs had begun to rack up some of Apple’s best sales in years. Since then the numbers have made a Merlin of Jobs once more. Apple’s profits are way up, and the company said in April that it had doubled its share of the retail desktop market over the past year.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Macmillan Computer Publishing, $25, 0672316498), Alan Cooper has a message for fellow technologists: Get human.

A much-lauded software author and designer, Cooper sets out in this book to make the business case for interaction design. Interaction design is a lofty-sounding term for what ought to be an obvious concept: making things (such as computer software and hardware) that people can easily use.

Such a simple truth has eluded Silicon Valley’s best minds, in Cooper’s view. And he says it doesn’t have to be that way. Designers don’t have to make guinea pigs out of customers, rolling out half-baked versions of computer products and then relying on users’ complaints as the basis to tweak subsequent editions.

Cooper’s book is a plea for technology’s high priests to meet the masses halfway. Sure, people in business must come to terms with bits and bytes, he argues but those who turn ones and zeroes into screen icons need to do a much better job of focusing on the needs of computer users.

Inmates’ main audience is the general business reader, for whom the book is a glimpse at how the technologists do their thing and how they could do it better, making the lives of computer users easier and making companies that depend on technology more successful.

Cooper offers an alternative to the Microsoft way of doing things. In fact, Bill Gates makes a case against interaction design in Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (written with Collins Hemingway; Warner Books, $30, 0446525685; Little Brown, Abridged, $24.98, 1570427526; Time Warner Audio, Unabridged, $49.98, 1570427534). You’re usually better off tackling smaller processes and building on them, Gates argues, and then improv[ing] the solution as you get user feedback. To many of the millions who work with Microsoft products every day, user feedback sounds like a euphemism for the anguished squawks emitted when a program performs an illegal operation and shuts itself down, or when that annoying little paperclip guy pops up on screen to ask whether you know how to write a letter.

But the Microsoft way is here to stay, and, on balance, that may be a good thing. More than anyone else, Gates has brought computer technology into the everyday lives of people the world over. One can politely debate him, as Cooper does, or hate him but not ignore him. He is the Alpha Nerd.

Business @ The Speed of Thought lays out Gates’s vision of the near future in worldwide business and society. His underlying message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For all the productivity gains registered by businesses in the past decade through the skillful deployment of technology, the hot-wired organizations of the 21st century hold the promise of even greater progress. The book is full of real-world examples of companies whose digital nervous systems are making them more efficient and profitable by improving the flow of information among decision-makers at all levels.

Not all of these systems are necessarily produced by Microsoft. Gates uses his company’s inner workings to show the processes that go into digitizing a business, but he also candidly discusses Microsoft’s, and his own, failures of strategic vision in the past most notably its tardiness in embracing the internet’s potential.

Gates makes a persuasive argument that technology can be a liberating force. In businesses, improved digital information systems can empower employees to move beyond carrying out orders and take more initiative on their own. Beyond business in education, government, and elsewhere in society the same systems can benefit the common good.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).

Beyond nerd chic We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity's relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate…

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

H.W. Brands

Interview by Anne Bartlett

In Our First Civil War, historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands brings to life the families, communities and tribes torn apart by opposing beliefs during the American Revolution.

Our First Civil War is a concise history of the American Revolution told largely through first-person accounts from letters, diaries and memoirs written by the Founders, prominent Loyalists and other lesser-known participants. Why did you take that approach? Were any of the documents difficult to find and research?
I myself am most engaged by primary sources: the words of the men and women who lived and made history. So it comes naturally for me to write history that way—and indications are that my readers like it.

As for documents, as the digital world expands, historical research becomes easier. There was almost nothing I wanted to see for this book, by way of letters, diaries and the like, that wasn’t available online.

You wrote The First American about Benjamin Franklin 20 years ago. Why have you now come back to the American Revolution, in a book that again looks closely at Franklin, among others?
While recently writing about the Civil War (of the 1860s), I remembered how divisive the Revolutionary War had been. And with the civil war model in mind, I took a new look and discovered how apt a model it is for viewing that earlier conflict.

You devote a considerable amount of the book to Franklin’s evolution from believing in a transatlantic British empire to his firm advocacy for independence. How was he pivotal to the Revolution’s ultimate success? 
No single person is indispensable in something as large as the American Revolution. But Franklin comes close. He was a great fan of the British Empire until the people who ran that empire treated him like a foolish and venal provincial. He then concluded there was no future for people like him within the empire. George Washington had a similar experience. They were both unlikely revolutionaries, but British folly provoked them beyond forgiveness.

Read our starred review of ‘Our First Civil War.’

Some readers may be shocked to learn that Franklin’s son William was not only a prominent Loyalist but also someone who instigated what can be seen as a Loyalist terror campaign late in the war. Why did he take such a different path from his father?
Benjamin Franklin had revolted against his own parents and against the theocrats who ran Boston when Ben was young. William Franklin came to his independence of mind honestly. In addition, where Ben was abused by the British authorities, William found his honor and honesty called into question by American rebels. From his position, loyalty to Britain was the only possible course.

You write about how people of relatively similar backgrounds and early beliefs, like Franklin and the Loyalists Thomas Hutchinson and Joseph Galloway, ultimately developed sharply different positions on independence from Britain. How much of their divergence was ideological, and how much derived from personal experience? I think, for example, of Hutchinson losing his home to the vandalism of a Patriot mob.
Every decision for or against independence was deeply personal. In some cases it was ideological, too. In almost no cases was it simply ideological. To put your life on the line in revolt requires a powerful emotional commitment.

Historians who want to examine the role of women in the Revolution often focus on Abigail Adams. In contrast, you tell us about a Philadelphia Loyalist named Grace Growden Galloway. Why was she interesting to you?
Grace Galloway suffered grievously as a Loyalist in Philadelphia, primarily from the Patriots, who confiscated her property, but also from abandonment by her Loyalist husband, who had to flee for his life to Britain. Yet Grace discovered in her sufferings and abandonment a personal freedom she had never imagined.

“Every decision for or against independence was deeply personal.”

George Washington and Benjamin Franklin wrote often about how the British were treating Americans no better than “slaves”—obviously a sore point for both. But neither seemed to address the existence of slavery in the colonies, including, in Washington’s case, his own possession of enslaved workers. Did they really not see the contradiction between their beliefs and the injustice in their own system?
Both recognized the injustices of slavery, but they didn’t see enslaved people as their social and political equals; almost no white people at that time did. In any case, they believed that before enslaved people could be freed, the United States would have to win its freedom from Britain. The revolution in rights that they were waging wouldn’t be won all at once.

How does your focus on Mohawk leader Joseph Brant address the Native American side of the Revolution’s story?
Brant and the Mohawks faced the same question everyone did at that time: Which side will you choose? Brant had good relations with the British and leaned in their direction. He also supposed his tribe and the larger Iroquois Confederacy would have an easier time dealing with Britain than with an independent United States. Some of his fellows agreed with him; others did not. The war split tribes just as it did families and communities among white Americans.

Among the other fascinating but lesser-known characters in the book are two enslaved men on different sides of the war, Boston King and Jeffrey Brace. Why would enslaved people have fought for either side?
Boston King accepted the British offer of freedom to those enslaved by rebel masters if they crossed lines and came to the British side. He took a gamble: that the Patriots wouldn’t capture him, that the British would win, and that they would honor their promise at war’s end. Although the side he chose—the British—lost the war, King won his freedom and evacuated to Canada with the British at war’s end. 

Jeffrey Brace went to war on the Patriot side because his enslaver did and took Brace along. Brace noted the irony of fighting, enslaved, for his master’s freedom, yet didn’t see an appealing alternative. The Patriot side won, with Brace still enslaved, but his master decided Brace had earned his freedom and let him go.

“As worrisome as the current divisions in American society are, this country has survived much worse.”

At times in the book, it seems like Washington was desperately trying not to lose to the British until Franklin had negotiated an aid treaty with France. French ships were crucial to the outcome at Yorktown. Did the French really win the American Revolution for us?
French help was crucial, but France was fighting not for American independence but to weaken Britain. For a time, the interests of France and the United States coincided. Franklin and Washington capitalized on that coincidence, to America’s benefit.

Another surprise for some readers will be how restive and even mutinous the Patriot army was, to the point that the safety of Congress was under genuine threat. What was Washington’s role in turning that around, and how was that important for the nation’s development?
Mutiny—its threat and its actuality—was a real danger during the Revolutionary War. Many other generals have taken it upon themselves to assume political power when the civil government seems feckless, as the Continental Congress often did during the Revolution. But not Washington. His authority compelled the mutineers to stand down. Quite possibly no other person could have accomplished that feat. Had he not done so, the United States might have gone the way of revolutionary France, into dictatorship.

What do you hope contemporary readers learn from this book, and how might it help them see our current political divisions in a different way?
As worrisome as the current divisions in American society are, this country has survived much worse.

Your 30-some books on American history are incredibly wide-ranging in their subjects, from capitalism to foreign policy, American presidents and recently John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. Is there a period you haven’t yet explored that you want to tackle?
I’m thinking about something on World War II.

Author photo by Marsha Miller.

H.W. Brands illuminates the intensely personal convictions of the Patriots and Loyalists during the American Revolution.
Technology

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Beyond nerd chic We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity’s relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate a crop of recent books that cover the past, present, and future of high-tech industries.

Case in point: Folks can launch their own satellites now. One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200948), author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million.

Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company’s inner workings from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson’s entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital’s culture of discovery with the feudal, unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts.

What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital’s success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science.

If Orbital’s story offers inspiration, another new book offers exactly the opposite. When you see an airplane crashing from a clear blue sky, you just have to watch. When you encounter one of the great triumph-to-disaster stories in the history of American business the rise and fall of Apple Computer Inc. you just have to read on.

Michael S. Malone’s Infinite Loop: How The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (Currency/Doubleday, $27.50, 0385486847) is the stuff of a corporate horror movie, replete with moments of terrible Scooby-Doo inevitability. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak might as well be the teenaged couple wandering through the spooky factory, about to pry open the icebox door to see what’s making the noise inside. You want to put hands over eyes and scream: Wozniak, no! Don’t give away blocks of your founders’ stock to 30 buddies on a whim! Jobs, no! Don’t shoot down CEO John Sculley’s idea of making the Macintosh IBM-compatible! This is the tale of a company that had it all and blew it. Early in the personal computer age, Apple had superior technology on its side. Its customers displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the creative energy that made U.S. high-tech industries the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life. Success thoroughly ruined their magic and nearly ruined the company.

Malone tries to cut through the Silicon Valley mythology that now surrounds the company’s beginnings in the garage of Jobs’s Santa Clara, California home, and he makes a special effort to recognize key players in its first years who have not shared the limelight since. Malone was an insider for part of Apple’s early journey and covered the company as a journalist at other times. He brings to this account an authority and an evident big-picture understanding that lay to rest any conflict-of-interest concerns. Still, his disgust with Steve Jobs fairly oozes from these pages. There is a grudging tone to his rather passing acknowledgment that a more grown-up Jobs (now a wise old man of 43) has presided over quite a turnaround at Apple since he engineered a boardroom coup and returned to the helm in 1997. The book went to press in October 1998, just as the new iMac line of PCs had begun to rack up some of Apple’s best sales in years. Since then the numbers have made a Merlin of Jobs once more. Apple’s profits are way up, and the company said in April that it had doubled its share of the retail desktop market over the past year.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Alan Cooper has a message for fellow technologists: Get human.

A much-lauded software author and designer, Cooper sets out in this book to make the business case for interaction design. Interaction design is a lofty-sounding term for what ought to be an obvious concept: making things (such as computer software and hardware) that people can easily use.

Such a simple truth has eluded Silicon Valley’s best minds, in Cooper’s view. And he says it doesn’t have to be that way. Designers don’t have to make guinea pigs out of customers, rolling out half-baked versions of computer products and then relying on users’ complaints as the basis to tweak subsequent editions.

Cooper’s book is a plea for technology’s high priests to meet the masses halfway. Sure, people in business must come to terms with bits and bytes, he argues but those who turn ones and zeroes into screen icons need to do a much better job of focusing on the needs of computer users.

Inmates’ main audience is the general business reader, for whom the book is a glimpse at how the technologists do their thing and how they could do it better, making the lives of computer users easier and making companies that depend on technology more successful.

Cooper offers an alternative to the Microsoft way of doing things. In fact, Bill Gates makes a case against interaction design in Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (written with Collins Hemingway; Warner Books, $30, 0446525685; Little Brown, Abridged, $24.98, 1570427526; Time Warner Audio, Unabridged, $49.98, 1570427534). You’re usually better off tackling smaller processes and building on them, Gates argues, and then improv[ing] the solution as you get user feedback. To many of the millions who work with Microsoft products every day, user feedback sounds like a euphemism for the anguished squawks emitted when a program performs an illegal operation and shuts itself down, or when that annoying little paperclip guy pops up on screen to ask whether you know how to write a letter.

But the Microsoft way is here to stay, and, on balance, that may be a good thing. More than anyone else, Gates has brought computer technology into the everyday lives of people the world over. One can politely debate him, as Cooper does, or hate him but not ignore him. He is the Alpha Nerd.

Business @ The Speed of Thought lays out Gates’s vision of the near future in worldwide business and society. His underlying message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For all the productivity gains registered by businesses in the past decade through the skillful deployment of technology, the hot-wired organizations of the 21st century hold the promise of even greater progress. The book is full of real-world examples of companies whose digital nervous systems are making them more efficient and profitable by improving the flow of information among decision-makers at all levels.

Not all of these systems are necessarily produced by Microsoft. Gates uses his company’s inner workings to show the processes that go into digitizing a business, but he also candidly discusses Microsoft’s, and his own, failures of strategic vision in the past most notably its tardiness in embracing the internet’s potential.

Gates makes a persuasive argument that technology can be a liberating force. In businesses, improved digital information systems can empower employees to move beyond carrying out orders and take more initiative on their own. Beyond business in education, government, and elsewhere in society the same systems can benefit the common good.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).

Beyond nerd chic We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity's relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate…
Biography

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Elvis as you’ve never seen him before When he was on the cusp of national stardom (the first Ed Sullivan Show performance was only months away), Elvis Presley was photographed by Marvin Israel who trailed the once-and-future-King in Dayton, Ohio, and later, back home in Memphis, for Seventeen magazine. Except for two photos, Israel’s shots (mostly candids) have never been published. That is, until now. Elvis Presley: 1956, edited and designed by Martin Harrison, is a paean to the New York School of photography, which means the images are gritty, black-and-white, and cutting-edge. For Presley fans, as well as photo buffs who may know Israel as an artist and art director who teamed with Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon on books and exhibitions, the book’s most vivid images are of the young rock ‘n’ roller emoting on stage. Further proof that there’s never been anyone else quite like the King.

Elvis as you've never seen him before When he was on the cusp of national stardom (the first Ed Sullivan Show performance was only months away), Elvis Presley was photographed by Marvin Israel who trailed the once-and-future-King in Dayton, Ohio, and later, back home in…

Technology

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Beyond nerd chic. We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity’s relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate a crop of recent books that cover the past, present, and future of high-tech industries.

Case in point: Folks can launch their own satellites now. One of the most inspiring business books of the past year tells how a little company full of big ideas, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., got into the business of putting commercial satellites into space. In Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-Up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven (Perseus Books, $26, 0738200948), author Gary Dorsey chronicles the progress of a pipe dream as it has evolved into a company with 1998 revenues of $734 million.

Orbital founder David Thompson gave Dorsey unfettered access to the company’s inner workings from the beginning of its efforts to design a commercially viable communications satellite in 1992 through the first launch in 1995. The author clearly identifies with Thompson’s entrepreneurial ardor, contrasting Orbital’s culture of discovery with the feudal, unimaginative culture of old-line aerospace companies addicted to government contracts.

What Dorsey lacks in objectivity, he makes up for in clarity. From his fly-on-the-wall perch, sitting in on company meetings and peering over the shoulders of workers in the lab, he has observed and distilled into concise prose the details that made Orbital’s success possible. Dorsey explains the technology behind the business so fluidly that it hardly seems like rocket science.

If Orbital’s story offers inspiration, another new book offers exactly the opposite. When you see an airplane crashing from a clear blue sky, you just have to watch. When you encounter one of the great triumph-to-disaster stories in the history of American business the rise and fall of Apple Computer Inc. you just have to read on.

Michael S. Malone’s Infinite Loop: How The World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane (Currency/Doubleday, $27.50, 0385486847) is the stuff of a corporate horror movie, replete with moments of terrible Scooby-Doo inevitability. Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak might as well be the teenaged couple wandering through the spooky factory, about to pry open the icebox door to see what’s making the noise inside. You want to put hands over eyes and scream: Wozniak, no! Don’t give away blocks of your founders’ stock to 30 buddies on a whim! Jobs, no! Don’t shoot down CEO John Sculley’s idea of making the Macintosh IBM-compatible! This is the tale of a company that had it all and blew it. Early in the personal computer age, Apple had superior technology on its side. Its customers displayed fanatical product loyalty. Its young founders became instant archetypes of the creative energy that made U.S. high-tech industries the envy of the world. But Jobs and Wozniak achieved too much too early in life. Success thoroughly ruined their magic and nearly ruined the company.

Malone tries to cut through the Silicon Valley mythology that now surrounds the company’s beginnings in the garage of Jobs’s Santa Clara, California home, and he makes a special effort to recognize key players in its first years who have not shared the limelight since. Malone was an insider for part of Apple’s early journey and covered the company as a journalist at other times. He brings to this account an authority and an evident big-picture understanding that lay to rest any conflict-of-interest concerns. Still, his disgust with Steve Jobs fairly oozes from these pages. There is a grudging tone to his rather passing acknowledgment that a more grown-up Jobs (now a wise old man of 43) has presided over quite a turnaround at Apple since he engineered a boardroom coup and returned to the helm in 1997. The book went to press in October 1998, just as the new iMac line of PCs had begun to rack up some of Apple’s best sales in years. Since then the numbers have made a Merlin of Jobs once more. Apple’s profits are way up, and the company said in April that it had doubled its share of the retail desktop market over the past year.

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Macmillan Computer Publishing, $25, 0672316498), Alan Cooper has a message for fellow technologists: Get human.

A much-lauded software author and designer, Cooper sets out in this book to make the business case for interaction design. Interaction design is a lofty-sounding term for what ought to be an obvious concept: making things (such as computer software and hardware) that people can easily use.

Such a simple truth has eluded Silicon Valley’s best minds, in Cooper’s view. And he says it doesn’t have to be that way. Designers don’t have to make guinea pigs out of customers, rolling out half-baked versions of computer products and then relying on users’ complaints as the basis to tweak subsequent editions.

Cooper’s book is a plea for technology’s high priests to meet the masses halfway. Sure, people in business must come to terms with bits and bytes, he argues but those who turn ones and zeroes into screen icons need to do a much better job of focusing on the needs of computer users.

Inmates’ main audience is the general business reader, for whom the book is a glimpse at how the technologists do their thing and how they could do it better, making the lives of computer users easier and making companies that depend on technology more successful.

Cooper offers an alternative to the Microsoft way of doing things. In fact, Bill Gates makes a case against interaction design in Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (written with Collins Hemingway; Warner Books, $30, 0446525685; Little Brown, Abridged, $24.98, 1570427526; Time Warner Audio, Unabridged, $49.98, 1570427534). You’re usually better off tackling smaller processes and building on them, Gates argues, and then improv[ing] the solution as you get user feedback. To many of the millions who work with Microsoft products every day, user feedback sounds like a euphemism for the anguished squawks emitted when a program performs an illegal operation and shuts itself down, or when that annoying little paperclip guy pops up on screen to ask whether you know how to write a letter.

But the Microsoft way is here to stay, and, on balance, that may be a good thing. More than anyone else, Gates has brought computer technology into the everyday lives of people the world over. One can politely debate him, as Cooper does, or hate him but not ignore him. He is the Alpha Nerd.

Business @ The Speed of Thought lays out Gates’s vision of the near future in worldwide business and society. His underlying message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For all the productivity gains registered by businesses in the past decade through the skillful deployment of technology, the hot-wired organizations of the 21st century hold the promise of even greater progress. The book is full of real-world examples of companies whose digital nervous systems are making them more efficient and profitable by improving the flow of information among decision-makers at all levels.

Not all of these systems are necessarily produced by Microsoft. Gates uses his company’s inner workings to show the processes that go into digitizing a business, but he also candidly discusses Microsoft’s, and his own, failures of strategic vision in the past most notably its tardiness in embracing the internet’s potential.

Gates makes a persuasive argument that technology can be a liberating force. In businesses, improved digital information systems can empower employees to move beyond carrying out orders and take more initiative on their own. Beyond business in education, government, and elsewhere in society the same systems can benefit the common good.

Nashville journalist E. Thomas Wood is the author of Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust (Wiley).

Beyond nerd chic. We are all nerds now. Or maybe there are no nerds anymore. One way or the other, technology has reached the masses in the past two decades. This sense that humanity's relationship with technology is attaining a certain maturity seems to permeate…

All In

In the energetic audiobook edition of her autobiography, Billie Jean King connects deeply with her audience through audible tears and laughter.
LifestylesHealth & Fitness

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Fat chance: help for healthy living “Focus on permanent, not temporary changes” is the recommendation of Jeffery and Norean Wilbert. “Remember the rule of thumb: Don’t do anything on a diet you’re not willing to do the rest of your life.” This common sense advice appears in their new book, Fattitudes: Beat Self-Defeat and Win Your War with Weight. The Wilberts believe that all too often, those who want to lose weight are their own worst enemy: “Recognize that the universal obstacle to healthy weight management is self-defeating behavior.” Their remedy is to learn to recognize and change your fattitude, which they define as a “thought or pattern of thinking that leads to self-defeating behavior in weight management efforts.” You may not even be aware that you have a fattitude. According to the Wilberts, an adjustment is probably in order if you’re unable to stay on a healthy eating track, if you sabotage your own weight loss success, or if your exercise habits last only a few weeks. In Fattitudes, the Wilberts tackle the complexities of emotional eating, warn you about how certain relationships can set you up for failure, and show you how to establish emotional freedom from the fattitudes that have been at work in your life for a long time. This book will help you find out a lot about yourself and your love/hate relationship with food.

Pat Regel race-walks in Nashville.

Fat chance: help for healthy living "Focus on permanent, not temporary changes" is the recommendation of Jeffery and Norean Wilbert. "Remember the rule of thumb: Don't do anything on a diet you're not willing to do the rest of your life." This common sense advice…

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