Phil Hanley’s frank, vulnerable, funny memoir recounts his journey from struggling student to successful comedian who wears his dyslexia “like a badge of honor.”
Phil Hanley’s frank, vulnerable, funny memoir recounts his journey from struggling student to successful comedian who wears his dyslexia “like a badge of honor.”
Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.
Preventable and curable, tuberculosis is still the world’s deadliest disease. John Green illuminates why in Everything Is Tuberculosis.
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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…

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 Philip Lee Williams freezes an idyllic moment in time with a nostalgic flair that could rival a Norman Rockwell print. The Silent Stars Go By: A True Christmas Story relates a southern, boy’s-eye view of the simple joys of a country Christmas. Set in Madison, Georgia, 1959, this charming memoir speaks of a time, pre-Nintendo, when a boy could still be pleased with oranges, Brazil nuts, and a few special toys. Williams’s descriptions of his love, at age nine, of holiday hymns, the smell of a freshly cut cedar tree, and a hometown football team that never seemed to lose impart plenty of sentimentality for an era lost. But don’t worry about drowning in over-the-top gushiness. Williams merely tells it like it was, and leaves it to the reader to mourn the passing of the good ol’ days.

 Philip Lee Williams freezes an idyllic moment in time with a nostalgic flair that could rival a Norman Rockwell print. The Silent Stars Go By: A True Christmas Story relates a southern, boy's-eye view of the simple joys of a country Christmas. Set in Madison,…

Women wearing red cloaks and face-concealing bonnets at political protests in recent years speak to the enduring popularity and relevance of Margaret Atwood’s most well-known book, The Handmaid’s Tale. In a 30th-anniversary essay about the novel, featured in her delectable new collection, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021, Atwood lays no claim to prescience, but of course, she is just being humble. (She is, after all, Canadian.) With an inquiring mind and the razor-sharp intellect to fuel it, this cherished and award-winning writer, now 82, is never afraid to push boundaries or speak her mind about the things that matter to her and, collectively, to many of us. What may surprise casual readers of Atwood’s work is the way her mind is honed by a delicious wit that makes reading her thoughts on a wide array of subjects as entertaining as it is edifying.

There are more than 60 wide-ranging pieces gathered in this capacious collection: essays, speeches, reviews, introductions and appreciations. Somehow the book manages to be both an enchanting hodgepodge (in the best sense) and a cohesive amalgam of a writer’s vision. Many of the entries tap into one or both of Atwood’s primary concerns: literature and environmental science. The daughter of a scientist, Atwood has true bona fides in the latter category and has been sounding the call for climate change awareness for some time, such as with the MaddAddam trilogy.

In addition to providing invaluable insight into her own work, Atwood digs with enthusiasm into Shakespeare, Kafka, Dickens, Dinesen, Bradbury and the ancient Greeks. She writes with cleareyed affection about women slightly older than her who paved the way, such as Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and Ursula K. Le Guin. Rachel Carson, a clear favorite, makes numerous appearances, and the book ends with a brief reflection on the 2020 death of conservationist writer Barry Lopez.

This is the third collection of occasional nonfiction pieces Atwood has assembled over her 60-year career, and she divides it into five sections reflecting societal changes over the course of the last two post-9/11 decades. Some of the pieces are quite current—there is a piece on quarantine, for instance—but as one might expect, Atwood avoids a straightforward or navel-gazing approach even when contemplating our current state of affairs. Instead, the COVID-19 piece hearkens back to the everyday realities of quarantine (against diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough) when she was a child in the 1940s.

While no means an autobiography, Burning Questions scatters a generous enough smattering of personal recollections and details throughout to grant intriguing, often charming insight into Atwood’s singular life, from girlhood to her life partner’s death in 2019. Years ago, a lesser-known Toronto-based writer told me that “Peggy” Atwood was always a welcome—and hilarious—guest at dinner parties. That appraisal stayed with me, and upon reading Burning Questions, there can be little doubt it’s true.

Read our review of the audiobook, which boasts a huge cast of notable narrators.

A bracing, entertaining collection of nonfiction pieces further illuminates Margaret Atwood’s inimitable and indomitable mind.
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During its 50-year history, NASCAR has metamorphosed from dirt track, Saturday night, fairgrounds racing into a national spectator sport. It has become a very big business, but it has not lost its rural, southern roots. A panel of NASCAR stalwarts assembled a list of stock car racing’s 50 best (and often most colorful) drivers, representing each of the five decades of NASCAR’s history. With NASCAR 50 Greatest Drivers, writers Bill Center and Bob Moore provide a thumbnail history of each driver and his era, along with a sidebar of vital statistics and a collage of photographs from sepia-toned black and whites from the early years to bold color shots of today. Yesteryear’s heroes such as Junior Johnson and Fireball Roberts, current superstars like Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, and the timeless King, Richard Petty they’re all here, and they’re all legends. This is a book that any NASCAR fan would be happy to own.

During its 50-year history, NASCAR has metamorphosed from dirt track, Saturday night, fairgrounds racing into a national spectator sport. It has become a very big business, but it has not lost its rural, southern roots. A panel of NASCAR stalwarts assembled a list of stock…

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White Star Lines built the Titanic to make money, but it’s doubtful they ever imagined that the ship would continue to generate profits almost a century after it sank. Millions of words have been written about the ship, its passengers, their fate and the sinking’s place in our history and psyche. Brad Matsen’s new book, Titanic’s Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, gives us another look at the famous ship, and a fresh perspective on an old story.

Chatterton and Kohler are the divers who discovered the sunken German U – boat U – 869; their exploration of that vessel off the coast of New Jersey was the subject of their first collaboration, Shadow Divers. This time the two are on the trail of the biggest shipwreck of all time. Specifically, they’re given a clue by an acquaintance of Chatterton’s that indicates there was more than an errant iceberg to blame for the ship’s quick sinking. This bait they find irresistible, and they eventually find themselves aboard a Russian ship, scheduled for a dive to the wreck.

While their quest to the bottom of the ocean – and what they find there – is the reason for this book, the real heart of the story is Matsen’s detailed and fascinating look at the men who dreamed, schemed, designed and built the Titanic. There’s the unscrupulous American billionaire J.P. Morgan, who saw the Titanic as a means to gain control of the transatlantic passenger trade; the brilliant designer Thomas Andrews, destined to go down with his creation; the senior captain of White Star, Edward Smith, whose highly regarded reputation might not have been wholly deserved; and finally the Titanic’s builder, J. Bruce Ismay, a reluctant tycoon who would forever after be the goat of the Titanic’s story. Their actions drive the two divers’ thesis – the loss of so many lives didn’t have to happen. Was there a cover – up? And can they find concrete proof of their theory?Titanic’s Last Secrets is a good title, and a good book. Whether that title proves to be the truth remains to be seen. James Neal Webb admits to being something of a Titanic geek.

White Star Lines built the Titanic to make money, but it's doubtful they ever imagined that the ship would continue to generate profits almost a century after it sank. Millions of words have been written about the ship, its passengers, their fate and the sinking's…

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Ten Thousand Sorrows is the autobiography of Elizabeth Kim, a journalist from Southern California who began her life with a harrowing incident witnessing the murder of her mother in Korea. Having disgraced the family by bearing a mixed-race child with an American G.I., Kim’s mother was hanged in an "honor-killing" conducted by her grandfather and uncle. As her mother explained to Kim, according to her own Buddhist beliefs, "life was made up of ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows, and all of them were stepping-stones to ultimate peace." Her mother’s fate, albeit tragic, was not atypical; Korean society, particularly during the Korean War era, was very unforgiving of interracial relationships, particularly with American G.I.s. Murder in these instances was considered justifiable, or, as in her mother’s case, was labeled as a suicide.

Having escaped the filth and neglect of a Korean orphanage, Kim is adopted into a strict fundamentalist family incapable of conveying warmth or compassion. She describes the stigma of not being accepted into either Korean society or her adopted American home. Leaving her American family behind, she falls into an abusive marriage with a "godly man" who forces her to suffer routine beatings and bear indignities such as sleeping in the doghouse with the family pet. Years of rejection cause her to feel unworthy of the love and acceptance she once had with her biological mother (her "Omma"); at this point, Kim’s life is full of shame and self-loathing. Despite the dark circumstances of her life, the book is imbued with hope, which is transferred to Kim from her mother and later embodied in Kim’s relationship with her own daughter. Carrying this heritage from her Omma, she realizes that the love and acceptance for which she was searching can be found within, the beginning of her stepping stone to peace.

Jeannie Q. Joe, a Korean American attorney, practices corporate law in Austin, Texas.

Ten Thousand Sorrows is the autobiography of Elizabeth Kim, a journalist from Southern California who began her life with a harrowing incident witnessing the murder of her mother in Korea. Having disgraced the family by bearing a mixed-race child with an American G.I., Kim's mother…

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