In World War II, the Allies buried the Axis under a torrent of technological products. This is the story of that production miracle, as seen through the biographies of two key leaders. Bill Knudsen was a Danish immigrant who at General Motors pioneered flexible mass production and annual models of automobiles. Henry Kaiser was an entrepreneur who made his fortune on the West Coast, first building roads and then leading mega-scale projects like the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams.

In 1940, America was one of the most productive countries in the world, but industry had been hit hard by the Great Depression, and almost none of that capacity was geared towards military ends. The Army was without tanks, the Air Force was third tier at best, and while the Navy had capital ships, it was deficient in escorts and transports. In the last war, American soldiers had fought with French and British equipment. While Wilson had ordered a mass mobilization, production hang-ups and logistical snafus meant that very little of what was ordered ever saw a battlefield. If that happened again, there would be no way to defeat the Axis.

Knudsen was appointed Chairman of the Office of Production Management, and in the time between the invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor, when American involvement in the war was distinctly unpopular, began the tricky work of converting commercial production over to military use. Knudsen used his immense standing in industry and his detailed knowledge of production to begin producing machine tools and setting up new factories. From fitful beginnings, Knudsen unleashed an avalanche of material: hundreds of thousands of tanks and aircraft, along with billions of shells and all the other necessary components of war.

Kaiser turned his mega-project style to building transports, churning out hundreds of Liberty cargo ships, along with oilers and escort carriers. Applying mass production to ships cut the build time down from 200 days to 25 at full swing. As part of a contest, one yard turned out a complete ship in 4 days! But Kaiser's publicity seeking style made him enemies, including Bill Knudsen. And when Liberty ships began cracking up, Kaiser's reputation took the blame, even though the fault was a combination of design and steel quality, rather than manufacturing defects.

Herman is a conservative intellectual, with longtime associations with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, and this book is a paean to big business. Celebrating industry is a fair frame, but Herman can't help himself from taking swipes at FDR, the New Deal, or organized labor whenever he can. My politics are basically entirely opposed to Herman's, but the story that he tells is engaging enough that I can give his obligatory right wing gruntings a pass. Wages of Destruction is worth reading, but Freedom's Forge is fun reading. It's just important to keep in mind that contrary to Herman's great man focused vision, the American people paid for the war, where the big contractors got a cost+8% contract and useful capital installations afterwards; workers milled, stamped, riveted, and welded the ships, planes, tanks, and guns; and ultimately an army of citizen-soldiers used these weapons to win the war.

A Desolation Called Peace is simpler and better than the first book. A few months after the coup that saw a new emperor, and Mahit returned home, the war against the aliens is going poorly. The enemy has superior drive technology, something which lets their ships disappear into a swirl of visual distortion, and the six legions sent to fight them are being cut apart in a slow battle of attrition. When the fleet finally spot an one of their elusive foes, a ship of three rotating rings emitting horrific noises which cause people to vomit, supreme commander Nine Hibiscus calls for a negotiator from the homeworld.

That negotiator is former diplomatic assistant Three Seagrass, who decides this will be an adventure and a chance to see Mahit again, since the war is just past Lsel Station. Mahit has been dealing with her own political problems at home, with the government trying to decide if she's a loose end to be tied up, or a tool that still has use in advancing their agenda of getting the Empire caught in an endless quagmire of war.

The basic plot is therefore an attempt to make first contact with aliens who don't seem to understand the concept of language, with a race against factions which would prefer to see the negotiation fail. A wounded Empire is a dangerous thing, and even though its outmatched in space, the Empire has plenty of planetkilling nuclear weapons.

The points of view expand to include Nine Hibiscus, fleet commander, and Eight Antidote, the 11 year old heir to the throne, who is precociously working behind the scenes to learn the duty of an emperor and forbid genocide. First contact is pretty standard for scifi, and Martine's aliens are serviceable, but the straightforward scientific puzzle lets her characters shine under stress, where they spent too much of the first book stumbling through someone else's intrigue.

This was what the library had at a moment of crisis, when my five month old decided that rather than sleep through the night he would scream continuously until exhausted. After the second such night, we had to do something.

On the plus side, Dr. Weissbluth had simple clear advice which worked. According to his long experience in the field, most babies with sleep problems are simply overtired. To avoid this, the cure is to move bedtime up, even to as early as 5:30 if you think your baby has sleep deficit. And while there are many approaches to sleep training, at some point your baby has to learn to go to sleep on his own, and 'extinction' or 'cry it out' is a rough few night that simply works. More complex graduated extinction processes mostly just take more time and energy, and actually deliver worse results since kids can learn things other than "I must go to sleep on my own."

And you know what? Dr. Weissbluth was absolutely right! My son's nap times have been better, he's figured out how to go to bed in 10 minutes, and we're all sleeping through the night. Collective familial madness adverted.

So why three stars? First, this book needs a hefty editing pass. It's 600 pages long with lots of redundancy. I read quickly and getting the information I needed was still a slog. There's a really excellent 250 page book in here. And second, the opening chapters take a hysterical tone towards sleep hygiene, as poor sleep habits now can doom your child to a life of mental illness and failure. I get that defending sleep is Dr. Weissbluth's whole career, but it's the wrong tone to take with stressed parents who are already worrying about so much.

Tower of Mud and Straw is a lyrical fantasy novel about a disgraced politician overseeing a construction megaproject. Shea Ashcroft is one of the Queen's ministers, who refused to use violence against the mob. His new assignment is out on the frontier, where a 1000 foot air-defense tower is being built. He arrives to find a paranoid and insular group of experts around the local Duke, and that exotic and dangerous antigravity magitech that he has a family history with is being used to build the tower. Events move like an avalanche towards the only possible conclusion.

Tower is centered around moments of lyric beauty, self-consciously artistic descriptions of the play of light or stormclouds, and then secondly Shea's unravelling psychology and personal neurosis. The plot and other characters are dreamlike at best. But as a novella, this book doesn't wear out its welcome, and the literary qualities are worth savoring.

I loved loved loved Pinkwater as a kid, and after rescuing 5 Novels from my childhood bookshelf and deciding that I needed a break, I went back for a reread. And you know what, Pinkwater still holds up as an absurdist delight. His protagonists are deeply uncool short fat weirdos, embedded in mediocre suburban high schools and conformist families who don't get them, but who enter a slipstream world of lunatic obsessives and high concept scifi weirdness.

My two favorite stories are The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, which uses cult classic movies as an entry point into a missing mad scientist and a journey into the underground life of the big city, with a whole bunch of crazy stuff along the way. Young Adult Novel is a perfect Dadist antifable, about a high school Dadist club who stage a event to make an even weirder kid a schoolwide hero that spins ridiculously out of control.

The other stories are not quite as good. Slaves of Spiegel is stylish fluff. Alan Mendelsohn is meaner than I remember, but has a great tour of psychic weirdness and alternate dimensions. The Last Guru's parody of Age of Aquarius mysticism has lost whatever sharpness it once had.

But on the whole, these are fun, stylish, and altogether great young adult novels.

Krakatoa is one long and scattered digression on the subject of the titanic eruption of 1883. It's a lot of fun, since Winchester has a natural knack as a storyteller and a particular love for geology, but don't expect anything like focus. The story weaves through the spice trade, Dutch colonial policies, telegraphs, the Wallace line separating the biomes of Asia and Australia, and then the history of plate tectonics and the discovery of the source of volcanism along subduction zones, as water rich seabed slides into the mantle, melts, and bubbles upwards.

But if you're interested in the eruption itself, it takes several hundred pages for the story to wind it's way there. And the eruption is a hard thing to write about, so cataclysmic that most of the witnesses died. Though a few survivors carried forward stories of ashfalls at sea, 100 foot tsunamis, and thunderous cracks heard 3000 miles away.

Winchester's thesis, as much as this book has one, is that Krakatoa catalyzed the idea of the global community. News of the disaster spread worldwide in hours along commercial telegraph lines, a dramatic use of a tool more regularly used for reporting shipping news. Victorian recording barometers showed the spreading air shockwave reverberate 14 times around the world from Kratakoa, while tide meters pegged the change in the sea. Sadly, the eruption was also a missed opportunity for science, as geology lacked the theories to understand volcanism, and close biological surveys were understandly absent in the critical early months to see how life returned to the remaining islands of Krakatoa, and the new island of Anakrakatoa, a volcano growing at the rate of 20' per year from the submerged caldera.

The First Sister compares itself to The Handmaid's Tale and Red Rising, and it wears its influences on its sleeves, with a lot of overwrought drama in packed into a wartorn inner solar system. The story creaks under the weight of its influences, images mashed together without much sense of coherence, but Lewis manages flashes of talents which elevate the book.

The nameless and titular First Sister is a priestess-concubine on a starship run by the Earth-Mars Gaem theocracy. The Sisters hear confessions, relieve the tensions of the soldiers, and have their voices taken by surgery. When her captain departs, and doesn't take First Sister with him as planned, First Sister must embark on a desperate espionage mission while winning the favor of new captain, the wounded Hero of Ceres Saito Ren. She is allowed to write with Ren (an act normally forbidden to sisters) in order to reveal that the new captain is in fact a traitor. If she fails, she'll be unranked and given to the crew, or disavowed and executed by her own order.

Lito sol Lucius is the second viewpoint, a soldier with the Venus and Mercury based Icarii. The Icarii have had a longstanding lead in tech, based on hermium shields and drives using elements only obtainable on Mercury, but that lead has been eroded recently. Lito lost Ceres, and in losing it lost his partner Hiro val Akira. Lito and Hiro are linked via neural implants as paired duelists: rapier and dagger fighters who use shapeshifting mercurial blades. Lito is cooling his heels as a training officer when he gets a new partner and a new assignment. It seems Hiro survived the Fall of Ceres and has betrayed the Icarii. Lito's mission is to return to Ceres incognito, find Hiro, and assassinate them.

The third story is Hiro's, revealed in flashback as audio logs to Lito. Hiro is by any measure the proper protagonist of the book. Non-binary and the child of the terrifyingly powerful scientist and industrialist Souji val Akira, Hiro is looking to end the long and pointless war between the planets. He's also looking for justice for the Asters, a human subspecies modified for survival in deep space, and ruthlessly exploited by more baseline humans. And he wants revenge on his father for a childhood of lies and trauma.

The stories all build toward an explosive climax of revelations on Ceres, as our viewpoint characters decide where their true loyalties lie, and who they'll kill or save to enact their beliefs. There's a lot that I don't much care for in this book. The setting feels artificial and arbitrary, built of pieces lifted from other works rather than an organic whole, the pacing is a beat off, and Hiro is the real protagonist, with the other characters serving merely as lenses onto his plot. The silenced and submissive First Sister feels exploitative, though Lewis handles her with some delicacy. And as someone who reads a lot of these books, I can see these flaws, and I can also say they don't matter because of a sheer fearless verve in this book. I'm hoping Lewis will grow as an author, and look forward to book two.

If Then is a fascinating and flawed account of how Simulmatics, a pioneering market research team, prefigured much of contemporary concerns around big data and surveillance capitalism, while failing in almost every venture it embarked on. Lepore bounces between her primary protagonists and the great events that they failed to substantially influence or capitalize on to paint a picture of the 60s as a decade when a utopian dream of technocratic moderation became a nightmare of simulated insanity.

Ed Greenfeld, the founder of Simulmatics, was a Madison Avenue ad man and backslapping hustlers, who frustrated at the perennial failure of his favored candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, teamed up with social scientists in the nascent fields of behavioral science to create an election in a box, a computerized data model that would give a cannier Democrat an oraclucular advantage. The first few reports went to the Kennedy campaign in the summer of 1960 suggested that he should embrace civil rights and Catholicism; that the votes of racists and anti-Catholics had already been lost, and he could shore up support among African-Americans and non-bigots. Kennedy famously won by a narrow margin. An article in Harper's Magazine by Thomas Morgan sold Simulmatics as a magic people machine that gave the Kennedy campaign strategic insights (Morgan would shortly join the company), but Simulmatics proved best at selling itself, and failed to land subsequent opportunities.

Madison Avenue was rightfully skeptical of the shoddy data bases and under theorized models of consumer behavior. An attempt to use computers to model the 1964 election in near real time for the New York Times collapsed under a tidal waves of bugs and lack of technical experience with actual IBM mainframes. The most successful project was an expansion to Saigon, to try and simulate how communist insurgencies could be defeated, but Simulmatics was never more than a tertiary player in McNamara's data-driven war. After failing to deliver on an expensive contract, their efforts were cancelled by ARPA.

Meanwhile, the personnelle of Simulmatics imploded in their own way. Ed Greenfeld sunk into alcoholism. Mathematician Bill McPhee was committed to an insane asylum for a time, and then mostly failed to deal with his bipolar disorder. Political scientist/novelist Eugene Burdick (The Ugly American, among other didactic 60s political thrillers) used his insider access to skewer the company in his 1964 novel The 480, a reference to the 480 identified categories of people in the Simulmatics database. Burdick died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. Ithial de Sola Pool, a Trotskyite turned ardent cold warrior, pushed Simulmatics ever closer to the defense establishment, while fighting the rising peace movement in American universities. Everybody's marriage fell apart.

A last gasp at predicting urban race riots collapsed in 1968, and Simulmatics suffered an undignified bankruptcy in 1970. Ithiel de Sola Pool had the longest successful career, serving as a neoconservative prophet of the nascent internet until his death in 1984. Much like cybernetics, another trendy 1950s computerized synthesis, Simulmatics abilities never matched its ambitions. Yet, as Lepore shows, the concerns raised then are the same as our current concerns around Facebook, face news, information warfare, and all that postmodern jazz. Nothing is new under the sun, except in 2021 computers are fast enough and data models rich enough that it actually works.

Lepore ably blends the "Mad Men but real" flawed personalities with the great events of this time, but I wish she'd been a little more detailed as an intellectual and technical historian. I'm a lover of obsolete ideas and obsolete machines, and I'd have liked a little more detail on how it worked. Still, a fascinating book on a mostly forgotten group of visionaries.

Programming computers is actually not that difficult. Programming computers in an organization is really fucking hard.

I know from personal experience, having gone from self-taught academic to data science bootcamp to software developer for a bank. Academic code, whether you're analyzing a dataset or doing homework assignments, has to work just once. Commercial code has to work every day, and when it doesn't you're up at 5:00 AM doing hotfixes and trying to explain to important clients why they should stay with you even though you look absolutely clownshoes.

The Missing Readme has a lot of good practical advice for writing maintainable code, which is different from clever code in that someone else, possibly future you, will have to work on it again. But this book is really about the culture of computer programming, and about being the kind of useful friendly novice who's a good addition to teams, and can take over increased responsibilities as they grow in skill. I found the sections on Operable Code, Code Reviews, and Technical Design particularly useful.

And as a caveat, this review is based on the May 10 Early Access edition, but I suspect it's pretty close to done.

If The Right Stuff is the trashy tabloid tell-all, Moon Shot is the authorized biography version of the heroic age of the American space program, from Mercury to Apollo. The overall tone is one of awed cosmism. Astronauts are larger than life figures, top test pilots and engineers who manage to save their own lives and the mission by taming faulty space capsules. Beyond the atmosphere, floating weightless in zero-G, and looking down on our fragile blue marble, they serve as both the most exceptional Americans, and as pan-national unifying archetypes. Arrayed against them is of course the hostility of space, but also the small-minded cowardice of bureaucrats and Congress, who are unwilling to let these brave men risk it all.

The book is structured as a mission by mission account, and is light on technical details in favor of somewhat repetitive purple prose. Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton are the clear protagonists, two of the original Mercury 7 astronauts grounded by medical issues, who beat the doctors to eventually fly on Apollo missions.

I did learn something from this book, like how vital Gemini was as a bridge to maneuvering in space, performing the precision burns and dockings vital to the Apollo mission plan. Shepard's Apollo 14 was almost a failure, with a docking problem between the capsule and LEM solved by ramming the docking ring at higher than designed speed, and a radar fault in the LEM fixed by turning it off and turning it back on again.

Moon Shot is a decent, if unambitious history, and probably a good first pass for more extensive reading on the space age.