One can seethe with rage reading this book.
Related Posts
Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore by Arnold Thackray
Moore is famous for the law that bears his name: namely, that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip doubles every 2 years. The “law” originated from Moore’s insatiable love of data, his tendency to take copious notes, his reflective, analytical thinking and his affinity for graphs. Moore made this prediction in 1975 and although it is now generally held to have expired, it held true for 30 years, a testament to Moore’s vision for the field. He predicted “portable communications devices” – phones and so forth. Moore himself seems to have been a staid bit…
The Last Viking by Stephen R. Brown
This is a fine biography of Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian polar explorer (b. 1872) who won several trophies in the heroic age of polar exploration, including the famed race to the south Pole in 1912, the first to navigate the Northwest passage, and the first to cross the Arctic by air. Amundsen learned a great deal from some early failures. He and his brother undertook a skiing expedition in Norway’s North for no particular reason but to prove their bravado; the journey nearly killed them both. Amundsen quickly realized the folly of slapdash preparation and he seldom made the same…
The Chancellor by Kati Marton
The biography is interesting both for what it says and for what it omits. It’s remarkably thin in terms of content or juicy gossip. Merkel developed deep habits of paranoia when she lived in East Germany, so much so that years later she refused to use text or email. Her inner circle was so intensely loyal that nobody spilled the beans for this book, and it’s not clear that there were any beans in the first place. A few facts do emerge: Merkel had immense stamina for diplomacy, for engaging in dialogue. Germany’s chancellor is the de facto leader of…