Reviews and Comments

So, I read the first book of this multi book series by a Huguenot jeweler recounting his time traveling to Persia in the 1680s. The first half of the book is about his time passing through modern day Turkey and through Georgia and Armenia before getting to Azerbaijan and then into Persia proper. It's incredibly readable and breezy for something published in 1691, though you have to get Used to Randomly Capitalized words and Shoddy Orthography and typesetting where s and f look the same.

The book is half day to day diary, and half digressions on politics and religion and economics and geography. Chardin has reasonable command of English and Persian in addition to his native French. (This book was originally written in French but he collaborated on its English translation.) His understanding of history and etymology is pretty good for someone of his era though there is a lot of the usual making-shit-up you find in travelogues.

There are some delightful stories about drunk Muscovite ambassadors and some drama involving philandering court cryptographers somewhere in or near modern Turkey I want to say.

Chardin is a remarkably sensitive and even keeled observer during his travels. I just finished a 1950 travelogue of an Englishman in Iran and it is full of condescension even though the author has the best intentions. But Chardin is writing this before European nations began treating Asian countries as vassal states and playthings. He seems to really consider Persia and its people on equal footing with European nations, and really wants to observe and learn from them.

Anyway, this is a great read if you are remotely interested in early modern Persia, and can be found on the Internet Archive for free.

Wow this was one of those "can't put it down" books for me. It's hard to review without spoiling but basically it is a fantasy novel with extremely interesting and incisive things to say about how imperialism works. Most of the action takes place in a federation of dukedoms that is currently being occupied by a big bad Empire. When I looked at the map at the beginning of the book I thought "there is no way I am ever going to remember who these dozen different dukes are and where they sit politically" but by the end of it I was like "oh my god I can't believe Duke So-and-so decided to ally with Duke Whats-her-face! That will have horrific ramifications for petit bourgeois craftspeople!"

Anyway this is one of the best books I've read in years. The human drama is really gripping and it also has left me chewing on all sorts of thoughts about human nature, politics, and economics.

I am a total sucker for learning anything and everything I can about the mid 20th century think tanks and defense contractors that helped invent American technocracy. And yet I find myself lukewarm on this book at best.

The weakest part of the book is its core thesis: it attempts to make Simulmatics, a short-lived company that was far more bark than bite, into a harbinger of the modern data-driven, democracy-destroying privacy nightmare we live in today. The author fails to do this. Oh, she makes the claim that it is a harbinger, many times, but she doesn't show the work, seemingly expecting the reader to go "oh, that sounds similar enough that it must be the same thing."

Simulmatics was a shambles of a company run by a bright-burning PR hack and staffed by scientists who did not seem to be very good at their jobs. They never owned any computer equipment, instead renting time on university machines. Among other disasters, the scientists who worked there had a contract with The New York Times for the 1962 midterm election which culminated in them installing a giant, expensive IBM mainframe at the Times offices and then... not knowing how to use the thing. Simulmatics existed during a time that I have spent significant time researching on my own, and I had never heard of them. There is no reference to them in any of my extensive notes on ARPA records from the late 60s and early 70s (granted this was in the twilight of the company). It's pretty clear they were small fries. Interesting small fries but I think a book about the Rand Corporation or SDC would be much, much more suited to the thesis of "this was the harbinger of the Facebook adtech privacy nightmare."

I'll admit, I am coming at this from the perspective of an amateur computer historian. What I see here, mostly, is an author who ran across a really genuinely interesting company called Simulmatics when she was going through the papers of Ithiel de Sola Pool. She says as much that she "began to think there might be a book in those boxes", which is something I've thought many times sitting in archives. Most of the time, there is not a book in those boxes. I think this is one of those times where it should not have been a book. Maybe this is cynical of me, but I think this is a case where Lepore, who friends assure me is usually a much, much better writer than this, was able to convince a publisher based on her sterling reputation and the exquisite timeliness of the subject matter, that there was a book there.

The best thing about the book is its insistence on not erasing women in the narrative of Simulmatics. This includes the detailed stories of several women employed by the company, as well as the wives of the company's founding members. "They treat their wives like dirt" is a refrain in the book, and one Lepore never lets you forget, with good reason. I love her willingness to paint hucksters and abusers and exactly what they are, and the pains she takes to show that a lot of the scientists involved in Simulmatics were blustery fools who literally could not operate a computer unless a highly trained woman was there to run the machinery for them.

One of my favorite things about the book was its portrayal of Ithiel de Sola Pool, one of the Simulmatics founders, who was one of the few people there who seemed to be genuinely good at what he did (unless you count the company founder Greenfield, who was genuinely good at being a huckster). Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, knew him very well as they were both in Vietnam at the same time doing overlapping working for the Department of Defense. According to Ellsberg, when Pool learned of the leak he was shocked because Ellsberg would surely lose his security clearance.

"I was expecting to go to prison for the rest of my life," Ellsberg wryly said later, "and Ithiel wanted to know whether I understood that I'd never get another dollar from the federal government."

Oddly, there is a diversion in the middle of the book about Eugene Burdick, an author of political thrillers who had some connection to Simulmatics, and whose last novel was heavily based on their business. Lepore needles him for rushing out half-baked books in the name of timeliness. Ironic, considering I just finished a prime example of that exact phenomenon.

This is a satirical novel about race and America, using tech companies but specifically the sales side as as its lens. If I had to be cute about it I would say it's like Sorry to Bother You meets American Psycho.

It's genuinely funny and thought-provoking in parts, and made me cringe (in a bad way) in others. I think the author's pen is its sharpest when he's depicting startup life and its intersections with race. I've been the only non-white person in the room in many, many startup meetings and offices. Askaripour doesn't quite push things into the magical realist sci fi of Sorry to Bother You -- instead he takes things right up to the edge of absurdity, but not over it. Ultimately all the racism he depicts from the well-meaning and clueless to the consciously vindictive is stuff that I've witnessed first-hand. I have been in the office when "Fuck the Police" comes on over the speakers during the Friday afternoon wind-down and white guys forcefully rap along and make sure to enunciate the N-word extra EXTRA loudly. I have been in conversations where white guys go on and on about the "culture fit" of a perfectly good job candidate. I have been in arguments with engineers who playfully advocate for eugenics. There is an office "prank" described early in the book involving paint that might seem too mean-spirited and too overtly racist in its symbolism to happen in real life, but, frankly... I would believe it if someone told me it happened to them.

Those are the great parts. The cringey parts, for me, were where I felt I had accidentally wandered into a (very smart) book for teenagers, full of melodrama and lessons that are wrapped up maybe a little too neatly for the reader. I was also never sure about the book's conceit of the occasional fourth-wall breaking bit where the narrator interrupts the story to give us a little bit of business advice. Sometimes it worked well, sometimes I rolled my eyes.

I'm also not sure of where I think the book ultimately lands in terms of what it has to say overall. As I said above I think it's great at depicting many of the problems in the startup world. I'm not sure I'm sold on the book's third act where it tries to do something about it. The book seems to be pretty solidly focused on Blackness but by the third act seems to talk more about issues facing all people of color, and I'm not sure if that was an intentional "wrong turn" taken by the main character or if it's trying to say something (though not sure what, given how it all ends) about the necessity or possibility of cross-racial solidarity-building. Although I suppose I was just complaining that the lessons were sometimes a little too neatly wrapped up, so I guess this is an example of that not being the case! I would give this book like.... 4.5 stars, but I'm second-guessing as to whether it's my shortcomings as a reader moreso than the author's shortcomings as a writer.

Ultimately this book passes the main test of what I want from any story I'm told: I'm going to be thinking about it long, long after today. I would certainly recommend it, especially if you've ever worked in tech and looked around and thought, "This is fucking insane."

This was... okay. It's a travelogue of an Englishman in Iran in 1953. I have a specific interest in this period because it's when my father was a child in Iran, so it aligns to some extent with the stories of Iran I grew up with. Even so I found the book a bit of a mixed bag, sometimes incredibly tedious and other times insightful or laugh out loud funny.

The author is of course a clueless English traveler. I'd say he is about 50% aware of his status as such. There are some times when he talks about his own behavior in Iran that I think "wow what an asshole", though mostly he comports himself well and has reasonable empathy for the people he encounters.

The best part of the book is the very detailed depiction of a single tea house in Isfahan and its regulars. This makes up only about 10% of the book but is a huge highlight.

I also found the times when he touched on politics really interesting. 1953 is just a few years after the CIA backed coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister, which installed Reza Shah as the monarchic (and American allied) ruler. It's really interesting to see some of the "deeply religious" anti-shah sentiment he encounters in his travels from the vantage of the present, knowing that the Islamic Revolution would come 25 years later.

His descriptions of bargaining in the bazaars are also good, and are true to the tales I've heard (and also match my experiences in other middle eastern countries).

There's too much description (I think) of how hard it is to get around. There are descriptions of Persian history that are filtered through random "scholars" he met that are dubious or outright false. I also am personally offended that he didn't find chelo kebab to be particularly good or bad!!!

Anyway, I don't regret reading this but I feel like I could have loved it a lot more.