Reviews and Comments

As an examination of the German people after World War 2, "They Thought They Were Free" has its flaws. Demographically, the city chosen by Mayer to examine was more supportive of the Nazi program and less scarred by the horrors of war than most. Mayer's sweeping generalizations of the nature of the German people has its flaws as well, especially with the benefit of hindsight. As Mayer himself attests, he was an American in Allied-occupied Germany who didn't know the language. He knew there were limits to what he could accomplish — and he was largely correct about them.

As an examination of specific German people — an examination of some of the "little people " who were attracted to Hitler's program — the book has much to offer. The anti-intellectualism that discouraged development of any coherent policy theories (lest a learned writer of National Socialist theory becomes disgraced later), the creation of and eventual abandonment through neglect of a party-run religion, and the steady expansion of state sponsored anti-Semitism provide examples of authoritarian behavior that all ring true 70 years later.

Where the book truly excels is as an examination of America through the eyes of Germans in the mid-1950s. The hypocrisy of Jim Crow, the stupidity of McCarthyism, and the self-destructive support of fascist movements by the CIA to oppose Soviet-sponsored Communism are all laid bare. The corruption of machine-era politics, in which state public employees still "voluntarily" donate to the political party in charge, is used by Mayer's Germans to partially explain why they held little value in American-style democracy. As a slice of introspection in which Americans started to seriously consider the gap between the idealized version of themselves they pitched on postcards, advertisements, and school lessons against the observed realities of American life, the book offers insights which remain pertinent to the present day.

"The Unicorn Project" tries to pick up where "The Phoenix Project" left off by pitching a world where developers and engineers manage to move fast and try things — and occasionally break them.

Towards the end of the book, it was clear the author started to see some of the political and financial pratfalls inherent in the approach being pitched — and how overly optimistic his vision was — but flinched before he drew away from his preconceived conclusion. Though the author is correct that legacy institutions can process and policy themselves to death, it's also true that many institutions have middling developers and engineers — not the eternally curious and preternaturally competent engineers leading the Rebellion in the book — but need to execute anyway. In the real world, many of the processes and policies exist to keep the "gifted and talented" from running amok beyond their actual (as opposed to perceived) limit of expertise — and also exist to ensure those who are less competent or confident know where their lanes are and how to function with them.

Put more directly, the book did an excellent job of describing how to create small skunksworks projects that can deliver internal value but spent little time describing how to safely bring those into existing operations. Instead, the book hand waved over the process, threw in some artificial political and financial pressure to boot, and then hoped readers wouldn't notice that it served as much as a recipe to distract subscribing organizations on new and shiny projects over the dull but important work that keeps them in business.

And it's an impossibly rich man to become improbably obsessed with their sexual pleasure and emotional well being, a man who will break the rules to support a woman's career and drive for justice, a man who will bring her fresh coffee without being asked and who is also good with cats.

Y'know what? I don't blame them. Sounds nice.

First I need to talk about the book. Then I need to talk about the first person narrator protagonist.

The book itself is a frustratingly open homage — to the point of being distractingly referential — of Dune, Hyperion, Star Wars, possibly Enders Game, and I'm sure a few other science fiction series I didn't catch. There are noble families dependent on individual resources for wealth who are opposed to technology. There's a mentat ("scholiast") who mutters "Kwatz!" There are personal shields that don't block swords — swords which, by the way, sometimes behave like lightsabers.

And so on.

As for the protagonist, he's an entitled noble who wants to justify a genocide he announces from page 1 that he committed. Unsurprisingly, this justification takes the form of narrative that reads like it was written by Sephiroth, with overwrought language and far too many details — and at each stage, he tries to build the case for the reader that he's actually a Good Guy, really, we promise. He's attracted to a subordinate and consequently learns the hard way — but not too late! — that his power and position overwhelm her ability to consent to advances. He kills a man — but he feels bad about it! He lives as a homeless person for years after forsaking his family, so he understands what it's really like outside the world of palace politics!

He's a Nice Guy!

Consequently, the "self-written memoir" is ponderous, slow, and includes several narratively unnecessary details and digressions. It also exists in a world that breaks the fourth wall more than once through references to other science fiction series in annoying and distracting ways.

I think I'll pass on the sequels.

'Death of the Author' is an emotionally intense and multilayered story featuring a paraplegic Nigerian-American author who wants to experience everything the universe has to offer and a pair of robot personalities unwittingly fused together by the last human on Earth.

Or it's a story about an author who finally frees herself to write a groundbreaking piece of science fiction while she takes the reader through Nigeria and Chicago — the good and bad and ugly of both locations — while also sharing her ties with her protective family with the reader.

Or it's a story about two robot tribes hellbent on destroying each other as nuclear Armageddon races to Earth from the Sun.

Or... it's not just one but at least two really good stories interwoven within each other, each teasing and dancing and pulling the reader on a journey of family, healing, struggle, loss, control and power.

Give Dan Simmons credit — he tried. He tried to answer every question raised by his Chaucerian space pilgrimage in "Hyperion."

Do the answers make sense? Largely they do not.

Does Raul Endymion — the trapped narrator-protagonist in the final two books of the Hyperion Cantos — become increasingly sympathetic as the series finished? Largely he does not.

In the final book of the series, Simmons does his best to tie together all of the loose threads scattered around the Cantos to tie the convoluted space-time plot together into something coherent. In many respects, this was likely a mistake — reality never comes together neatly, so presenting every event in time and space across a vast, infinite universe as coming together towards a conclusion would stretch belief under the best of circumstances.

Frustratingly, Simmons decided to strap the sprawling conclusion to the back of Raul Endymion — a man chosen by a poet to protect the reluctant young female Messiah he's told repeatedly (by her when she's 11 and he's in his 20s) that he will eventually fall madly in love with. In the previous book, Raul seems generally competent and affable, if not especially bright; "Rise of Endymion," however, quickly turns him into a petulant and clueless brat who spends most of the novel whining to or at someone while the Smartest And Most Attractive Human In The Universe seduces him.

Charitably, this may have been on purpose. The book's message, beyond "Choose again," is that love is a source of energy, and the relationship between Raul and Aenia is supposed to signify the ideal of this novel energy source. With this in mind, turning Raul into a man who's only capable of an obsessive all-consuming codependent love for Aenia, one capable of scouring time and space for every trace of her so that her entire story can be told,.makes a certain kind of narrative sense.

I'd be lying if I said I found it to be an especially satisfying read, however, especially by the end.

Much as Hyperion set the table for The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion leaves a cliffhanger for The Rise of Endymion to settle.

Endymion is largely told in the voice of Raul Endymion, a man captured in a high tech space prison who is effectively dictating his last will and testament. The book is the first half of the story behind how he ended up in his predicament — his near-execution, followed by his assignment to protect Aenea, a 12-year-old girl who emerges from the Time Tombs and speaks fondly of their future romantic relationship.

Raul, it should be noted, is 27 when he meets Aenea — but to Simmons' credit, he writes Raul to be appropriately chaste and protective in a fatherly way towards the young child.

The Catholic antagonists are more reliably interesting and believable than the protagonists, who are largely relegated towards being set pieces for Aenea's precognitions. Having said that, Raul and the rest of Aenea's party makes the most of whatever free will they have within the constraints imposed upon them by her visions of the future —and the story moves at a steady pace overall.

Picking up from the end of the cliffhanger of "Hyperion," "The Fall of Hyperion" tells of what happens after the pilgrims finally reach the Shrike.

Unlike the previous book, which adopted the structure of the "Canterbury Tales" to tell the backstories of each pilgrim, "The Fall of Hyperion" has a somewhat more straightforward but still creative narrative style — one which shifts between multiple first person views while consciously granting one narrator a bit more omniscience than the rest. The result is a generally enjoyable and linear read.

That said, at least for me, I found that some of the plot developments require a fair amount of faith. It wasn't always clear how each character's actions affected the future that sent the Time Tombs into the past — to say nothing of the larger supernatural forces at play. Even so, the story itself was much more enjoyable than not and I had no difficulties reading to the end, even if I felt the need to suspend disbelief on several occasions.

"Character Limit" is an in-depth look into how and why Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X), along with what he did with and to the social network afterwards.

The first half of the book does an excellent job detailing the state of Twitter before Musk's buyout — its ethos under Dorsey, its struggles to grow and turn a reliable profit, its inability to innovate past its original 140-character product, and its sprawling multinational moderation team. The book then goes on to detail the choices Twitter's board faced when Musk offered to buy the company, including their legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value — and how that responsibility overrode any loyalty to the original mission of Twitter. The remainder of the book then details Musk's early reign at Twitter, including a neverending cascade of layoffs, declining advertising revenue, and increasingly erratic behavior from the company's poaster-in-chief.

The book is well structured and tells its story well. The authors do an excellent job of describing the events that led to the buyout of Twitter and Musk's subsequent behavior.

Even so, I liked this book more than I loved it. Since the book came out before Trump's reelection, it leaves the story at the nadir of Twitter/X's influence — and consequently misses Musk's reemergence (and likely subsequent fall). The book consequently prematurely dances on Musk's and X's grave.

I hope the authors consider writing a sequel.

In the 1960s, American liberals faced a crisis. After three decades of New Deal liberalism, which wedded government, labor and business together towards large common goals, it was becoming increasingly clear that there remained large gaps in class, race, gender, and other social issues. Additionally, many of the government agencies responsible for regulating corporations had become cozy with them, using their regulations to stifle competition while benefiting incumbents.

Ralph Nader wanted something different.

To his credit, he saw the need for more voices in government, more chances for input and participation, and more accountability for all parties. To provide those things, he started the public interest movement, which would fight in courtrooms across the country to protect and preserve the rights, safety, health and environment of Americans.

This book is the story of that movement — and how many of the strategic and tactical choices he made set the stage for the dysfunction we see today.

"The Lords of Finance," a book about the four most powerful investment bankers and how they responded to changing economic conditions in the 1920s and 1930s, shouldn't be half as engaging as it is. Ahamed does an excellent job of bringing the Great Depression and the inevitable failure of the gold standard to life by bringing the people responsible to life. Instead of being treated as distant ciphers, the central bankers of the US, UK, France and Germany are treated as human beings — people with friendships, beliefs, romantic relationships, and, alas, horribly misguided beliefs on how monetary policy should function and who it should serve.

Over a decade after it's publication, this book remains an approachable and engaging overview of the all top human decisions that ultimately led to the worst economic cataclysm in modern human history.

There's something about James C. Scott's writing style that makes his books easy for me to put aside while also providing moments of deep insight.

In this book, Scott discusses the history of Zomia — a geographical zone centered near Southeast China and the hills of Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. In the history he presents, the people of Zomia are largely the castoffs of "civilized" padi-rice society, with all of its conscription, taxes and central authority. To escape the control and deprivations of central authority, the people of Zomia organize themselves into various groups (Hmong, Miao, etc.). Since many of the people of Zomia are refugees from Thai, Chinese, and other fixed agriculture societies, the corresponding ethnicity of any group of people in Zomians is consequently fluid, in much the same way "Californian" could ethnically be just about anything.

Makes one wonder how fixed ethnicities truly are anywhere else.

The book contains several insights about the nature of state-building, which are generally compelling if a little "just so" at times. Many of the claims in the book are somewhat grandiose and binary, however, and it seems somewhat ungrateful to openly disdain state creation in a book that couldn't exist in an illiterate society.

It was definitely thought provoking, albeit difficult to grip.