I wrote a review of this book, but took too long and it timed out and goodreads tossed it into the bit bucket. ("Bit bucket" is programmer slang for the mythical location of lost data.) This happened before so I'd learned to write less carefully and post less thoughtful prose. But, not being a computer, I forgot this time and tried to fix my typos and go beyond first draftiness. A better programmer (it's not the computer's fault) would have had the program save my earlier draft so I could recover. Ms. Ullman would understand.

A better programmer would also know that goodreads reviewers probably don't pay a lot of attention to making sure the correct "edition" is chosen and the stats thus generated are bogus. ("Bogus" is another word popular among programmers, or it at least it was long ago when I used to program.) I'm intentionally leaving the default edition (Hardcover) which is different from the one I actually read (Audio), out of spite for having to write a second review from scratch.

Ms Ullman writes in a way that is understandable by liberal arts majors but still keeps techies from becoming bored.

Subtitled "A Personal History of Technology," it often reads much like a non-personal history. All histories are personal, only some affect a style of writing that makes them look more like reporting and less like opinion. They still reflect opinion but aspire to objectivity which really means that they take the points of view that the dominant (I should add 'male') culture does.

This history is personal in that its points of view aren't those standard ones. It doesn't end with the geeky privileged boy culture of the TV shows like "Silicon Valley" but starting from the truth of that cliche is willing to venture way outside its bounds, often ending up in memoir territory. It also dares criticize the"better world through technology" point of view which pervades much tech literature.

She further takes on the dominant trope of people being no more than machines built out of meat. In my previous review, I went into some of the reasons the comparison of humans to computers is so pervasive but in this rewrite, I'll merely say that the Tao that can be stored as data is not the eternal Tao and save this before I lose it.