A very good overview of Boeing's history particularly after its merger with McDonnell Douglas, which the author argues was a turning point from an engineering worldview to one of bean-counting. It chronicles the spinoff of engineering functions and the way the American FAA allowed Boeing to be its own regulator and inspector. It was written in the wake of the twin 737 Max tragedies, which are a primary focus, but the seeds are sown for all the bits falling out of the sky that we've seen of late.
Meet Bridget Jones—a 30-something Singleton who is certain she would have all the answers if …
Childhood turning point
5 stars
The good parts of this have stayed with us, though often having become clichés; the not-so-great parts, well anything looks a bit musty a generation later, doesn't it. This was a 5-star game changer for me; it created the market for (admittedly not always quality) 'chick lit', but turned the stage a bit for female authors, who were thin on the ground at the time because of how the industry was (is…) run.
With very few exceptions I rate books as I would have when they came out, not as I see them now. Two decades ago I was smashing the *** and !!! keys. And so it stays.
There aren't many travel books that focus specifically on L.A., and even fewer that offer anything at all for the traveller on foot. This one isn't bad and isn't expensive, though it does date from 2018 and hasn't been updated since Covid.
The mountain is eternal, but trails change, and in his new book, Mount Tamalpais Trails, …
The only useful book I have for Mt. Tam
4 stars
This and a prior edition are the only books I've found to cover Mt. Tam properly, with detailed terrain and history discussions as well as clear maps. Printed on heavy, glossy stock, it's a bit heavy to carry on a major trek. But no other book I've found serves me as well.
I threw away most of my travel books from before the pandemic. This 2016 guide is one of the few I kept.
I loved this book and devoured it quickly. But five years on I'd forgotten I had read it. That could dock a star, but I try to rate things as I would have right after I read them.
Definitely keeps you guessing, and the answer is never what you thought ten minutes prior - just as it should be.
Packed with photos of the beautiful Palau de la Música Catalana, this is my favorite keepsake from an early noughties Barcelona trip. Brief descriptive text in Catalan, Spanish, and English mostly lets the pictures speak for themselves.
A concise but wide-ranging personal history of the internet from—for the first time—the point of …
How we use and get used by the 'net
4 stars
A lot happens in "Lurking," but true to its title, the book mostly shines a light on what foul things other people are doing - and how one's odds of getting away with it depend on how much the man in the mirror looks like Zuck.
Ms. McNeil considers how social media have changed our behavior, first as offline interaction became normalized, and then as it has become weaponized.
Personal behavior is the focus here, so Google is mentioned only offhandedly. A leisurely defunct platform called Friendster opens the book, followed by crash courses in trolling on Twitter and 4chan and reverse-engineering what Facebook thinks you want.
Conversely, we hear about Wikipedia and successful efforts by the underrepresented to own and share their true stories.
But ultimately Ms. McNeil can't hold back: "...I have tried to maintain a consistent tone of criticism that is not openly combative... but I have …
A lot happens in "Lurking," but true to its title, the book mostly shines a light on what foul things other people are doing - and how one's odds of getting away with it depend on how much the man in the mirror looks like Zuck.
Ms. McNeil considers how social media have changed our behavior, first as offline interaction became normalized, and then as it has become weaponized.
Personal behavior is the focus here, so Google is mentioned only offhandedly. A leisurely defunct platform called Friendster opens the book, followed by crash courses in trolling on Twitter and 4chan and reverse-engineering what Facebook thinks you want.
Conversely, we hear about Wikipedia and successful efforts by the underrepresented to own and share their true stories.
But ultimately Ms. McNeil can't hold back: "...I have tried to maintain a consistent tone of criticism that is not openly combative... but I have found it next to impossible to maintain this distance when it comes to the topic of Facebook. I hate it. The company is one of the biggest mistakes in modern history, a digital cesspool that, while calamitous when it fails, is at its most dangerous when it works as intended."
I won't slice that as a quote post because it sounds shrill out of context. In context, it makes absolute sense.
The bestselling entertaining guide from America's most delightfully unconventional hostess is now available in paperback! …
Hospitality under the influence (2007 review)
4 stars
Well-written and funny, with a fair number of drug references, and recipes that look like they just might work, but one is a little reluctant to commit a lot of time to recipes from someone who proclaims herself to have both a primary and a backup dealer.
The bookstores really don’t know where to file this — some file it under Humor, some under Cooking, some just give up and stick it on a table in the middle of the store. During the book tour, Sedaris was at her most animated when railing against those who want to call it humor — she takes the recipe and entertaining bit very seriously, in an ironic sort of way, and she wants people to take her book seriously. It’s as if she truly believed she was the Betty Crocker for the new millennium, a burnt-out roach in the ashtray and a medicine …
Well-written and funny, with a fair number of drug references, and recipes that look like they just might work, but one is a little reluctant to commit a lot of time to recipes from someone who proclaims herself to have both a primary and a backup dealer.
The bookstores really don’t know where to file this — some file it under Humor, some under Cooking, some just give up and stick it on a table in the middle of the store. During the book tour, Sedaris was at her most animated when railing against those who want to call it humor — she takes the recipe and entertaining bit very seriously, in an ironic sort of way, and she wants people to take her book seriously. It’s as if she truly believed she was the Betty Crocker for the new millennium, a burnt-out roach in the ashtray and a medicine cabinet full of Valium (and marbles).
Encompassing nearly 2,000 years of heists and tunnel jobs, break-ins and escapes, A Burglar's Guide …
Earnest, fascinating, scattered
3 stars
At its best, this book is a fascinating flight through the skies of L.A. and scamper through the tunnels below, a cops-and-robbers tale that informs us of the tricks of both trades.
Dampening the action is that the author is as earnest as a puppy; whomever he's sitting next to is his best friend, whether that's a former burglar, a master lock picker, or the LAPD. He repeats police propaganda unflinchingly, but later carries lock picks and handcuffs into a bank and worries he may get caught with them.
We learn about capers through sewers, into rivers, underneath banks and slicing through museums. We meet a burglar who builds himself a Spider-Man themed hideout inside a Toys 'R Us.
In the end his in-laws are burglarized, and The Burglar falls from a perch of "master of misuse of the built environment" to lazy teenage punks.
The tales are thrilling, if …
At its best, this book is a fascinating flight through the skies of L.A. and scamper through the tunnels below, a cops-and-robbers tale that informs us of the tricks of both trades.
Dampening the action is that the author is as earnest as a puppy; whomever he's sitting next to is his best friend, whether that's a former burglar, a master lock picker, or the LAPD. He repeats police propaganda unflinchingly, but later carries lock picks and handcuffs into a bank and worries he may get caught with them.
We learn about capers through sewers, into rivers, underneath banks and slicing through museums. We meet a burglar who builds himself a Spider-Man themed hideout inside a Toys 'R Us.
In the end his in-laws are burglarized, and The Burglar falls from a perch of "master of misuse of the built environment" to lazy teenage punks.
The tales are thrilling, if you can jam your internal GPS and just go where he takes you.
All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and …
Prescient
4 stars
I highly recommend this book. Written back in 2015, it opens with a geographic thesis on why Russia would want to invade Ukraine. (It's for a warm water port. )
99% Invisible is a big-ideas podcast about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings …
Enlightening for the like-minded
3 stars
By the makers of the 99% Invisible podcast, this book offers dozens of bite-sized views of the built environment, its limitations, and those who would transcend them.
It has a particular worldview, one somewhere between New Urbanists and City Beautiful. But it acknowledges and calls itself on this view continually, noting that improvement to some is gentrification to others.
Saint Etienne have spent three decades making music out of memories for people who make …
Leaps out of the gate, then cruises
3 stars
The first perhaps ⅔ of the book, which is about one of the author's favourite bands, is a lovely romp down Memory Lane. Eventually it becomes the tale of how one song and one album made him a superfan, and that's rather more relevant to his mates than to fans of Saint Etienne.
I picked up What Tech Calls Thinking to have a short book to take on an airplane. It ended up taking me weeks to finish.
Daub's core thesis is that tech is really good at finding not-quite-problems and selling us on tech solutions. And at not-quite-failing, and being proud of it (proud of the ones who eventually succeed, anyway). And at taking generally true things, or generally false things, and laundering them through the words of people who have said similar things. And at using the names of those people in interviews, or on motivational posters, or in venture-capital pitches.
The dilemma is that Thinking itself engages in this same conceit. At the end of the book, I knew and believed exactly what I had before I opened it. But I had a few new names to drop, if I chose to remember them.
Occasionally Daub allows that the internet …
I picked up What Tech Calls Thinking to have a short book to take on an airplane. It ended up taking me weeks to finish.
Daub's core thesis is that tech is really good at finding not-quite-problems and selling us on tech solutions. And at not-quite-failing, and being proud of it (proud of the ones who eventually succeed, anyway). And at taking generally true things, or generally false things, and laundering them through the words of people who have said similar things. And at using the names of those people in interviews, or on motivational posters, or in venture-capital pitches.
The dilemma is that Thinking itself engages in this same conceit. At the end of the book, I knew and believed exactly what I had before I opened it. But I had a few new names to drop, if I chose to remember them.
Occasionally Daub allows that the internet did change some things for the better, like clearing the shelf space where you kept the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In that example, he even missed a chance to critique whether the tech replacement is actually as good as the original - a fat pitch down the middle that a book like this shouldn't take.
I wasn't expecting a cover-to-cover hymn book for those of the Big Tech Sucks cloth. I might have thought I wanted that when I bought it, but upon finishing the book, I realized that I hadn't.
Like the archetypal internet troll to whom much of a chapter is devoted, Thinking neither adds to nor improves the discourse. One variant of the troll in Daub's telling is the guy who drops a comment to explain to you what you just said. I definitely had a feeling of having just been explained to.
