A great blast from the past

I just finished Rod Serling’s Stories From the Twilight Zone a collection of six of the best episodes of the television series. Included in the book are: The Nighty Casey, Escape Clause, Walking Distance, The Fever, Where is Everybody and The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

The stories are introduced by Serling’s daughter Anne Serling and followed by the classic end narration from the TV show. I enjoyed them immensely. If you’re at all a fan of the classic TV series, you will too.

24 for the year.

A great book by an extraordinary individual

I just finished Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth and it is truly an excellent book. Hadfield is the Canadian astronaut who not only commanded the ISS for a couple of months, but posted the infamous youtube video of himself singing David Bowie’s Space Oddity while actually in space.

Hadfield comes across in this memoir as the most incredibly humble and down to earth person imaginable, especially for an astronaut. The book recounts his quiet determination to become an astronaut when, as a citizen of a nation with no space program, he had no clear path do doing so. His adventures along the way are informative and entertaining.

Throughout the book he takes pains to draw some key lessons for life from his experiences; first, no matter how unlikely your goals are, constantly be preparing for them. When he decided he wanted to be astronaut, he said to himself: “Okay, Canada doesn’t have a space program yet, but when they do they’ll look at military pilots as the first potential astronauts” and went out and became a military pilot. Second: You will only have so many “golden opportunities” in your life to keep your mouth shut. Always think about what you’re about to say and try to discern whether what you’re about contribute will actually help the situation or your reputation. Third and perhaps most important: always strive to be a “zero”. Hadfield’s premise is that in every situation there are people who actively contribute to the success of the team (+1s), those who actively detract from the team’s success (-1s) and those who might not do anything, but also don’t harm it (“zeros”), or as he put it:

“Over the years, I’ve realized that in any new situation, whether it involves an elevator or a rocket ship, you will almost certainly be viewed in one of three ways. As a minus one; actively harmful, someone who creates problems. Or as a zero; your impact is neutral and doesn’t tip the balance one way or another. Or you’ll be seen as a plus one; someone how actively adds value. Everyone wants to be a plus one of course. But proclaiming your plus-one-ness at the outset almost guarantees that you’ll be viewed as a minus one, regardless of the skills you bring to the table or how you actually perform. This might seem self-evident, but it can’t be because so many people do it.”

Anyway, the book is a very entertaining read, that just might have some life lessons it it. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

23 for the year.

Stupidity Codified

This time it was The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla. I came by the book via a recommendation from a blogger I have a great deal of respect for, so I expected to be impressed by it. Instead, it was kind of “meh”. It’s not that the book is bad, it’s not. It’s just kind of, well, facile and obvious. Anyone who’s had any dealings with humans will intuitively know that these laws are true, even if they haven’t taken the trouble to codify and quantify them in this way. To save you the trouble of reading the book, here are the five laws:

1. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

2. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

While the definition, law #3, could, perhaps be reworked a bit, the list is more or less solid. And it only took 71 pages to expound it. But I really expected something more, maybe something funnier, or with witty examples. It was “OK” but don’t go out of your way to find this.

22 for the year.

Good But Not Great

I just finished A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II by Maury Klein and there is a great book in there, but it was layered over with enough extraneous stuff to make it a chore to read. The book did an excellent job of setting up the economic circumstances of America on the eve of WWII. A decade of depression had left perhaps as much as half of American industrial capacity idle, while the aftermath of WWI, when the government had encouraged private investment to increase capacity them suddenly pulled the contracts using that capacity when the war ended, left many businessmen chary of expanding their business to bid on contracts. It also gave a good account of how the first stirrings of rearmament were carried out and financed.

Another great strength of the book is that it conveys a good sense of the personalities involved. Readers get an excellent idea of who the men responsible for the mobilization were, men such as, Bernard Baruch, Donald Nelson, Henry Kaiser, Andrew Higgins and a host of others. He also does a pretty good job of laying out the challenges facing the government and the at times almost incredible in-fighting between the military and the administration over control of production and procurement of raw materials.

In fact the whole book is quite good until late 1944 and 1945 when it kind of went off the rails on a number of issues that are only tangentially related (at best!) to the main topic of the book. First were a couple of anecdotes about this farmer, drug store operator, or on one case beekeeper (!) which were mildly interesting, but which Klein never tied into the larger narrative. Second was a lengthy discursion on FDR’s health and political prospects in 1944, which, I suppose could have been germane to the topic if the author had explained how it impacted mobilization and third was a perfunctory technical account of the various methods of enriching uranium and created plutonium which again, didn’t really fit in the rest of the narrative. In fact the entire treatment of the Manhattan Project was kind of lacking in focus.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is still good for the details of how the US produced as much as it produced, but the reader will have to wade through a morass of marginally useful stuff to get it. Recommended with reservations. I’m still looking of the equivalent of Tooze’s epic Wages of Destruction on the Allies.

21 for the year.