Blogs

The Making of the Atomic Bomb
by Richard Rhodes
Simon & Schuster, 1986.

Five years in the writing, Richard Rhodes' history of the atomic bomb has become a landmark in the field of science popularization. At over 900 pages long, it presents a comprehensive account of the events that led to the production of the terrible weapon ever devised by man. It is really several different books in one, shifting in tone and emphasis as it follows the concept from start to finish: from scientific discovery to military-industrial project to the study of political decision-making in war.

Scientific discovery

The first third of the book is largely an account of scientific discovery, as experimenters worked to uncover the structure of the atom at the turn of the 20th century. Even in this foundational period, it was easy to see that nuclear bombardment involved energies that were orders of magnitude greater than the chemical reactions already familiar to science. It was natural to speculate about how to unlock those energies someday, and thus the dream of nuclear energy developed right alongside the earliest experiments. Frederick Soddy described the possibility of nuclear energy in his book The Interpretation of Radium (1909), based on his work alongside Ernst Rutherford. H. G. Wells then picked up on the idea in his famous novel The World Set Free (1914).

But the early nuclear bombardments could only play with atomic forces at a small scale. With the discovery of nuclear fission, it became obvious that a chain reaction was possible and could be used to multiply the energies released. But it would not be worked out in a time of peace on earth and brotherhood among men. With the expulsion of Jewish academics from German universities and the looming onset of World War II, the leading lights of atomic science left Europe for America. In just a few years, the center of gravity in the physics world had shifted across the Atlantic.

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The Pentium Chronicles
The People, Passion, and Politics behind Intel's Landmark Chips
by Robert P. Colwell
John Wiley & Sons, 2006.

Bob Colwell was the lead architect of the Intel P6 project, which became the Pentium Pro processor. The marketing name suggests that the P6 was only a small evolutionary improvement to the original Pentium, but the engineering reality is far different. The original Pentium (P5) was designed at Intel’s original facilities in California, by many of the same engineers that had worked on the 80486 and 80386. The P6, by contrast, was designed by a brand new team in Oregon, charged with securing Intel’s dominance of the microprocessor world by bringing the full range of RISC techniques to the x86 platform. The first engineer to join that team was Bob Colwell.

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He also relishes several “I told you so” moments over Intel’s stumbles. For example, he was called a “Chicken Little” for pointing out that Intel owes a great deal of its success to missteps by competitors. They shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too much, for at some point, continued speed would no longer be enough to keep Intel on top. He saw the end of the megahertz race in 1998 – about five years before it actually came to be. He also saw Itanium as a hopelessly complicated combination of unprecedented architectural changes, and thought that it should instead have been a proof-of-concept research project.

The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College
by Jacques Steinberg
Paperback: Penguin, 2003.  ISBN 0142003085

The Gatekeepers goes a long way towards demystifying the college admissions process in the United States.  Steinberg adapted the book from a series of articles that he’d written in the New York Times; and he actually has enough material collected to justify a full-length book.  Apart from the somewhat overlong mini-biography of admissions officer Ralph Figueroa that opens the book, it's captivating reading.

I knew a fair amount about college admissions to start with.  I went to a very competitive suburban high school.  I applied during the 1999-2000 admissions season – the same season chronicled in this book.  One of my apartment-mates in grad school went to Wesleyan, the college whose admissions office threw open its doors to Steinberg.  I do admissions interviews for applicants to my alma mater, almost all of them students at a super-competitive suburban high school.  I have some idea of how the admissions game is played.

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The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood
by Edward Jay Epstein
Random House, 2005

Edward Jay Epstein occupies the strange position of being a Hollywood columnist – but one who focuses on the business side of Hollywood rather than the razzle-dazzle. That is a unique niche to be in, but it's also a very small one. When times got tough in the magazine business, Slate dropped his Hollywood Economist column, and Epstein now gets his film-business commentary out through his blog.

Hollywood Economist

But he's absolutely right to point out that the news media rarely covers the substantial parts of the film business. All the focus on box-office receipts obscures the fact that the box office is no longer so important to profitability.  A film need only do well enough to guarantee an afterlife, in which the real money gets made. On the other hand, the shallow focus on box office grosses is not unique to Hollywood. Most business coverage in newspapers is awful, whatever the industry. They focus on big day-to-day events, and rarely do the simple arithmetic to explain the economic fundamentals that drive whole industries.

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The Eastern Front, 1914-1917
by Norman Stone
Macmillan, 1976

In the West, World War I is remembered for the futility of trench warfare, as men died in the tens of thousands for gains of a few hundred yards. In an attempt to break that stalemate, the most industrially- advanced nations of the world applied their ingenuity towards developing industrial ways of killing on the battlefield. Men were asphyxiated by poison gas, burned alive by flamethrowers, and finally, crushed by tanks. Yet another First World War was also fought alongside the war in the trenches -- a war of movement, in which victorious campaigns led to advances of tens, even hundreds of miles. That was the war on the Eastern front -- a war forgotten by a Western Europe that was preoccupied with its own tragedies, a war whose results were overturned by later events, a war that ended up overshadowed by revolution, a war that Winston Churchill dubbed "the unknown war".

Decades after it was written in 1976, Norman Stone's meticulously researched book remains the most complete English-language account of the Eastern front of World War I. In the introduction, Stone summarizes the existing English- language literature as consisting of essentially two books, one of them being Churchill's book from 1931! Of course, by the time Stone was writing his book, the Eastern front of World War I had long since been overshadowed by the Eastern front of World War II, which saw the fiercest fighting of the war and ultimately decided its outcome. The same cannot be said of the Eastern front of World War I.

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