Unselfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World

Empathy is a key to raising a child today. How do we help children to develop empathy? The book provides a number of anecdotes (often in a classroom setting) showing how the research on empathy can be put in practice. Empathetic Children have a moral compass and think of "us" instead of "Them". They work for the betterment of everyone. Alas, there is a great tendency of children to focus on themselves and seek after their own personal desire fulfillment. It can require a lot of work to help teach them empathy.
The Epilogue contained a few points that had proven successful for teaching empathy.

• Be friendly
  
• Break Down Barriers
  
• Give Kids a Voice
  
• Play Chess and Unplugged Games
  
• Create Parent Support Networks
  
• Build Caring Relationships
  
• Don't Give Up.
  

Working towards increasing empathy is a long process. Different children may respond differently. (Though how they respond may be surprising. A baby can help bring out empathy in groups that you would not expect.) This book provides some research and toolbox to help achieve greater empathy.

Soonish

Soonish is a humourous take on the technology we can expect to see in the near future. It focuses on "almost there" technologies (like fusion) and describes how close (or far away) we are from seeing them in our lives. The book is made to be easily accessible and includes plenty of brief cartoons illustrating the points. Each of the sections contains a description of the current state as well as where we will be going and concerns we may have. Each technology appears to be thoroughly researched via literature review as well as personal interviews with key contributors. In addition, the final chapter includes shorter summaries of technologies didn't quite make the cut for the book.
While the focus is on the "optimistic" side of new technology development, the ethical and pessimistic side also comes in play. Programmable matter sounds great when we talk about assembling the tool we need right when we need it. However, if a hacker could cause the matter to suddenly transform into a destructive weapon, we could be in big trouble. Similarly, what if that new "smart limb" could be controlled by an external party. Robotic construction could eliminate many of the good blue collar jobs, leading to greater income inequality. Synthetic biology could result enable all sorts of terrorism opportunities. And interfacing a brain with a computer? Well, it does not take much effort to think of the negative possibilities there. This book would be a great source for all sorts of science fiction scenarios.
Some of the technologies described in the book will probably never become a significant part of our lives, while others will gradually seep into general acceptance. However, guessing which ones will make it is a difficult task. Lets just hope we don't cause a disaster by rushing too fast into the "wrong" technologies.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

The humble shipping container helped to usher in giant changes in the world economy. Box does an excellent job of presetning the history of the container. However, the writing at times seems to jump around, perhaps attempting to provide too many facts at once. Prior to the adoption of a standard container, the cost of loading and unloading a ship could exceed (in time and expense) the cost of transporting the good across the sea. There was little incentive to use larger or more efficient ships because they would just be bogged down in port. Containerization attempts were started with railroads. However, these ended up getting held back due to regulation. (The railroads were not allowed to charge cheaper rates even though the containers added to economies of scale.)
when a ship arrived in port, a large group of laborers was needed for the work of unloading and loading. However, this work was not very regular, and the wages paid could change based on supply and and demand on both sides. This opened things up to bribes, and later unionization (which was often along ethnic lines.) One union controlled west coast ports, while another controlled the east coast. By having a stranglehold on all port traffic, the unions were able to exert greater control than other unions. When containers threatened to reduce the labor needed for handling ships, the longshoremen negotiated significant benefits for themselves. (In essence they would "share" the benefits of containerization.) It is scary the impact that a single union could have. The unions only reluctantly accepted the progress of the container and had done their best to delay their inevitable.
Railroads too engaged in stupidity at the dawn of the container. They preferred using their boxcars rather than shipping containers. They were ideally situated to transfer containers from the ports to inland locations. However, they did what they could to not get that traffic, thus hampering their own viability and giving significant advantage to long range distance trucks.
The military initially had its own small version of containers. However, the logistic challenge that was Vietnam encouraged them to adopt the standard commercial container.
The container encouraged big container ports, often at the expense of small ones. Instead of smaller ships calling at many ports, a massive container ship would run between a couple ports. In most cases, it was major ports that expanded to be the container behemoths. However, there are some that came out of nowhere to dominate container traffic. One of the most interesting was the port of Fleixstowe in Britain. It was a privately owned backwater port not organized by the union. While the union was busy battling out with London-area port, Flexistowe built up support for container traffic and came to become the prime container port before the unions could work out their differences with the other ports.
Container traffic enabled cheap reliable transportation of good around the world, and thus encouraged just in time manufacturing. I wonder why something similar has not been tried for transportation of humans? What if we got in our pod that then whisked of to the train station, connected us to the airport, flew us across the ocean, and then took us to our destination. We could enjoy the comfortable journey without the slog of transferring between multiple modes. Could we find a way for people transit to work the same way as goods transport?

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran is memoir by Azar Nafisis describing the author's experience reading Lolita and other books of English literature in Iran during the time of the Islamic revolution. She was born in Iran, then educated in the United States and returned to teach in Iran right as the revolution was taking place. At first, the revolution looked like it would be a positive experience. However, it later became more totalitarian, eventually shutting down the university and leading to her leaving the country. She does note that even the participants in the revolution were complex people. (At one time, the more radical Islamists would defend her while the liberals were silent.) She brought with her some western sensibilities that she wanted to live in Iran. Alas, the revolution would spin from crackdown to liberalization leaving the life of a westernized intellectual precarious. (It was interesting that they would use "Switzerland" as the example of a lax moral state.) The youth were often the ones to provide the muscle behind the revolutionary effort. (Hmm... Are the professor shoutdowns the first step of that in the US?)
The history of the revolution is secondary to the life of individual people through literature. The book is divided into four sections, each based on an author or work of literature. The book provides excellent literary criticism by weaving the story of the people studying the work with the characters and themes of the book. Lolita is in part a story of oppression, but also one of willingly taking the "easy path". Forcing everyone to fully cover themselves can be just as offensive as forcing people to not be covered. Great Gatsby superficially glamorizes "immoral" behavior, but deep down it is condemning it. The subtleties are lost on censors. The works are all fiction. They are presenting tales of the conditions of people to help us today.
While the first two sections tended to focus on individual works, the last two where geared more towards authors' as a whole - Henry James and Jane Austen. Nafisi finds parallels in the human condition and subtleties of reaction within the current Iran. Women's rights are greatly restricted in the Islamic republic. Even some devoutly religious find issues with their identity. With everyone forced to adopt the headscarf and covering, the devout no longer are set apart physically. Courtship and marriage takes on a very different meaning. People are not supposed to even look upon the opposite sex, yet they still have the sexual urges. They complain about hypocrisy among those in power, yet are often reluctant to challenge themselves within or without of the confines of the rules. Those in power in Iran are often portrayed as reactionary buffoons. One student sets himself on fire after no knowing how to deal with life after the end of the Iran/Iraq war. In another case, an attempt is made to murder a group of authors by getting them on a bus and driving them off a cliff. However, in spite of this, there is a reference shown to the unifying force of the death of Ayatollah.
In the end, the author leaves Iran to come teach in the US. Many of her friends have also left Iran, while at the same time Iran had made some small steps towards liberalization.

Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts

Negotiations over dollars and contracts can be fairly straightforward. Each side wants to get ahead and is willing to give and take a little to get what they desire. However, when emotions and deeply held values are at at stake, things become much more thorny. How do you negotiate when each side has "unchangeable" values that must be respected. Daniel Shapiro provides clues to help us recognize different "non-negotiables" and to successfully work with them. He describes many situations that he has dealt with. In one example, he divides a group up into 6 small groups. Each group much come to consensus on a number of difficult questions (such as should the death penalty be allowed). After each group has come to agreement, all the groups must come together and agree to a consensus within a few negotiating rounds or the earth will be destroyed. Despite only recently adopting their group values, each individual tribe held to them. In almost all cases, the earth ended up being destroyed before the team could reach a conclusion. In another role-play, a group was divided into groups, with one group gradually accumulating more wealth in the came. The "haves" were pulled out to a fancy area to plan the rules going forward. The "have nots" mutinied and refused to even listen to the plan of the "haves" - even though there plan was to ensure that the have-nots benefited more. They saw the group as "them" and could not trust them. They were out of tribe.
This "tribe" behavior often happens in the real world, with nations, religions and even sports teams. The attachment is real, even if illogical.
Deeply held values can also be a stumbling block in negotiations. If the two sides hold different, unmovable values, how do you negotiate a common solution? Often the solution is to explore the root value. Is there a solution that can satisfy both sides without compromising values. (An example given was a wife who wanted a Christmas tree for what it represented growing up with her father. The husband did not want one because they were raising their kids Jewish and it would not be appropriate. The solution they came up with was to visit Grandpa on Christmas with the Christmas tree, thereby providing for the memories and keeping their home pure to the Judism.)
Convenient means like problem solving and positional bargaining are often insufficient for resolving emotionally charged conflicts. We can often get in a state of what the author calls "Vertigo". Time passes. Each side is intent on "winning" the conflict and emotion takes over. Participants lose awareness of the outside world and lets emotions take over a negative focus. You need to work to jolt yourself out of this state. Sometimes a surprise or bringing in a legitimate authority can help to break free. A somewhat similar problem is the repetition compulsion. In that, the argument just goes in autopilot as both sides repeat the same thing that has been said before. It is tougher to deal with. It is helpful to identify the "lure" to try to avoid the triggers and stop it before it starts.
Taboos can be both good and bad. Shared taboos are beneficial for a group. However, differing taboos can lead to conflict. Possible options include accepting, chiseling away at the taboo or tearing it down. The key is to find the best way to work around the taboo so that it doesn't interfere with decision making. Similar to taboos, varying sacred values can make agreement difficult. The author uses a scale of "Important, Pseudo-sacred, Sacred and Sacred Sacred" to describe the different degrees of sacredness. These are internal values that may or may not correspond to outward religious practices. To one party "keeping the house clean" is something important, while the other side sees it as a sacred value that must be kept. Understanding these differences can help resolve problems.
Emotionally charged conflicts can be very challenging. Understanding the values and identity that each party has can be very useful in reaching a resolution. Identifying the sources of emotional challenge can help to avoid the pitfalls and obtain a peaceful resolution. The book provides many useful tools for what will be a challenging process.

Why Read Moby Dick

Why should we read Moby Dick? Nathaniel Philbrick gives us a number of reasons in this short book. It serves as a nice intro, giving us background in Mellville's life and times as well as the book itself. When it was published, Moby Dick was not very successful. However, after the civil war, and especially after the great world wars, the novel increased in popularity due to its timeless themes. Melville was also a stickler for details giving the novel additional value as a history of a bygone era and profession. Moby book is a long book, and Philbrick acknowledges you can get plenty out of abridgments and other versions. Now, I want to read it.

Joy Luck Club

Joy Luck Club is a collection of stories of Chinese women who have lived in San Francisco. Some stories deal with life in China, but most deal with life in San Francisco. In one, a mother remarks that she hoped to raise a Chinese woman with all the benefits of America, but instead got an American woman. That becomes a sad theme in the book. In spite of growing up in a large Chinese community, these women have mostly lost their Chinese culture. They live like Americans. When they go back to China, they are clearly foreigners. However, in America, they are often not seen as "true Americans" (In one story, she is mistaken for Vietnamese.) The old culture is lost, but there is not a new culture to replace it.
The Chinese mothers come across as the powerful figures. Even in a culture that placed little importance in women, the mother still became the controlling figure in their children's lives. Once in America, the mothers could continue to rely on some of the "old world" knowledge to see through the trappings of materialism in America to realize that their daughters are not doing as well as they thing they are. Alas, it takes adulthood for the daughters to finally come around. Most of their troubles are those typical of upper-middle class Americans. The Chinese culture helped push them out of the "poor refugee" status, but still left them to struggle with life.

Stones Into Schools

Stones into Schools comes across as a "behind the scenes" tale of the quest to provide education for the "uneducated" in the impoverished areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The focus is primarily on girls, who are often denied education due to lack of resources and cultural restrictions. They hope the education will "set them free" to help achieve their full potential. (However, what they do achieve is still up to them, and may be different than what we westerners would desire.)
In order to help people, it is important to understand them and work with them. There were many rural communities begging for schools. A great deal of success can be had in working with them to fulfill their needs. Something "owned" by the locals will last longer than something inflicted upon them. The author mentions times when the schools were spared the wrath of militants because a local religious leader was involved with the school and another time where the "inspectors" were so thrilled with the playground they had no issues with the school. However, there were also cases of foreign companies donating expensive camping tents to help people after a natural disaster. Alas, the people mad fires in the tents, causing these expensive tents to burn down and eventually to be used primarily as fuel.

Three Below: Floors Book 2

Leo is now the owner of the Whippet hotel. The books starts with his dad marrying his best friend's mother. He now has a brother to lead him on adventures. This time, he needs to go on a quest to get money to pay the property tax bill (while the parents are out of town on a honeymoon.) To make things challenging the former hotel manager is planning on swooping up the hotel property by paying the taxes. they need to act quick. In the process they explore the lower levels of the hotel. Their adventures go further and further into the realm of fantasy. This book is clearly in the realm of children's literature. There are just too many holes and bits of fantasy to keep it believable. (The numbers all seem too low. Even the ridiculously high tax seems low for a block in Manhattan. The subterranean creatures and inventions also go way beyond the realm of our world. And of course, there is Merganser who seems to have nothing better to do than lead boys on a quest and make sure they don't get harmed. As long as you turn off critical thinking, you can enjoy this quick escapist read.

The Undercover Economist Strikes Back

The Undercover Economist Strikes is a humorous primer on basic macroeconomics. Chapters began with quotes - humorous quotes form Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy lead off a couple of the early chapters. Most of the book is in a conversational "question and answer" format. The "pupil" asks a question which the "economist" answers, leading to additional follow up questions. The answers tend to light-hearted anecdotes that provide an exaggerated understanding of an economic condition. Chapters discuss an early macroeconic modeling system that used hydraulics to solve economic differential equations to model a country's economy. (Enterprising economics even hooked the export pipe of one model one model to the import of another to model the impacts policies would have on other countries.) We also have money supply explained using the failure, success, and failure of a capitol hill babysitting co-op. Printing money can be good, unless it leads to hyper inflation, in which case it is very bad. People can be irrational, and be much more concerned with a drop in their salary, even though a small increase in times of high inflation tends to be worse. In classical economic models, prices rise and fall based on supply and demand. However, in the real world, there are many factors which cause the prices to be sticky. This can often lead to negative economic outcomes. (It is difficult to cut wages. Thus, unemployment tends to worsen when the economy is bad - even though many people would be willing to work for a smaller amount of money.)
By using humor, the author is able to provide explanations to both sides of controversial economic policies such as stimulus and inequality remedies without being dogmatic.

Time Travel: A History

Time Travel is a rambling exploration of the history of time travel. It bounces around from treatments of time travel in literature to scientific papers on theoretical physics. Treating time as a 4th dimension came in vogue. However, in our world, we have only been able to move forward. Being able to move backwards seems like a logical possibility. However, why haven't we seen changes in our history? Perhaps the world is in our "best possible world". Or maybe it is just not possible to travel in time. Or perhaps it is just too hard for us to comprehend. Science Fiction stories have explored a number of possible paradoxes that could result from time travel. (What would happen if somebody went back and met themselves? Or what if they killed their ancestors or prevented them from meeting?) The book rambles around to include a history of science fiction with some significant authors (such as H.G. Wells and Heinlein.) It also looks at the treatments by physicists such as Einstein as well as the philosophy of time travel. We also explore the history of "time". (Does the consideration of the "past" separate man from other animals?) There are many interesting parts. However, there is little overwhelming thesis other than "this all has to do with movement through time."

Floors

A young boy works with his dad in maintenance at an exotic and very posh hotel. The owner amassed a huge fortune and felt it was important to make all sorts of wacky inventions. In the course of the book, the boy goes through a quest where he learns more and more about the hotel and eventually discovers who is sabotaging it and what the future will be. He also finds a new friend and prepares himself for future leadership roles. The hotel turns out to be a kid's dreams with rooms ranging from "life size pinball machine" to a recreation of central park (along with many "secret" rooms in between. Ducks are also very important. The story is devoid of extreme drama and engaging for young readers.

Fooled By Randomness

Fooled By Randomness explores the importance of random events in life and society. On the outset, the author states that he wanted this book to be fun to write, and tried to avoid too many citations. He does cite some literature, but more often he helps provide alternate explanations for results. For example, many studies have tried to tease out what makes successful businessmen. Intelligence is not seen as super important. However, the propensity to take risks does stand out. However, if you looked at bankrupt businessmen, you may see similar results, likely with an even higher "risk taker" rating. The highly successful may appear to be average because they are. They just happened to get lucky. The finance world tends to revere the young, successful traders. However, finding the next "big shot" is essentially a crap-shoot. One person may take risks and get lucky. However, many others will not have the same luck. An older trader is probably your best bet, because they have managed to survive for a long time without imploding.
It is very hard for us to separate out the "random luck" from "skill". Today CEOs get paid enormous salaries to lead companies. However, do they really bring anything to the table? It is difficult to precisely quantify the value that they add. It could be that they just happen to be charismatic and happened to be heading a well-run company. Lower level individual contributors tend to produce results that are much more easily quantified. But as you move up the management chain, randomness plays a larger and larger roll. Even companies as a whole benefit enormously from randomness. Microsoft became a mega software company because IBM used DOS and IBM's architecture became the dominant in the industry. A lot of dice rolls went their way and resulted in a mega company. How much of Bill Gates' fortune is due to luck and how much due to skill? His net worth may be a million times that of some contemporary programmers with equivalent talents. (This also brings in to place network and building effects. Due to "randomness", early success may lead to greater future opportunities that can help develop different skills in the future.)
Even when we know the role of randomness, we are still likely to "fall for it." This can sometimes result in self-defeating behavior, as the mental benefit from a gain less than the harm from a similar loss. It takes skill to avoid "distractions" of randomness and live our lives in the best way possible.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World

The Logic of Life is an economics book in the vein of Freakonomics. It provides logical explanations of seemingly illogical behaviors by people. In many cases, psychological studies tease out logical behavior from seemingly illogical outcomes.
One example was the discussion of racism. "Bigoted racism" would be expected to weed itself out of the business world. If businesses that turn down the best candidates merely because of external characters, would suffer and falter. (A simple example could be seen in basketball where all white teams became at a significant disadvantage compared to integrated teams.) However, "rational racism" is much more difficult to remove because it does provide some "stereotypical" advantage. On average members of certain groups will do better, therefore companies are more likely to hire those in the group. Those in the "out group" still suffer, but companies that practice it are still successful, thus making it more difficult to remove. These groups can also self-reinforce their standing. A Catalan who studies computer science rather than Catalan may be shunned by his community for attempted to do something outside the community. This leads to fewer people being willing to study and succeed and thus an overall reputation of community being inferior. Once the group is deemed inferior, a logical company would prefer the stereotypically better group, and thus perpetuate the inferiority.
Similarly, devolution of areas to isolated ghettos can be explained by a logical behavior. A perfectly integrated community may be functioning well. Each resident likes to have a certain number of similar people nearby, and that balance is properly met. However, if one resident moves out and is replaced by a "different" person, that could upset the balance. Now one person feels they are too different, and move out, this starts the chain reaction which results in the community dominated by a single group.
There are a number of additional examples in other areas of logical explanations for something that seems illogical on the surface. Groups can do strange things when they are composed of individuals doing "logical" things.

The Go-Giver

The Go-Giver uses the common business book trope of a salesman meeting with a "guru" to gain insight in ways to improve his career. Alas, the meetings do not help him to meet his original sales quota, but it does serve as the jumping point to his new career.
The Go-Giver philosophy is basically "give and receive authentically". You must freely give to others without expecting anything in return. You should also let others give to you without making things to difficult. And finally, you should be true to yourself and not come across as fake. The values are anti-narcissistic, yet in the long run paradoxically helps benefit you. It makes personal and business life better as everybody is seeking to help others.

Messenger

Messenger is the third and shortest book in the Giver Quartet. It follows more closely with the second book, and only superficially connects to the first and forth book. The series feels like two separate ones. Giver and Son go together, while Messenger and Gathering Blue are tied together. Had they been marketed as such, the reading experience would be much less frustrating.

Gathering Blue

The end of The Giver left many questions unanswered. You would think the sequel would fill in the blanks. Alas, in that you would be mistaken. (Try "Son", the fourth book in the series.) Instead, Gathering Blue takes us to a totally different area of the same "Giver" world. A young girl has a special gift, but also a physical abnormality. She is brought into the castle to serve with others. She learns that though she is treated well, she is also being "imprisoned" to have her talents used for the benefits of others. She eventually discovers her father and leaves. In some ways it is a repeat of the Giver, with a similar story arch in a very different community. Other than preparing us for the community of the fourth book, the second book is not critical in the Giver series.

Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

Ninety Percent of Everything provides insight into the shipping industry. Today, it is often so cheap to ship things long distances that we think nothing of buying "cheap junk" from halfway around the world. However, things still need to travel across the ocean to get to us. The focus of the book is the ocean travel. The author spends time with a ship crew to experience shipping first hand. Crews typically come from less developed countries, where the wages from life at see can allow their family to live quite well back home. We also get plenty of coverage of the Somali pirates and possible reasons for their behavior. Alas, with the focus on the people at sea, there is not a whole lot of coverage of the whole logistics of the operation.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

Unexpected "shocks" to the normal way of doing things can often help spark the creativity needed to accomplish something truly amazing. Messy opens with the story of a jazz pianist that was going to walk away from a performance due to the poor condition of the piano. However, as a special favor to the promoter, the pianist performed and produced one of the top performances of all time. The condition of the piano forced the pianist to improvise and go out of the "comfort zone" and produce something great.
Attempts to be fully objective often produce bias in how the "objective" criteria are created. External factors have a habit of rearing their ugly head. APGAR scores for new borns lead to more c sections. Diversity produces benefits when there are true differences. Cities that section every thing off in neat areas not only produce great amounts of traffic, they eliminate many chances of spontaneity that can lead lead to positive growth. Providing too much protection from failure reduces the chances of small problems, but increases the odds that a problem will be catastrophic. (The book gives the example of the Air France jet that crashed over the ocean. The pilots were accustomed to auto-pilot, and had difficulty responding to abnormal conditions. Standardization and protection can lead to us keeping the "same old bad".
Startups help to inject new messiness into the system. Amazon did stupid stuff early on. They would even go out and buy toys at retail, losing money on the transaction to get it to the customer. That messiness allowed them to succeed.
People adapt to meet criteria, even if that hurts the big picture. (For example medical appointments in 2 days mean none available in advance. Surgeon ratings on outcomes lead to more unnecessary surgery. Actually results show little difference in surgeon compared to entry condition of patients.) Being able to rely on some messiness can help the big picture to be better - even if there are parts that are not so great.

Son

After meandering around a few other side stories, the Giver series finally returns to the original story line in the conclusion. Son starts out in the same village as the Giver. We follow the story of a girl who became a birth mother. We gradually learn that she had lived at the same point in time as the Giver. She had a difficult birth and was then reassigned to a different job. However, in reassigning, they had forgotten to give her the "pills" that cut off emotion. She had the yearning to see her son, and eventually found him at the nurturing center. After he Jonas flees with baby Gabe, she ends up boarding a boat and ending up in another village. There she discovers a society vastly different from her own. (It somewhat resembles a somewhat primitive society with little technology, but a degree of learning and understanding.) From there, she builds up strength to climb out and find her son. Alas, she makes a great trade with the Trademaster and loses her youth in exchange for seeing him. She doesn't let him know until near the very end.
You could easily jump from the first book to this book in the Giver series. The two middle ones provide deeper understanding of the world, but are not really needed to follow these plot points. I would have been fine with the "Trademaster" being removed from the book. He seems to be added to allow a "superhero" conclusion where good triumps over evil. However, the supernatural abilities just don't fit well with the rest of the work.

Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

What are fifty inventions that helped shape the modern economy? This book doesn't attempt to find the 50 most important inventions, but 50 that have had impact. Some of the things are classical physical inventions like the plough and plastic. Others like management consulting and Seller Feedback are modern, abstract innovations that are important to our economy. There are also cautionary tales. Attempts were made to ban leaded gasoline in the 1920s. However, lobbying get it going for another half decade before it was eliminated. What other things in our current society are still being forced upon us by the regulatory framework and inertia. (Cars seem to come to mind.)
The book does a good job provided self-contained stories of individual innovations together with the glue that holds it together. Paper money is in interesting innovation, but the story of how it came about makes it come alive. The Smart Phone has quickly become an integral part of our lives. However, it is an amalgam of technologies produced primarily via government sponsored research. Compilers allow code to be more easily programmed, bringing programming to the masses and allowing higher and higher level programming. The barcode had been "invented" multiple times. The technology was the easy part. Getting producers and retailers to agree on to use it in a standard way was the challenge.
While a number of different innovations could have been included here. The author does a good job justifying the ones included and providing an informative and entertaining work.

A Mind at Play

A Mind at Play deifies Claude Shannon as a renaissance-type genius who is able to make contributions to any field he desires, yet is likely to leave his greatest ideas unfinished. You would have a tough time finding any criticism in this work. He grew up a tinkerer in small-town Michigan. He was super smart, and was great at understanding and applying math. He was also able to pick up domain knowledge of other fields and made great contributions to genetics research (that were only recently "rediscovered"). However, his primary contribution was the theory of information transmission. Alas, only briefly discusses what this theory is, leaving us wondering why he is so important. (Though this may be in part because it seems so obvious today.) He made some of the earliest "thinking machines", such as a "maze running mouse" and chess computers. He lived to see the dawn of the information age, but was suffering from Alzheimer's at the time and was thus barely able to comprehend it.
While I found the book to be a excessively laudatory, I did enjoy the descriptions of the time at Bell Labs. Having a bunch of people turned lose at doing whatever they wanted seems to be one of the advantages of monopolies. Any research that could be tangentially related to phone company business was fair game. The huge number of innovations that arose from Bell Labs validates its value. Imagine if we allowed more researchers the freedom to investigate ideas rather than spend endless hours writing grant proposals or helping the companies short-term bottom line? We see some of that with the big tech companies like Google and Facebook these days. Alas, a lot of the innovation today is in the small startups, and that funding is driven by the ability to appease the venture capitalists.

1984

I remembered 1984 being a lot better. Maybe I am confusing it with other similar books. (It does seem a lot like The Giver in theme. The start of the book is primarily about physical relationships, then rebellion, then torture and brainwashing, then an ending contentment. What does the main character accomplish in the story? His seed of rebellion is quashed and he is back to a "respectable" member of society. He just went through a very painful way of getting there.
The society is very stratified. The senior party officials live like kings and have a right to limited privacy. The lesser party party members are always watched, but live within a rule of law. They are protected, but most adhere to the strict rules. Even history is subject to change. They are always monitored by two-way telescreens. Even their thoughts could turn them in. The lower classes are for all practical purposes ignored. They can get away with anything, but end up punishing themselves with internal crimes. The society is content, but suffering as war continues going on.
Why is the book important today? The stories of fake news do seem similar to what happens in the Oceana of the novel. People are manipulated in to believing what the government wants them to believe. These same people may see their physical comforts diminish as they are cheering on the war's heroes and "hating" the other side. This parallels the left's view of the right-wing reactionaries. However, the left doesn't get off unscathed. The party regularly rewrites history to conform to the the current views. Disgraced people are "removed" from historical accounts. The current enemy has "always" been the enemy. This parallels sure looks a lot like the right's view of left-wing political correctness and revisionist history. The stratification of society can also be adopted by either side to describe modern day America. We have a wealthy elite that control everything. The party, represented by big borther is the corporate entity that has total power over society. The upper party members are those corporate elite that exercise true power. The others are their minions. The lowest classes are meant to rot as being unimportant. (Or depending on political persuasion, they are kept in a sufficient mass to allow the middle class to be oppressed.)
The moral code (with sex restricted solely to procreation as a duty to the party) and torture (strict physical torture to brainwash nonconformists) occupy a great deal of the text, but reduce the power of the novel. A society that actively spends that much effort physically forcing control seems less powerful than one that uses subtlety to get people to exercise the control themselves.

Children of the Fleet

Children of the Fleet takes place after the conclusion of the formic wars. The world is celebrating a great victory. However, they are still not sure if another onslaught is coming. There is some effort made to colonize other planets as "insurance policy". However, most of the world is more concerned about internal affairs. Dabeet Ochoa is child prodigy in the vein of Ender who wants to finagle his way into the "fleet school". He learns that being the smartest kid around will not get him anywhere. He needs to learn how to work with others, both accepting their instructions and helping them to achieve on their own. He eventually gets to prove himself in a real life situation. Like other Card books, the characters just "know" what needs to be done and have elaborate plans to help get other people to do it. It makes for good entertainment, but sacrifices believability. Perhaps as a payback, we get to know about Dabeet's parentage while he has not yet figured it out. (But if he can figure out everything else, why can't he figure this out?)

Leonardo da Vinci

I had always thought of da Vinci as a scientist who occasionally dabbled in artwork. In Isaacson's biography, however, he is presented primarily as an artist. (I guess that goes better with his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle companions. In the book he is portrayed as a gay eccentric who has sufficient gifts to allow him to run in elite social circles and get away with eccentric behavior. He loved to tinker and dream. However, he often did not finish his work. (That may be how he gets his reputation. In retrospect, it looks like his ideas were the base of modern inventions. However, that assumes he would have continued down what we now see as the obvious path, which was not so obvious back then.