Best Reading in 2008
These are the best half a dozen books I've read this year (in no particular order). They weren't all necessarily published this year, but this is the year in which I read them. Feel free to read them your selves - I recommend all of them.
Alan
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Penguin
The art of the sustained polemic is not dead! In an age where bland agreement with the current fad is 'in', Nicholas Taleb has written a book that not only takes apart the pretensions of the market traders and other would-be oracles, but also reintroduces robustness into debate.
Some people won't like the style, of course. That's sad, because they will also be missing a very informative book. It really does tell you a lot about randomness in life, what it means, and possible strategies for dealing with it.
As a computer programmer I was particularly struck by the discussion of how easy it is to mistake noise for signal by looking at phenomena at the wrong scale. That's a small part of the discussion though, others will find nuggets relating to their own experience as they read through the book.
I liked this book. I liked the irreverence - arrogance even - with which Taleb dispatches his enemies, and turns 'common sense' upside down.
Highly recommended.
Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML by David Schultz and Craig Cook. Apress
The useful book is both a beginner's introduction and a reference book. One particularly useful feature is that the elements are fully defined in the body of the book as you learn about them, and then they are all brought together, alphabetically in Appendices. This allows the book to be used as a fast reference when you have finished it.
XHTML and CSS are covered pretty thoroughly, as are forms, tables and image maps. There is a brief discussion of client side scripting with JavaScript, but I would hesitate to use the technique on production code without looking at a more in depth book on the subject. This book is, as the title implies, a book for beginners. I doubt that a web developer with experience would get much out of it. On the other hand it's refreshing to find a book for beginners that doesn't talk down to its readers, or treat them as dummies!
Recommended
The Lion and the Unicorn by Richard Aldous. Pimlico (Random House)
This magnificent account of the rivalry between Gladstone and Disraeli is a revelation for anyone who, like me, thought history was a boring list of kings and queens. The book brings to life the role and functioning of the British parliament in the 19th century, which was, in general, dominated by the wealthy, and run in their interests.
And who 'won'? Well Gladstone outlived Disraeli, and became prime minister several times after Disraeli's death. Disraeli's legacy was the idea that the job of the opposition should be to oppose the government, and he laid down the foundations of the modern Conservative Party, and developed the 'One Nation' ideology that kept it as the natural party of government for near a hundred years.
Gladstone left a Liberal Party severely split over the issue of Irish Home Rule, and doomed within twenty years to be squeezed out between the confident Conservatives and the growing electoral power of the Labour party. On the other hand he did give his name to the gladstone bag!
Queen Victoria survived them both. She adored Disraeli and despised Gladstone. In fact her comment on the two of them makes a fitting epitaph: 'When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr Gladstone I thought he was the cleverest man in England, but after sitting next to Mr Disraeli I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.'
A really good read.
Imaginary Futures by Richard Barbrook. Pluto Press
Subtitled 'From Thinking Machines to the Global Village', this is a really unusual and interesting book. It's about the political and philosophical lineage of the Internet. Beginning with the 1964 New York World's Fair, it traces the Cold War origins of the politics which gave rise to the Internet.
For Barbrook the work on cybernetics by Norbert Weiner and John von Neumann fused with the 'global village' concept developed by Marshall McLuhan provided the impetus for the eventual development of the Internet. This was elaborated on by a group of former left wing intellectuals including such luminaries as Walt Rostow, J.K. Galbraith, and Daniel Bell who were able to turn it into a vision of an American future that would compete with that of the Cold War enemy - Russia.
The book charts the history of the ideas and actions of this group through to its discrediting through the denouement of the Vietnam War. It also covers - unfortunately all to briefly - how the ideology was co-opted and resuscitated by Californian neo-cons via Wired magazine.
I suspect Barbrook's left wing analysis, and some of his assumptions, will make American readers feel uncomfortable. In addition, I feel that the analysis has a touch of one-dimensionality about it. Nonetheless, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone interested in an analysis of the Internet's political pre-history.
Buda's Wagon - A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis, Verso
MacArthur fellow Mike Davis has written an absorbing book about the development of what has been called 'the poor man's air force'. Starting with anarchist Mario Buda's horse and cart bombing of J.P. Morgan's building in Wall Street in 1920, Davis leads the reader through the development of increasingly powerful and sophisticated weapons until we get to the use of car bombs in Baghdad today.
But the author is not just interested in the technical time-line of car bombs, he also looks at the sociology of car bombs, in particular the way in which car bombs have been increasing used to inflict deliberate civilian casualties, rather than to target specific 'enemy' infrastructure. Davis also charts the rise in suicide car bombings and sets the whole story in a political framework which some people will find uncomfortable.
Just one caveat. Don't take this book to read on a plane. Government security personal are notorious for their inability to understand that people might want to study activities of which they disapprove in order to understand motivation!
Nemesis by Max Hastings. Harper Perennial
This account of the 1944-45 World War II battles against Japan is something of a tour de force by Max Hastings. Drawn from interviews and the papers of those who participated, it presents both sides of the story, but without falling into moral ambivalence. Even more importantly, it does not look at the decisions made at the time solely from hindsight - it looks at them within the context in which they were made.
Many of the things that happened then become more explicable - not necessarily condonable, but certainly explicable, including Japanese atrocities against those they conquered, and the much debated decision to drop the atom bomb.
Two things which I hadn't previously understood became clear from a reading of this book. The first was that all of the people involved at a high level with the dropping of the bomb failed to understand the qualitative difference between conventional and nuclear explosive. They all thought it was just a bigger and better version of what the B-29 bombers were already doing to Japanese cities.
The second was the extent to which high ranking Japanese military and civilians privately knew the war was lost, but because of the warrior cult of bushido, were unable to express this publicly.
The B-29 bombing campaign and the submarine blockade had already massively reduced the ability of the Japanese to produce war materiel. However, Hasting's conclusion is that the Russian invasion of Japanese occupied China and Korea, and the dropping of the atom bomb were necessary to force the Japanese surrender. The atom bomb was necessary to convince the civilians in government that they should surrender, the Russian invasion to force the army to face the fact that it had lost.
Not everyone will agree with this idea, but it is well argued, and cannot be ignored.
Recommended
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