Katrin Himmler (2005)

The family history of Heinrich Himmler and his two brothers Gebhard and Ernst, as told by his great-niece.

There’s a lot of fascinating backstory in this book, and it explains a lot. It portrays Heinrich Himmler as very much the product of a middle-class, socially ambitious family who pushed him relentlessly to succeed and only seemed really to embrace him after he achiveed visible success as a Reichstag deputy and then later as Reichsführer-SS. The author, Katrin, has access to lots of family papers and photographs that have never been explored before, as well as being able to talk informally to Heinrich’s brothers’ children about their experiences. This makes this a profoundly personal exploration of Heinrich’s rise and fall.

That’s also its weakness, of course, of which Katrin herself is well aware: it was cleaerly not an easy book to write, and one led her to realise how much families re-write their own histories – understandbaly so in the light of what happened. It also means the the book as a whole concentrates on the domestic side of Heinrich’s life, which can be jarring: the period from him being a secretary to leading the SS is covered in less than a page. Overall, though, there’s a lot of keen insight provided into the making of a monster.

4/5. Finished Thursday 22 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Paul Lynch (2023)

A timely and troubling consideration of social breakdown.

The most notable thing about this novel is that it happens in Ireland: not “far away”, but in a European country that is nevertheless seen as collapsing through (it is hinted) a shift to the right taken by fully democrtic means, and a subsequent descent into authoritarianism. That’s a perfectly believable scenario for many countries.

Lynch writes in a stream-of-consciousness style that manages to be comprehensible while still retaining the slightly bewildered feeling of someone caught-up in event they don’t fully understand and can’t quite keep up with. There’s enough Irish vernacular and geographical detail to make the story hard-hitting for anyone who knows Dublin.

Some people desperately cling to processes that no longer have any meaning; there are huge numbers of forms to fill out despite them serving no purpose; there’s lots of bureaucracy used to drum people into compliance; and there’s lots of venality hiding behind the continuation of these processes to convert them into vehicles for personal gain. Rules tighten as order breaks down, and the same cast of chancers and bandits and people-smugglers emerge in Ireland as in other countries that have gone through this kind of trauma. And that I think is the main message of the book. The themes and characters emerging from social breakdown are universal, and a European country would go the same way as anywhere else.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 20 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Scott J. Shapiro (2023)

A lawyer’s take on hacking. That’s both a compliment and a limitation.

The book presents itself as being a history of hacking. It kind of is, and covers some famous incidents in varying degrees of detail. It spends a lot of time making the underlying technology understandable to a non-technical reader, which is a major contribution. One could argue that it’s mis-named, in that it spends more time on the hacking of Paris Hilton’s cellphone and the evolution of the Mirai botnet than on Fancy Bear’s attack on the US Democrats., but it does place these attacks into a wider and useful context.

But the wider context is als0 a problem. Shapiro is a legal philosopher – and it shows. Firstly he annoyingly introduces terminology to distinguish between computer code (“downcode”) and social norms and the law (“upcode”), with “metacode” sitting in between. Is this distinction useful? – I don’t think so, since the whole point about “upcode” is that it’s not code but a set of political choices and norms. Secondly, he tries to draw a distinction between criminal use of computers and espionage, arguing that the former is illegal but that the latter is not – and from this tries to argue that US responses to state-directed hacking are hypocritical. Well, yes: is that a point worth making, and does it have any significance beyond the purely philosophical?

Thirdly, the book also has a somewhat rosy view of US behaviour which is (in my opinion) contradicted by the facts and by the arguments of other books – for example This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, which deals with the origins of cyberweapons.

There are also some annoying wild claims. Turing’s results absolutely don’t say that finding bugs in code is undecidible; this doesn’t stop us from radically improving our technological approaches to malware; we don’t think that problems are decidable because they’re all that we see; and a belief in the fundamental comprehensibility of the universe is not absurd. These weaken the presentation and detract from its undounbted strong points.

3/5. Finished Monday 19 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

James Fox (2022)

A book using colour as a way to access a range of other topics, without ever losing focus.

Some of the choices will probably be controversial, such as the emergence of “whiteness” as a racial classification, even though supported plentifully by evidence. There are plenty of other less challenging anecdotes, though. Why do we usually consider there that there are seven colours? – at least in part because of Newton’s religious and alchemical ideas that led him to want to tie colour to the notes on the musical scale

I most enjoyed the chapter on purple, mainly because it focused on the significant technological change that synthetic aniline dyes brought into culture, changing the relative abundances of various colours and changing the ways in which they were perceived as signifiers of wealth and status.

4/5. Finished Sunday 11 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Tony Fadell

Twenty-five years ago, more or less, I ran a start-up company. I wish books like this had existed back then to help me understand what start-ups need to do.

Fadell has perhaps the best pedigree imaginable, including being involved both in massive successes (the iPod, the iPhone, the Nest thermostat) and crashing failures (General Magic), and the best thing about this book is his willingness to share them, warts and all. He’s clearly come to a place in his life where he regards everything as a learning opportunity and a teaching opportunity, rather than needing to project a particular image of himself.

The business advice is fascinating, even for someone who doesn’t intend to start a company: there’s plenty to learn about organisation structures and politics. I suspect it’d be absolute gold for anyone thinking of making hardware devices for the modern software-dominated world, though. Fadell has a clear understanding of what’s needed to make a physical product succeed, and his emphases on story-telling and understanding the customer’s journey as a route to success are compelling.

There’s also a lot of insight into some of the major companies and personalities he’s met along the way. He’s positive about Apple, clear-eyed about Steve Jobs’ strengths and weaknesses – and clearly quite shell-shocked by his exposure to Google as not what he was expecting them to be.

5/5. Finished Saturday 3 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)