Brian W. Kernighan (2019)

You probably have to be a hard-core Unix head to get anywhere with this book – but it’s a gem if you are. Kernighan was there throughout what is possoibly the most formative period of computer history, when Unix was developed and many of the paradigms of operating systems and software tools were developed.

There are other books that handle many of the stories in greater detail, but this book is great for the “sweep” of Unix through Bell Labs and out into the world. The memoir parts are perhaps the most interesting, as they illuminate how the various tools came into being and why. There are cameos by people like Richard Hamming, whose own scientific contributions are matched by his insistence that you can only do important work if you first find the important problems, and by both an expected and unexpected cast of pioneers. I’d like to find a similar book on the early years of Lisp showing how decisions that now seem to be inevitable came to be made, and what alternatives there might have been.

The most hard-core part of the book? It was written using groff, the GNU successor to the roff text formatter than Kernighan himself wrote.

5/5. Finished Monday 2 January, 2023.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Martin Gilbert (1994)

A thoroughly readable narrative history of the First World War and its aftermath. I think the strongest parts are the beginning and end: there’s an unavoidable tedium in the middle that reflects the statis of trench warfare.

Churchill comes out well, perhaps unsurprisingly in a book by one of his biographers. Later authors place more of the blame for Gallipoli at his door. The American army also comes out well; Pershing, its commender, somewhat less so, as his insistence on having a solely American field army delayed their deployment and in many ways invited disaster in 1918. The Kaiser cuts a sorry figure throughout, belligerent and indecisive and blind to reality right up until the end.

Gilbert is also very strong on the often-overlooked mior allies of both sides. The complexities of Polish and Finnish independence movements, allied to the Central Powers largely in order to defeat Russia, get a lot of exploration, as does the eventual breakup of the Habsburg Empire. The Middle East and the Ottoman Empire are less well-covered. In each case there are clear lines drawn to the peace treaties and the grievances that later gave rise to the Second World War.

4/5. Finished Thursday 22 December, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Mike Rothschild (2021)

Does a fantastic job of explaining an essentially inexplicable movement.

QAnon is a conspiracy theory like no other, one that subsumes other conspiracies and morphs into new shapes as its existing tropes and predictions fail to come to pass. It’s hard to see it as anything other than a rejection of reason and modernity and the embrace of … well, nonsense. Rothschild sees it as far more than that, and manages to dive into the abyss without ever becoming lost or tempted to become a believer. He traces the theory’s development, from before the first Q “drops” until after Q’s disappearence, and draws some historical parallels with previous movements whose failed predictions did little to damage their popularity.

4/5. Finished Monday 12 December, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)