Skunk Works

I just finished Skunk Works by Ben Rich. Rich was the second director of Lockheed's Skunk Works division, which was responsible for the U2 spy plane, the SR-71, and the F-117A stealth fighter, among other neat airplanes. This is a really interesting look at what the aerospace industry looked like before all the regulation and red tape in the acquisitions process - the director of Skunk Works went in with an idea for an airplane at one point, and the director of the CIA wrote him a personal check to get his assembly line started. Everyone involved would go to jail if that happened today. Seeing how these guys wee able to develop stealth technology with essentially the equivalent of pocket calculators is fascinating, and honestly, and incredible story. Also, the way you hear it, our brave, brilliant American scientists came up with stealth ex nilo. As it turns out, the key idea of stealth (the faceted surfaces that reflect radar off away from the receiver) was developed by a Russian scientist and published in an obscure journal that a Skunk Works employee happened to read. Of course, the Soviets ignored the original developer, and Skunk Works went on to develop stealth, and the rest, as they say, is history.

From a managerial perspective, the Skunk Works model is really interesting. They worked on high risk, high payoff projects that revolutionized aerospace design. They had virtually no oversight from upper management, and the only reason they were allowed to do what they did was because they were incredibly good at it. You have to hire the absolute best and give them a lot more rope than you are probably comfortable with. They also have to have a parent organization to borrow tools, people, and production lines from (and return to after they finish a product). It's a model that a lot of people have tried to emulate and very few have recreated successfully, which should tell you something about how easy it is. Also, the current acquisition process basically prohibits this kind of development, which is kind of an important difference.

Well worth a read. The technical stuff is fascinating, and the personal dynamics are very interesting.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I know most of you have already read this, so I'll skip the summary. I thought this was a very interesting book, and it really made me think about my food. I can barely eat at fast food restaurants any more, so thanks for that, Mr. Pollan.  Thinking about our food systems and how we get food on the plate is very important, but I am not sure I would go as far as he does in terms of the animal rights stuff. I did have a moment of wanting to quit my job and start a post-organic farm though. Anyway, this book is worth reading, especially the first two sections (the bit at the end about foraging is kind of ridiculous, and the author acknowledges it).

The biggest criticism I have of this book is that he doesn't really present any alternatives to the problems he sees. For example, we can't all live close to management intensive grazing farms, and if we could, not everyone would be able to afford to eat food from one. He points out that people in other countries spend a lot more of their income on food, but they also starve to death in much higher numbers too.

I have been talking about thus book pretty much nonstop since I read it, so that's probably a good sign. Well worth a read. (Ironically, I bought my copy of this book at Costco.)

Half Broke Horses & The Glass Castle by J. Walls

Oh boy - I have had both of these books sitting by my computer for a couple of weeks waiting for me to review them!  However, Meredith has reviewed them both, I read both of them at her suggestion and loved both of them... so!  I am going to leave it with that.  Read them - you will love them!  They are quick reads but the style pulls you into the story and you feel a part of the family.  I rarely read books twice, but this is the second time for The Glass Castle, and I loved it just as much as the first.  I am trying to get going on a long novel now, so it may be awhile....

Fodor's Travel Books

I have been reading travel books like they are going out of style.  With all the honeymoon travel planning I carry around 2 travel books almost all the time.  The first is Fodor’s Pacific Northwest.  The second is Fodor’s Northern California.  Both are excellent and have glossy pages with lots of pictures.  I’m all about that.  Every time I travel I take notes in the books I have so if I ever want to go back I can remember what I did or didn’t do and what I did and didn’t like.  I can’t wait to fill these pages! Yay for travel books!

The Glass Castle

I finished the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls a few weeks ago.  I loved the book.  It is the story of a girl’s life and her growing up with crazy parents that basically keep them living in a poverty stricken life due to their own self motivations and self centeredness instead of doing things for the best interest of their children.  I especially enjoyed this book because the story is from the point of view of the granddaughter of main character in Half Broke Horses (HBH) by the same author.  It is amazing because the grandma in HBH is so driven and disciplined.  This drive did not transfer through to her daughter but it is clearly evident in her granddaughter in The Glass Castle.  Having the two books about one family was wonderful.  I loved the Glass Castle and would recommend it to anyone.

The Lady of the Rivers

I just finished "The Lady of the Rivers" by Philippa Gregory.  I did enjoy reading it, but it was not my favorite  Gregory book. I had a harder time getting through some of it than usual-although that could be due to my circumstances and not because of the writing.  I had a month of kids being sick and that made reading for pleasure hard.

Anyway this book was interesting because it's  main character (Jacquetta Woodville) is a woman is a constant figure in the War of the Roses.  She was the Lancaster Queen's head lady in her court, the mother of the York Queen, and the grandmother of the Tudor Queen when Henry Tudor takes the throne back from York. She is Queen Elizabeth I's great great grandmother.  Gregory really made her come alive and her novels "The White Queen," "The Red Queen," and "The Lady of the Rivers" have made me a lot more interested in the War of the Roses and that time period just before the Tudors.

So to sum up...fun read, but it did drag in the middle a bit. Overall I'd recommend it to others.

A Couple of Books

I haven't posted in a while, and in that time, I have finished two and a half audiobooks, a novel, and I have pulled the ripcord on a non-fiction book. Here's some brief summaries:

The Geography of Bliss, by Eric Weiner (audiobook) - What is it that makes people happy? To find out, the author visited a series of countries, some of which rank high on happiness measures (Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Thailand, etc.), and some of which rank low (Moldova, England). Not to spoil anything, but there are lots of different reasons why people are happy, but fewer reasons why people are unhappy. This was a really interesting listen - very well written, with some interesting philosophical detours into what happiness really is. Made me want to travel more and see some of the places he talked about!

Red Shirts, by John Scalzi (audiobook) - great meta- sci-fi novel about a group of ensigns on the Universal Union spaceship Intrepid (modeled closely on the USS Enterprise) who notice that there's always a junior crew member on away team missions, and that's the guy who always dies. They set off to find out why. I don't want to spoil it, so that's all I'll say. This one gets weird quick, but it is a really great story that touches on fate, destiny, meaning-of-life kind of stuff. Even if you don't like sci-fi, I think you might find this one interesting. (To add to the meta, the audiobook is read by Wil Wheaton, who played Ensign Crusher on Star Trek The Next Generation. He does a great job!)

I got through half of "The World Without Us", by Alan Weisman. It's a thought experiment about what would happen to the planet if mankind suddenly disappeared, leaving behind all our buildings, chemicals, plastic, etc. It's an interesting book, but I got tired of the anti-human attitude that ran through the entire first half. I know we need to be good stewards of the world we have, but the assumption that the untamed wilds are preferable to a human-influenced landscape seems like a big assumption to me. In the first chapter, he talks about a project that is trying to recreate enclaves in Manhattan that restore pre-Dutch landscape and vegetation. It's interesting that he doesn't mention until the last sentence of the chapter that the Native Americans had settled Manhattan for thousands of years and significantly influenced both the flora and the fauna that the Dutch found when they got there. The assumption that European settlement is somehow less valuable than agrarian hunter-gatherer tended forest is just not an assumption I agree with.

Reamde, by Neal Stephenson - entertaining novel about a computer virus that gets out of hand. This novel starts out strong, gets (frankly) rather ridiculous in the middle, and finishes really strong. I mean, you've got Chinese hackers, Russian mafia, islamic terrorists, fundie survivalists, and everything. It's just nuts. But it's well written, and has done interesting things to say about international crime, computer security, and unintended consequences. Weighing in at something like 900 pages, it's an investment, but it pays off.  It's more of a techno-thriller than anything else, and with a good editor could make for an exciting movie.

I was going to write something about the book I just bailed on 25 pages on, but it's not worth it. On to the next book!