5 comments about Rocketman: Astronaut Pete Conrad's Incredible Ride to the Moon and Beyond.

1. I have read a lot of material on the Mecury, Gemini, and Apollo missions and found this book to be a nice easy read. There were a couple of items that were mis-quoted, but other than that, I enjoyed reading it. I would suggest for readers of this type of material to be sure to read "Failure is not an option" by Gene Krantz, he was the flight director who was envolved with Mecury all the way to Apollo 17. With the knowledge of his book, it helps to understand a lot of what's going on. I did however, seem to notice a lack of writting about Pete Conrad's family. I have done business with Pete Conrad Jr. and he's a great guy. I was suprised to see so little mention of his family in the book. There was just a small part about them in the book. I guess perhaps written by is present wife would explalin it. But I enjoyed reading the book. Long may you rise above the earth Pete Conrad.
   
   KLD



2. Pete Conrad had a fairly colorful style about him, part cowboy - part engineer - full time iconoclast. However, these traits do not come thru in this book. The writing does not convey the dynamics of the man, so ultimately it becomes little more than a 'just the facts' biography.
   
   While I doubt any astronaut book came come close to capturing the human story of space Michael Collins' "Carrying The Fire", this book had a chance since it focused upon one of the truly unique characters in the space program. So am immensely dissapointed at the final product.



3. I enjoy reading about this time in American History and consider myself a student of the early space program. In that regard, in a brief perusal of the book, I have already noticed some factual errors that should have been caught by the editor or by Mr. Klausner. First, in the picture section, it shows a picture of Pete on the ladder about to board an F4 Phantom, yet the label says that he is posing in front of a T-38. Another error is related to the issue with "Max Peck". Max Peck was the Mgr of the Rice Hotel in 1962. After the 2nd group of astronauts was chosen, including, Frank Borman, Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, Ed White and Neil Armstrong they were asked to check in under the Mgr's name to avoid their names reaching the press prior to their formal introduction. However, this book states that this happened back in 1959 when the first 32 candidates for the Mercury program checked into a a non-disclosed hotel in Washington. Not only is that fact wrong, but they didn't check into a hotel in 1959 for that first meeting but the Dolly Madison house in Washington.



4. The book arrived within the scheduled delivery time in excellent condition.
   
   Thank you,
   
   Mark & Francine Keehnel



5. I've read way too many space books, so I love the subject matter, but the style of this one was too breezy, lacking in important detail. Each chapter is about 12 words long, so you get the impression this was either rushed through or intended for young adults. I learned little about the man, whom I wholly admire. Did he alienate anybody? Were there any character flaws? Also, I was looking to learn more of an insider's view of Gemini and Apollo, but it was all very superficial, heard-it-before material. I'd read a bit about Conrad, like his attempt to smuggle onto the moon a huge cowboy hat to fit over his space helmet, or his attempt at trick photography on the lunar surface, hoping to befuddle the photo analysts later. Neither of these gems were in the book. He's a great guy, a pilot's pilot, a problem-solving magician with a live-for-the-moment spirit. But the book is really junk food, even for a space nut like myself. Sorry, Pete. They done ya wrong.

5 comments about The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.

1. Robert Noyce had all of the significant traits of ADD. Any parent devastated by their child's diagnosis should read this to see what one can accomplish when one uses one's strengths. This book shows the positive side of ADD.
   
   The book gets a bit detailed in some spots, and is overly repetitive in others, but overall is an interesting read.



2. The author uses a lot of first hand material still available from people close to Bob Noyce. You will eat it fast, because you can get the "life mood" from well synthesized private life and public life smartly chosen events. The story of a guy that did put the moral value driven face of America high, from the cubicle to the world stage. The explanations around the new "silicon valley" management style are also very didactic, and has more value in it than most of expensive seminars. You can get the essence of it.
   ... In some places , it is close to hagiography, probably the beyond the grave aura of Bob Noyce ...and you can get contaminated...



3. The book has a fascinating subject and is well written. It fully captures and holds your attention. The author is very deft in handling arguments or controversies Noyce was involved in, presenting facts without bias. The book is even-handed and intelligent.
   
   From a literary point of view, I think the book raises the bar in terms of biograpical research. I've read a lot of biographies, and I've never seen one as well documented as this. Almost every sentenced can be traced back to its source. In addition, it has original research. I believe the author is responsible for discovering that Noyce's NDR diode was at least coincident with Esaki's Noble-prize winning work. Overall, an excellent read.



4. I've spent 30 plus years in this and related industries. As a partial introduction to IC's and their "market successful" agents, it is OK. As entertainment it is good, just don't forget you are being entertained! As a biography of Noyce it is only partial. That the rest of the story with Jack Kilby, Texas Instuments, and non-Noyce IC industry and players is missing makes it very bad history. That the patent fight history and the rules for patents, mainly that continuous work on ideas must be shown or it's "abandoned", are not covered makes it very much a dis-eduational offering. The big truth, stated deep in the book, that "Credit floats up.", almost makes the reading good, but not quite!



5. Berlin has performed an amazing amount of detailed research into Noyce's life. She takes us back to the years when the semiconductor industry was born, and shows us how Noyce helped make it flourish in Silicon Valley.
   
   A striking passage describes how Noyce anticipated the observation of negative differential resistance in a tunnel diode. Some 18 months before Leo Esaki in Tokyo discovered it. Esaki would win the Nobel in Physics for his work. In one of these what-ifs, Noyce could easily have taken that for himself.
   
   By the way, the book's explanation of negative resistance is a trifle awkward. The quantum mechanical phenomenon cannot be easily explained to a general audience. (As a grad student, I had the same problem of discussing this about my research, to laymen.) But if it puzzles you, remember that it also eluded a lot of people in the 1950s.
   
   You might already be familiar with the broad outlines of how Noyce, Moore and others worked for Robert Shockley, and then left en masse in disgust at his management style. But Berlin furnishes here far more detail than is commonly known. About how Noyce agonised and reluctantly left Shockley.
   
   Likewise, with the later tale of Fairchild Semiconductor and how Noyce and Moore would in turn leave that. This time to found Intel (with Grove). Berlin gives much more detail on this broad outline, that explains the motivations of Noyce and his associates.
   
   Some readers might be amused to see that the CEO of Fairchild resisted handing out stock options to employees, in the grounds that this was "creeping socialism". Which played no small part in the exodus of its best people.
   
   The book describes a Silicon Valley that has vanished.

5 comments about Woman in the Mists.

1. When it came to dealing with people, Dian Fossey was sometimes her own worst enemy, but her dedication to saving the African mountain gorilla and its habitat in Rwanda is indisputable. Describing himself as an "editorial collaborator," rather than as a biographer, Farley Mowat assembles Fossey's story from her never-before-printed journals and private papers, inserting them directly into the book in boldface so she can tell her own story. From her founding of the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda in 1967, until her murder there in December, 1985, Fossey battled to save "those she loved" from poaching, abduction, and dismemberment.
   
   Throughout her eighteen years at Karisoke, Fossey studied organized groups of gorillas to whom she became so familiar that they would even touch her. As fierce and protective of her own "turf" as a silverback, however, she refused to bend to the exigencies of the political climate and funding requirements and made innumerable enemies. When local herdsmen exerted their age-old rights to graze cattle on "her" mountain, Fossey shot the cattle. When poachers hurt her gorillas, she pursued them, even kidnapping the four-year-old son of one of them to force his surrender. When students at her own Center disagreed with her, she could be brutal.
   
   Fossey also fought local officials, park guards, and conservators who took bribes and staged events in order to protect their payoffs. She battled conservation organizations which wanted to get her funds, rival researchers who wanted to take over her project, and governmental officials who saw tourism in the park as a source of wealth and graft. Always fighting with ferocity, she made no effort to see another point of view or compromise. Her unsolved murder in 1985, by someone who knew the layout of her cabin, could have been by someone from any of these alienated groups.
   
   Mowat presents Fossey as a lonely warrior who never found personal peace, a woman who was instrumental in drawing pubic attention to the plight of the mountain gorilla but who was less sucessful than she had hoped. As he points out in his Epilogue, her cause has been continued by some of the researchers who studied with her. Two of those, Amy Vedder and Bill Weber, continue the story of the gorillas from the death of Fossey through 1993's disastrous Rwandan Civil War. Their book, In the Kingdom of Gorillas: Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land, reflects a more conciliatory viewpoint than that of Fossey. Mary Whipple



2. Another engrossing and fascinating Mowat title, another Mowat "must read", "Woman in the Mists" is the sympathetic biography of a woman whose work gave us a window into the world of the mountain gorilla, a species to whose protection and conservation she was devoted. By alternating excerpts from her diary entries and personal letters with his own descriptive text, Mowat brings Dian Fossey, a powerfully willed and often abrasive woman, to life. Her youthful years, young adulthood, her fateful meeting with Louis Leakey, her romantic involvements and disappointments, her first contacts with the gorillas and the years of her work and struggle are portrayed with humanity and affection. The tale is enormously enriched by her own words. She struggled indomitably against self-serving African bureaucrats, indigenous herdsmen and hunter-gatherers, antagonistic forces that gained strength against her in the fields of primatology and philanthropy, and her own gradually deteriorating health largely the result of a powerful smoking addiction.

   But her work and her happiness were plagued by male academics and agents of philanthropic organizations who got caught up in a web of calumny and distrust motivated by primatologists who were seriously bent out of shape by her abrasiveness and who felt they could avenge themselves by vilifying her, possibly abetted by society's undercurrent of misogyny. Had there been no vilification, she may never have been killed, as her fatal enemy, probably an African, no doubt took strength from knowing how much she was hated by, for example, the American and European agents of the Mountain Gorilla Project. Mowat provides the reader a chilling view of Fossey's victimization, but never identifies the sexist element which seems apparent to this male reviewer.

   Fossey survived all the victimization because of her extraordinary strength and a powerfully motivating love for the gorillas and the entire eden-like natural world in which she lived. She had serious blind spots: her obliviousness to her abrasiveness, her hatred for the National Park's Tutsi herders and pygmy hunter-gatherers, even before the latter began killing her beloved gorillas (whole gorilla family groups, in order to capture a single infant for the zoo trade and skulls for the tourist souvenir trade), and her (and Mowat's) use of the racist epithet "wog" with impunity toward Africans who she hated, though she shared genuine bonds of love with the Africans who worked with her as trackers and poaching patrollers, and evidenced no other racist feeling. Mowat's record of Fossey's life is a powerful, shocking, revealing and loving account.




3. Farley Mowat performed an excellent service when he wrote this book. Dian Fossey was a woman of great character, confidence, courage, determination, and conviction. Her life was lived for what she found to be a greater cause and the world is that much worse off without her. This book did an excellent job of showing the reader who Dian Fossey really was and what she really went through. I recommend it to anyone. It is well worth reading.



4. Read this book, and you will feel like you know the real Dian Fossey. Personal letters, journal entries all give insight to her life as a living, breathing human being who had many friends (human and non-human). Her passion for life is inspirational! This is a must read, and also an excellent book to read for school projects!



5. This Book contains the interisting life of Dian Fossey from her bith to her dearh

5 comments about Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis.

1. What possesses a European woman to pack up her life and move across the ocean to study the natural world? Did I mention that it was 1699?
   
   Chrysalis tells the story of Maria Sibylla Merian, a woman living in the late 1600s and early 1700s, who is fascinated by the process in which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. She cultivates them as one might cultivate roses. More, she studies them in their own habitat. But how did she do it in a time when women were subject to their men, when witch trials were the norm, and dabbling in insect life was more than suspect?
   
   But Chrysalis is more than a biography. It is a study in entomology. What is the process from caterpillar to butterfly? And why do the chrysalises sometimes produce flies rather than butterflies? Remember this is the time of "spontaneous generation" when scientists thought frogs came from rain and meat produced flies.
   
   Chrysalis is more than entomology. It is religious history. What made the Pietist sects split off from the Lutheran church? What was the call of the Labidists for Merian? And how did she slide by the rules of stripping off worldly trappings in order to continue to paint and study?
   
   And still that is not all. There is her study across the ocean in Surinam. Her return. Her art. The study of microbiology with the invention of the microscope. This book is a comprehensive study of much that was going on in the world. It is fascinating and the art is beautiful. If I have any complaint, it is that the author references pieces that aren't pictured in the book and when the pieces are pictured, there is nothing to note that. I spent a lot of time flipping to the grouped photos in an often fruitless search.
   
   Armchair Interviews says: This is an overall fascinating book that could be improved by better referencing and picturing of the art.



2. [...]
   
   Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, a nonfiction book by Missoula writer Kim Todd, sounds like a Victorian adventure novel: a fifty-two-year-old woman abandons her husband and European continent to study the metamorphosis of caterpillars in Surinam. But this was before the Victorians. In 1699, more than a century before Darwin, sixty-five years after Galileo's prosecution, and a time when witch hunts were part of the recent past, Maria Sibylla Merian embarked on a journey of scientific discovery in the dangerous New World with only her daughter for company. While the male colonists grew sugar cane on their plantations, Merian's slaves and servants helped her locate insects, reptiles, and plants for her to study and depict in her captivating watercolors. She trusted the natives' knowledge to assist her research, something that would be used against her reputation in the decades after her death.
   
   By the time Merian stepped on that boat to Surinam, she was a mother of two, had published two books about the metamorphosis of caterpillars in her native Germany, and spent five years living with a Pietist religious sect in a castle in Amsterdam, where she argued successfully for a separation from her husband using the sect's beliefs. At the time, a woman's husband was her legal representative and the court ordered numerous women to return to their abusive husbands. But after Merian's successful separation, she lived in Amsterdam and financially supported herself and her youngest daughter. Watercolors were her tool because "guild rules banned women from painting with oils." To get on that boat and to fund her scientific and artistic expedition, Merian sold her paintings and any unnecessary belongings.
   
   Kim Todd who received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing for her previous book, Tinkering with Eden, vividly describes the cultural, religious, and political time Merian lived in, as well as her artwork and scientific contributions, without overwhelming the reader. Todd also introduces other fascinating, accomplished women of the seventeenth century, and the new, exciting time of natural philosophers (the term scientist hadn't been created yet, neither had biology, ecology, or any of the other -ologies). Spontaneous generation, the idea that creatures could be born from non-living sources, was a common belief during Merian's time. Todd includes some of the recipes. My favorite is:
   
   To get a bee -
   Find a sunny space roofed with tile
   Beat a three year old bull to death
   Put poplar and willow branches under the body
   Cover it with thyme and serpellium
   The bees will emerge
   
   In language as colorful as Merian's paintings, Todd also describes the intricacies of metamorphosis and some of the insects that befuddled Merian and other natural philosophers. Through Todd's gripping prose, I became excited about the tricky metamorphosis of the large blue butterfly (Maculinea arion). Trust me, that's an accomplishment. If you don't believe insects and metamorphosis are interesting, you will feel differently after this book. To experience Merian's life and what happened to her work and reputation after her death, you will need, and want, to read Chrysalis. One hint: Peter the Great is involved.



3. You may have seen the artwork of Maria Sibylla Merian, as it is a staple for pretty but accurate pictures of butterflies, caterpillars, moths, and flowers, and can be found on china or stationery. She was more than a painter or engraver, though. Her life was unique. She had artistic talent, but she was also a keen scientific observer, who advanced the study of insects immeasurably. She was a teenaged bride who left her husband who divorced her, and she had to care for their two children. She was so enthralled with the study of moths and butterflies that at age 52 she traveled to a mysterious and largely unknown land to see more of them, and to bring back pictures and scientific descriptions of their behavior. And she did this more than three centuries ago. _Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis_ (Harcourt) by Kim Todd is a thoughtful examination of what we can know about Merian's life from the few personal documents that remain about her, and a proper reevaluation of her place in the world's scientific effort. It also is a fine resource about the biological controversies that were brewing in the seventeenth century, controversies that had to be settled in order for a basic understanding of insect life to take hold.
   
   Merian was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1647. She could not have a formal apprenticeship like a male artist in training, and she could not even paint in oils, because the rules of the guild forbade women from doing so. She was, however, able to use watercolors and engraving with beauty and utility to bring her objects of study almost to life upon the page. When Merian studied or painted insects, she included what foods they ate, and how they proceeded from egg to larva to pupa and to the adult, and it was all part of her contribution to science and to the branch that later was to be known as ecology. In doing so, she was working against scientific currents of the time, since it was held that insects could spontaneously generate from rotting meat, dew, or wool. She also was taking a risk in showing interest in possibly satanic insects, especially since she kept them alive, fed them, and kept their cocoons in her kitchen. Women were accused of witchcraft for less. Dutch curiosity cabinets did contain spectacular specimens from the colony of Surinam, but Merian wanted to see the insects as they lived, and used the money she made from her books and her paintings to finance her two-year trip there. She relied on the natives to tell her about the plants and their uses, and she got the first rudimentary understandings of the rainforest as a complex ecosystem; she observed, for instance, that butterflies at the tops of the trees were different from the ones nearer the ground.
   
   Merian left Surinam after only two years because of illness, probably malaria. After she returned to the Netherlands, she published _Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium_ in 1705, full of pictures and descriptions of the colorful insects she had seen on her travel. The beauty of the pictures was praised, but only succeeding generations could appreciate the ecological innovations of her insect portraits. Her reputation suffered after her death; if she were discussed at all, it was to ridicule her picture of a spider capturing a hummingbird. After all, she had no formal education, she accepted the reports of natives who lived among the insects she depicted, and she was a woman. It was only in the twentieth century that her reputation was restored, not just as an artist but as a scientist who insisted on direct observation of the insects she described, and who realized how their cycles linked within a larger natural system. Todd's book has to have a great deal of speculation in it; she includes many sentences beginning with "perhaps" or "probably". This is because the sources are scant. There are Merian's books and paintings, of course, but beyond that are a couple of her legal documents and less than twenty letters she wrote. Nonetheless, Merian's contributions to biology were considerable, and Todd's well-illustrated and thoughtful book helps in the restoration of her reputation.



4. Today Maria Merian is mostly known for her lovely butterfly prints, but back in 1699 she sailed from Amsterdam to South America on an expedition to study metamorphosis - a rare journey for any naturalist of the times, much less a woman over fifty - and spent two years in the tropical jungle seeking out caterpillars and studying butterflies. Her accomplishments were largely dismissed and forgotten but come to life here in a gorgeous biography surveying her life and achievements.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



5. Ever since "Tinkering with Eden," I have been eagerly awaiting Kim Todd's next book, and, with "Chrysalis," she does not disappoint. Anyone who enjoys a good biography should read this book - and for that reason, it's a great book to give as a gift. The topic sounds obscure, but Todd's vivid prose brings her remarkable subject to life. Highly recommended!

5 comments about Edison: A Life of Invention.

1. I liked this book a great deal. You should consider that this is not a fictional story, and is the very essence of a research work.
   
   Great insights about his life, religious views, and his business of invention. Well treated subject and a great read.



2. This book is very authoritive and well researched, and even more important is that it provides end notes for the reader to verify the author's assertions. If you want a quick overview of Edison's life or just the highlights, this is not the book for you; but if you need to know the man, this is the best book I've read. Paul Israel presents Edison's achievments and failures, in inventions, human relationships and finances in a dispassionate manner.



3. I've always been interested in reading the biographies of famous inventors. Edison was one I knew little about, so I purchased this book. It is very interesting and takes you through his entire life. You see how Edison begins as a skilled telegraph operator. But he is not content with the status quo, he is always improving what he is working with. But he is also a businessman and gets his ideas patented, and forms partnerships and businesses to profit from them.
   
   The book also includes many pictures form different periods in his life. If you are interested in Edison, this is a great book.



4. Reading this book has been an experience for me. I wanted to find out more about the life of one of America's most famous inventors, and this book has helped me along the way, so I give it credit for that. However, I have felt like I am trudging into a mighty windstorm, reaching deep into my soul to plunge each forward step as I slowly turn the pages in this book. There are pockets of enlightenment throughout the book, but it really is a relaying of facts about Edison's life, which is technically what a biography should do, but this book does not come alive in my hands like others have.
   
   To be fair, I did accomplish my goal of learning more about this great man. I learned that a lot his inventions were a result of not just great intellect, but of great work ethic and stick-to-it-iveness. Also, one of his greatest contributions was a corporate model for delegating work among his subordinates. The speed of the development of his inventions was the key, as several other inventors were working on similar ideas at the same time.
   
   Anyway, I recommend the book as a good introduction to the life of Tom, but I am sure that there is a book out there that will give you the same enlightenment without making you feel as though you've crawled on your hands and knees through the Sahara, with a canteen full of lukewarm water that leaks at a very slow rate.



5. I was given this book for a writing project and dutifully plowed through it over the Christmas holidays. Overall, I must say that it was an absolutely excellent holiday book as well as chock full of useful ideas for my scholarly purposes. This is an extremely difficult balance to strike and Israel has done it better than I thought possible - I was prepared for a long dry slog and instead found a great and exciting story.

   Edison, Israel argues, was not just a lone little-educated tinkerer of genius as he is often portrayed, but the creator of the prototype for the modern corporate research lab - he knew how to find talent, how to organize it to get the most out of people, and how to beat the competition by both speed and in the creation of entire new systems of technology. He also knew how to manipulate the media and build on his fame, creating a myth to which he had to live up. That being said, he had a pitch-perfect intuitive sense not only of potential new markets, but of how to create technical solutions to exploit them. He learned from his failures and strove to apply his less-successful inventions elsewhere, often to great effect. Taken together, this was true business genius and Israel explains it all succinctly, including the exposure of Edison's many weaknesses in management and his financial affairs and his many flops (such as the mining experiments that nearly bankrupted him). Furthermore, the basics of his major inventions - improvements to the telegraph and telephone, the light bulb, commerical electricity generation systems, to mention a few - are covered with competence, always with an eye to the management of it all and what it took, all of which are of great use. This adds up to a masterpiece of scholarship and popular writing in my view, crossing a plethora of disciplines in very readable prose and at a good pace of storytelling.

   However, there are many things that make this a challenging read and in some ways disappointing. Even though I know a lot about science and engineering from my own writing, I found the many passages explaining the nuts and bolts of his inventions hard to follow and ultimately rather dry. If the reader is not interested in these highly technical details, he can skim them without losing the narrative thread. Moreover, Edison as a person does not always come thru, though really he was his work and not much else. You also do not learn much about the fate of his enterprises or even his personal financial fortune after his death, which is also a part of his legacy that should be explored. Finally, Israel addresses somewhat rarified questions in the concluding chapter regarding whether Edison was a "scientist" and how industrial research was changing (developing specialties that required far more education than inventors of Edison's "heroic invention" epoch) to make the emergence of generalist, self-taught inventors like him far more difficult and with limited horizons; while I enjoyed this a great deal, it is of limited interest to those who were never steeped in "science policy."

   All in all, highest recommendation. It is a great achievement and will stand as one of the definitive biographies of this great and difficult man.

1 comments about A Voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams.

1. A Voice in the Wilderness: Conversations with Terry Tempest Williams is a selection of interviews with naturalist, author, and activist Terry Williams, as collected by Michael Austin. The discussions cover Williams' love of wildlife, her reflections upon eroticism, art, family, literature, democracy, politics, Mormonism and much more. A mind-expanding and highly contemplative reflection upon the multifaceted dimensions of life, A Voice in the Wilderness draws the reader in with its succinctly worded insights into the foibles and paradoxes of daily life. An index allows for quick reference to key subjects in this one-of-a-kind reflective memoir.

5 comments about Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics.

1. _Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics_ by the researchers Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, who had previously written on cults and fundamentalism, is a fascinating biography of an important figure in the history of the last century who played an important role in heralding in the coming age of information. Norbert Wiener (1894 - 1964) was a fascinating individual and a man of many talents who is perhaps best remembered as both a mathematician and the father of the science of cybernetics. Wiener was a highly eccentric individual who had been renowned as a child prodigy in his youth and studied at Tufts and Harvard from the ages of 11 to 14, eventually earning his Ph.D. at age 18. Following his early years, Wiener became an academic originally focusing on philosophy and mathematics, though taking a more applied bent towards mathematical research than some of his contemporaries such as G. H. Hardy, who routinely castigated him for this. Wiener's career took off at MIT where he developed the science of cybernetics, which was to play such an important role in furthering engineering, biological, and social sciences, as well as playing the role of an astute commentator on the role of automation. Cybernetics (a term derived from the Greek for "steersman"), the creation of Norbert Wiener, was an essential science in the understanding of feedback and control systems. Wiener continued to develop his theories following the publication of his first book on the subject and in particular examined the role of automation among workers. Wiener also was able to prove an inspiration for several important engineering projects focusing on such things as the human brain, artificial intelligence, and the development of prostheses for amputees. Wiener's ideas played an important role in the United States, but with the advent of the Cold War they also played a role in the Soviet Union, as well as in India where Wiener saw certain potential developments arising from newfound technologies. While Wiener was an agnostic throughout his life, his ancestors were Jews and he may have been related to the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, and he developed a profound interest in Indian philosophy and Hinduism ultimately leading him to accept the notion of reincarnation. Wiener's theories played an important role in paving the way for the information age to come and we see the end result of that in the information explosion in this century. This book offers a fascinating examination of the life of Norbert Wiener and is an excellent biography of this great man.
   
   This book starts with Wiener's early life, particularly as he developed into a child prodigy. The book begins with Leo Wiener, the father of Norbert Wiener, who was an adamant proponent of the ideals of Tolstoy and vegetarianism. Leo Wiener came to the United States and eventually made his way to Cambridge, Massachusetts where Norbert's talents for languages became widely known. Norbert Wiener became known as the "most remarkable boy in the world" and would attend university at Tufts and Harvard, originally specializing in zoology, along with other child prodigies such as William James Sidis. Following his Ph.D. at Harvard at the age of 18, Wiener traveled to Europe to study logic and philosophy with such individuals as Bertrand Russell. However, upon returning home, Wiener underwent somewhat of a crisis. Wiener, who was a lifelong manic depressive and prone to absent-minded spells and depressions, would largely see his emotional turmoil as arising out of his early youth. Wiener went on to join the faculty at MIT, an engineering school which hoped to promote a new mathematics department. Wiener made several important contributions and it was here that he developed his science of cybernetics. Wiener was known to all his students for his "Wienerwegs" or "Wienerwalks", where he frequently absent-mindedly roamed about the halls and campus of MIT. Wiener married and had two daughters. He also became involved with various other individuals and prodigies who tried to advance the science of cybernetics and the logical system developed by Russell in the _Principia Mathematica_. Wiener also was active in promoting the Macy conferences, where a diverse group of intellectuals including mathematicians, economists, social scientists, and anthropologists worked out the ideas of cybernetics. Wiener was deeply concerned about the role that automation would play in the coming era and wrote an important work focusing on the "human use of human beings" to show his concern over the new role of automation and computers. Wiener also wrote some more religious and philosophical works in which he attempted to address the problem of the "golem" from Jewish mythology as it concerned man and his creations. During the Cold War, Wiener refused to participate in research for the military and this led to his being branded a "Red" by the FBI. Wiener eventually was to travel to Europe and even the Soviet Union where he attempted to advance the science of cybernetics, although he made clear that he disapproved of the role of both superpowers in the Cold War. Wiener also knew the mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Nash while he was at MIT. In his old age, Wiener took an interest in India and Hinduism. Wiener attempted to identify a new role for automation in India and the potentially liberating effects of such technologies. Wiener also traveled to Stockholm to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony and it was here that he died.
   
   This book offers an interesting account of the life of an important figure in the dawn of the information age. Norbert Wiener and his science of cybernetics played a great role in giving rise to the information age and the era of computing. While Wiener was certainly a man of many talents and contradictions, he also had a darker side to him as did the technologies made possible through his advances. It is for this reason that he may be seen as the "dark hero of the information age" and the father of cybernetics.



2. From a historical and economic and sociological perspective, this book is utter propaganda.
   
   For example, from page 340, "To date, India's engineers and entrepreneurs have had the most success following the path Wiener chartered for their country's advancement, and while their numbers are still small compared to the whole of their population, they are reaping many of the benefits Weiner envisioned without the drawbacks of older models of industrialization."
   
   WHAT A F--KING JOKE!!! I'm dying of laughter!
   
   There is categorically no relationship between India's newfound economic success and Norbert Wiener. None. Na-da. Nothing. Zip-0!
   
   And that was just a single sentence from this text. Just imagine what else lurks in 400 pages of writing from what are two absolute fools. Flo conway and Jim siegelman are the stupidest writers ever!



3. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Nortbert Wiener the Father of Cybernetics tells of an ex-child prodigy and MIT mathematician who founded cybernetics - and then spent the rest of his life warning the world of the consequences of the new technologies he helped foster. Surprisingly, his works and his warnings are relatively unknown today - despite the fact many of his concerns and predictions came true. Dark Hero of the Information Age recounts his life and discoveries - and the consequences of his discoveries.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



4. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman have put an immense effort into writing an exhaustive review of Norbert Wiener, one of the great geniuses of the last century. Wiener spoke an ungodly number of languages, got his PhD from Harvard at the age of 19, made immense contributions to mathematics, biology, computer sciences, medicine, political thought - even in McCarthy's heyday he had no qualms about speaking his mind -, etc, etc.
   
   As generally is the case with biographies of Wunderkinder, the authors ultimately are not equal to their subjects, not for lack of effort, but for lack of having the intellect necessary to understand and do justice to an über-prodigy. And so it is with this book; rather than to analyze and judge Wiener's various accomplishments and beliefs, which range from phenomenal scientific accomplishments to believing that he had been reincarnated, the authors prefer to "tell it as it was" and let the reader draw his or her conclusions.
   
   Despite these inevitable limitations, this book is well worth reading, albeit thoughtfully.



5. When I first saw the title "Dark Hero of ...." I had to chuckle with the image it engendered of Norbert, dressed in a floppy Batman constume, goutee, thick glassed over his mask which of course hid his identy waddling down the corridors of Building 2, fighting crime in Tauberian Theorems.
   
   The authors wrote a magnificent opus on a great man who, in today's environment, would have been classified as a victim of child abuse. Their facts and presentation carried me back to that era. But, I am uncomfortable with the intensionality that the term 'Dark' might leave in the reader so grant me the right to give an added facet.
   
   
   As a senior at MIT during the 1959-1960 semesters I had the honor working with Weiner. Up front, my review arises from an unabashed gratitude and affection for a man whose influence and help were instrumental for all the good things that later transpired in my life over the last 45 years.
   
   One day in the fall of 1959 I was walking near Weiner's office after having come out of Dirk Struik's office from a discussion of an item in the Advanced Tensor Analysis course I was taking from him. Just as I was passing by his office the classical Norbert Weiner yelled out " young man, can you come in and finish the calculations on the board". Honestly, I was totally naive and did not know anything about him except having seen him in the corridors.
   
   "Sure" I said. As I entered the office he walked out. There on the dusty chalk board were a facsimile of a spread sheet, with rows of numbers scribbled across the board. I could not admit that I had no idea what the numbers represented, let alone what I was to do. Ego is a wonderful goad for creative problem solving. Seeing a number that looked like the sine of 30 degrees I quickly deciphered that the alternating lines were discrete values of the sine function, the parallel lines were filled with some varying numbers from a seemingly smooth function, and the next line looked like some multiplication/ addition of both. Norman Levinson's course in Complex Anaylsis came to the rescue. Weiner was performing a discrete fast Fourier Transform. Ten minutes later Weiner came in and saw that I had almost completed the spread sheet.
   
   Looking over his glasses he asked "What are you doing here?". "Helping you, Professor" I responded, startled. "Can you come back tomorrow for some more work?" "Sure"
   
   It turned out that he was perfroming a spectral analysis on a section of EEG readings Dr. John Barlow had given Weiner.
   I eventually had to hand read the red graph and number the amplitudes. The picture appears in CYBERNTETICS 2nd edition.
   
   One Saturday he directed me to "sit down and write". After a few lines I had the timerity to inquire what the heck was I doing.
   His answer: "I'm dictating the upgrade to my book CYBRENETICS". My mistake was to inform him that I could touch type. Zap! Three hours later I threw in the towel. From then on, after math classes I would be sitting typing and learning more ideas and mathematical insight than any of the past 3.5 years. Note, no word processor, no electric type writer. The old fashioned finger toughening for Karate thrust kind.
   
   My many mistaken sheets were then handed over to Weiner's secretary who produced a finished draft.
   
   When the galleys came out I, among many others, reviewed and corrected them.
   
   Weiner informed me that he considered "his students as colleagues" and he gave me the honor and respect that it entailed.
   I noticed over the years that the truly great and self assured, including Doc Edgerton in Electric Engineering, treated with respect f those 'under' them. The not so great and their undeserved pomposity are legion in all walks of life.
   
   A few vignettes of his Puckish sense of humor which were seen quite often are in order.
   
   One Saturday, Weiner, who had to check his urine for sugar, came into the office to check it. "Good, all is well", he smiled, "Here, take it and dispose of it".
   
   My response was as brash as anything I had ever done "Prof. Weiner, I have the deepest respect for you. I have had my rump fall asleep while tying your manuscript for hours. But, you take your G.. D....d sample yourelf"
   
   Weiner burst out in laughter "Well, I tried." and waddled off. I just keeled over with laughter.
   
   Weiner was subject to many folks who came to 'worship at his feet' and try to have him help on hair brained schemes.
   Once such soul came in one day and proceded to blather. Norbert rose, took him by the elbow with a "I know someone who will really be able to help you", and dumped into Struick's office. From across the hall we heard Struik's Dutch yelling, while chasing the man out. Then, flushed faced, Dirk leaned into the office and hissed "Norbert, stop dumping your garbage into my office!" , and popped out. Norbert broke into a loud chuckle, looke at me, and just smiled.
   
   
   
   
   A few years later Mrs. Weiner called and told me that Norbert was in Mass.General as he had fallen down and done serious damge to himself. I overcame my deep antipathy to hospitals and took my self over.
   She informed me that the Professor was in a bad way and Prof. Lee had just left, totally depressed at seeing his mentors state. She told me not to stay too long but to see if I could get him to respond.
   Entering his room, I heard Norbert moaning, leaning away from the door. How the wonderful inspiration came to me I have never figured out.
   
   As I walked to his bed , in my most stentorian voice, I said "What 14 carat plated phoney!" He moaned, tried to turn, and went back to moaning.
   "There is nothing wrong with you. I know you well enough to know that you faking it, just to avoid being drafted".
   
   Much as he tried not to, he let out a loud laugh. I continued "I bet you are pestering all the doctors like Barlow, that Fourier Anaylysis and Tauberian Theorems can solve all medical problems. They have to listen to you!"
   
   At that he slowly sat up, reached for his glasses and then went into a long story of how indeed he had such ideas, etc.
   
   Mrs. Weiner was clearly taken aback at my brashness and when Norbert sat up she did not know what to do. While happily pontificating Norbert said "Margaret, light up a cigar for me". She lit up one his 'stinkies', handed it to him, and Norber was on his way. Soon after Frau Professor chased me out but I was elated beyond words.
   
   That was the last time I ever saw Weiner but this wonderful book captured so many facets of this rare, great human,
   
   My gratitude. I was there
   
   John C. Kotelly MIT '60

2 comments about Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age.

1. This book has a nice mix of scientific history and mathematical information. It's not just pages of equations, but they are there to help explain the concepts. Also the tech notes are great for those of us who like to see how it all works out. I would recommend this book to engineers, scientists, mathematicians, or just people who enjoy a little history of science and technology. Heaviside is quite an interesting person.



2. Students who are really interested in physics, electrical engineering or related subjects would find this book informative and inspiring.
   Real electrical engineer would have the deepest feeling when reading through the lines.
   Written for a genius (hero) by a great educator of the field.

5 comments about Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth.

1. The NASA version of the Apollo moon landings is one thing (see the 5 DVD compilation: NASA The Story of America's Courageous Space Explorers!). 'Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth' is another. The cover says a lot. It shows Gene Cernan, Buzz Aldrin, John Young, Neil Armstrong, Charlie Duke, James Irwin, Alan Bean, and Jack Schmitt as heros worthy of being on collectible bubble gum cards. The author Andrew Smith was the perfect age when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. He was a kid. The moonwalkers are his heros. I was born later and equivalent heros for me are Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Yoda. The amazing thing about Andrew Smith's story is that he's able to actually meet those space-men and to come face to face with the realities of their lives after having walked on the moon. How much was an astronaught's salary? If I were standing on the face of the moon looking up at Earth, what effect would that have on my sense of God? What does a landscape devoid of atmosphere really look like? How does it feel to be alone inside the vehicle in orbit around the moon waiting for your colleagues to return from the moon surface? Especially when you're on the back side of the moon and you have no radio contact with Earth and you're more alone than any other human being in the history of our existence? What do you do with yourself after you return to Earth, after you retire from NASA, after your fame begins to fade away? Maybe you go into liquor sales, start your own religion or maybe you take up a career as a painter obsessively painting scenes from your lunar memories. Andrew Smith is a down to Earth writer who infuses wit, humor, and astute observation into this amazing book that I couldn't put down. Moondust ranks high among my favorite true account books which would also include Al Santoli's 'Everything We Had' and Joannis van Loon's 'The Life & Times of Rembrandt van Rijn'.



2. This book was very disappointing for all the reasons already stated, factually inaccurate, rambling, author being self absorbed, etc. The title is misleading and should have been "Andrew Smith: My thoughts on the Apollo Program (With an a few astronaut interviews thrown in)".
   
   I give it two stars because some of the interviews were interesting.
   
   Thankfully I borrowed this book from the library and didn't pay for it. I suggest if you're really interested in reading this book that you do the same...



3. This book turned out to be more about the author than about the astronauts. It was disappointing. The book was also hard to finish. It was uninteresting in most parts. Not recommended if you are looking for insight on the astronauts.



4. This particular book does a great job of getting into the insights of the astronauts when they were front page news. Apollo was truly the pinnacle of NASA and Andrew Smith does a great job of creating the aura that still surrounds the 9 men still living, that walked on another world.
   
   I could've done without some of his personal musings, as he paints a picture that you would rather he keep to himself. I have my own personal perspectives and if you didn't grow up in U.K. or CA, you'll probably agree that Andrew should've kept some of his memories out of the pages.
   
   Even with the author's anecdotes, the book is 5 stars and worthy reading for any space history buff.



5. It's hard to review this book. Everyone agrees that it offers a fascinating insight into the astronauts who walked on the moon. This book isn't really asking "what was it like?" because that's been done too many times. Instead, it asked "what was it like for you?" to each astronaut, and got some interesting answers.
   The remainder of the book is mostly about the journey of discovery that the author takes as he realizes that it had a relatively profound effect on his own life. Some reviewers (myself included) buy into this concept and found it made the whole package very engaging. Others (including some of my friends) found it annoying and distracting.
   So, if you would rather just read biographies of astronauts, try the book about Pete Conrad. If you ever wondered, "gosh, whatever happened to those guys?" or "well, what did it mean for the US to go to the moon anyway?" I think this is an entertaining, engrossing and ultimately enlightening read.
   I only gave it four and a half stars because it's not the best book I've ever read, merely one of the most memorable.

5 comments about The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever.

1. 
   Careful textbooks in my home state, Minnesota, portray Charles Lindbergh as an "isolationist" opponent to US participation in World War II. After all, he was a hero - OUR hero - a Swedish American from our state. Author David Friedman, with quite thorough evidence, portrays Lindbergh differently, as an admirer of Hitler and Hitler's Germany, who wrote to his American friend that Hitler "is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe he has done much for the German people. He is a fanatic in many ways, and anyone can see that there is a certain amount of fanaticism in Germany today... On the other hand, Hitler has accomplished results...which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism."
   Friedman explains: 'For Lindbergh, Germany seemed everything that America was not and probably could never be: a country composed of one virile, morally and ethically pure race committed to science, and united in a vision of national greatness. That such unity came at teh cost of democratic institutions, individual rights, and a free press didn't alienate him. Democracy was anoble idea, Lindbergh believed, but the reality was quite different...in the United States, where social and political equality, together with a free press...produced a climate of degeneracy... Only a strong visionary, and yes, even fascist, leader was best equipped to restore moral order to western civilization.'
   
   In Lindbergh's own words, from an article he published in Reader's Digest in 1939: Aviation "is a tool especially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe -- one of the priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown.... We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations... Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves, on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or an infiltration of inferior blood..." Aviation, by the way, was in Lindbergh's opinion the Third Reich's strong suite; neither England nor the USA could match the Luftwaffe in technology or skill, as he consistently testified to the Congress and war departments of the USA.
   
   Friedman documents Lindbergh's enthusiasm for "social Darwinist" eugenics, his anti-Semitism and overall racism, his contempt for the rule of rules, and his indifference to dialogue and compromise. In all of this ideological extremism, however, Lindbergh had a mentor, one of the few humans he respected as his own equal or even superior, the French Nobel-winning Dr. Alexis Carrel, the WW1 discoverer of battlefield antisepsis and the first developer of techniques for suturing arteries. Through much of the 1930s, Lindbergh trained himself in biology and worked side by side with Carrel to develop instruments and methods to maintain the life of organs outside the bodies of mammals. Lindbergh's mechanical genius, in fact, enabled him to invent waht might be called the first artificial heart. The story of this collaboration is the heart of Friedman's book; he clearly sees it as a story of gigantic psychological hubris, almost a gothic horror story of Mankind striving for immortality. (I confess that the scientific aspects of this story are truly fascinating to me, as a tale of genius without a speck of rational sense!)
   
   In every way except sympathy for Germany, Carrel was more a Nazi than Lindbergh - a virulent racist, an explicit eugenicist, a visionary whose vision was the creation of a "high council of experts" who would guide humanity behind the scenes. "There is no escaping the fact that men are not created equal," he told a reporter once, "as democracy, invented in the 18th century -- when there was no scienc to refute it -- would have us believe." The human race is moved forward, he continued, "by great men... Unfortunately, we don't understand the genesis of great men. Perhaps it would be effective to kill off the worst and keep the best, as we do in the breeding of dogs."
   
   Lindbergh's strident opposition to FDR on every front, and his enthusiasm for letting Germany expand at the expense of the Soviets earned him some interesting support in the months before the die was cast at Pearl Harbor, especially from a group of young students at Yale, who called themselves The Committee to defend America First, and who inlcuded, among others, Douglas Stuart Jr., Kingman Brewster, Potter Stewart, Sargeant Shriver, and Gerald Ford.
   Once the war involved American soldiers, however, Lindbergh found himself isolated, ostracized, even despised by his previous idolators and friends. Harold Nicholson, a close family friend and the biographer of Lindbergh's father-in-law, wrote of him that "his virility and ideas became not merely inflexible but actually rigid; his self-confidence thickened into arrogance and his convictions hardened into garnite. He became impervious to anything outside his own legend," largely because of the trauma of the kidnapping of his first son. It's an assessment that reminds me a good deal of Sen. John McCain's description of General Douglas MacArthur in the book Hard Call, and strangely enough, of McCain himself, whose formative experience was the trauma of captivity.
   
   Lindbergh may have been rigid, but he was far from unchangeable. As gracefully and patiently as such a man could, he reinserted himself in the military campaign to defend America, first as an advisor and then as a comabt pilot, showing a courage in the air war against Japan that restored him almost entirely to the good graces of the American people. And then, in the aftermath of the war, when he inspected sites in Europe and encountered the evidence of Nazi brutality and genocide, Lindbergh re-invented himself once more... as an incipient pacifist and critic of war crimes committed by any country. Inspecting the ash pit into which twenty-five thousand human slaves had been shoveled, worked to death at the Nazi's V-2 factory, Lindbergh had an epiphany; he wrote: "What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we have done to the Jap in the Pacific. As Germans defiled themselves by dumping the ashes of human beings into these pits, we have defiled ourselves bulldozing bodies into shallow, unmarked tropical graves. What is barbaric on one side of the Earth is barbaric on the other... It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation."
   
   One might think that Lindbergh had traveled as far and as fast as a lone eagle ever could, but there came still a later epiphany, in the 1950s, when Lindbergh turned against the technological, mechanical values he'd so ardently championed, and became a fierce crusader for conservation of Africa and of pre-modern cultures! This time, he wrote: "..the African framework of life contains ideas and values which may seem backward... but who is to say that the record of future evolutionary ages will prove the black to be less progressive than the white?...If civilization is progress in the basic sense of life, then why have past civilizations fallen -- sixteen of them in the last few thousand years, according to arnold Toynbee?" Is civilization progress, Lindbergh asked. "The final answer will be given not by the discoveries of our science, but by the effect our civilized activities as a whole have upon the quality of our planet's life."
   
   Wow! I couldn't say it better myself! My childhood hero was quite a man!



2. The story is compelling and unbelievable if it were not true. History as you never knew it to be and this needs to be made into a motion picture.



3. This book centers on the period of Charles Lindbergh's life when he was working with Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Carrel had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912 for his work on suturing blood vessels. He had also been lauded for his method of disinfecting wounds with chlorine (this was decades prior to the development and use of antibiotics). They were both famous men and, when introduced, they found they had many interests and views in common. Lindbergh's sister-in-law, Elizabeth Morrow, had a very weak heart that was going to shorten her lifespan and he felt medicine should have a way of replacing worn out organs just as he replaced parts in an airplane engine. Carrel was the leading authority in that field at that time and their work together is the central story of this book.
   
   During their years of working together, Lindbergh designed and developed the world's first perfusion pump that allowed entire organs to be kept alive for extended periods without becoming infected. Both Lindbergh and Carrel were interested in pursuing an extended lifespan and rejected the inevitability of death. Of course, the popular press misunderstood what they were after and what Lindbergh had developed. It was regularly called a glass heart or an artificial heart, but it wasn't.
   
   Lindbergh and Carrel also shared similar views on the superiority of the European or White race and the necessity of preserving and defending it. They both saw the coming war in Europe as a disaster that might go far beyond the losses and devastation of the Great War (World War I, we call it). Yes, Lindbergh favored Germany over Britain, but not for the reasons usually ascribed to him. Yes, he and Carrel viewed Jews as a separate race and they talked of good and bad Jews. However, they also helped Jews including a former assistant who went on to a brilliant medical career. Carrel and his wife were also mystics and impressed the Lindberghs and many others in ways that would embarrass anyone of a scientific reputation today.
   
   While I don't want to be seen as defending Lindbergh's views at this time in his life, it does have to be noted that eugenics was in the air and various strains of it were advocated by many famous people. Many of these advocates of this now discredited movement still have a solid reputation today (even if their views on eugenics are kept hush hush in popular discussions). And one can still hear eugenics arguments made today, but it is never called by that name.
   
   Essentially, Lindbergh saw Germany's manufacturing efficiency, engineering supremacy, and military discipline as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. He did not want the United States drawn in to a war that would leave Europe vulnerable to an expansionist communist movement. Carrel shared his anti-war views. However, once war came, Carrel went back to France to help as best as he could with his medical abilities. His reputation was smeared and was called a collaborationist, but all evidence shows this was not true. Lindbergh wanted to enlist, but was blackballed by FDR, so he went to the Pacific theater and flew several dozens of combat missions as a uniformed civilian. He shot down enemy fighters, dropped bombs, engaged in air battles, and shot up Japanese military assets on the ground.
   
   After the war, Lindbergh's views on religion, science, and nature changed. He became a pioneering environmentalist and stirred up as much controversy supporting species preservation and natural habitat as he had when he was speaking against the United States entering World War II.
   
   This is a very interesting story and supplements Berg's famous biography of Lindbergh. The author, David Friedman, even quotes from Berg's "Lindbergh" a few times. This is a well-balanced book that shows the complications of these men without feeling the need to make simplistic judgments or justifications. I found it very much worth reading.
   
   Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, Michigan



4. Never having read a real biography of Lindberg, and never having heard of Alexis Carrel, this book introduced me to a new universe of thought. Friedman is empathetic and compassionate when he describes the tragic (as in Greek tragedy, a flaw that dooms greatness) shortcomings of men he obviously very much admires. Carrel and Lindberg thought of themselves, with some justification, as Olympians. Carrel didn't suffer fools gladly - or at all - but he comes across as a far more human being than the driven, dispassionate, aloof Lindberg. It's easy to understand Lindberg's fascination with Nazism - all that counts is getting the trains to run on time, no matter whose bodies lie across the tracks. Friedman paints two very complex pictures of 'great men', and great men they truly were, and their close personal and professional relationships. Friedman also portrays Ann Morrow Lindberg as a brilliant although self-doubting artist of great sensitivity. Reading of Lindberg's treatment of his wife reinforces the general portrait of a cold, humorless, obsessive tyrant. Finally, the author gives the reader enough detail to understand the what, how and why of the Carrel/Lindberg quest for immortality through organ replacement without ever losing me in a flood of technical minutia. One of the most fascinating tales I've ever read and extremely well told.



5. Charles Lindbergh's and Alexis Carrel's views on eugenics, democracy and race don't sound so unusual when you consider how many European, British and American writers in the early 20th Century professed similar beliefs. H.G. Wells, for example, would have agreed with much of what Carrel writes in "Man, the Unknown," especially about the need for a technocratic elite to make binding decisions (including reproductive ones) for the whole world. Nobel Prize winning geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller advocated eugenics like his fellow Nobelist Carrel (an enthusiasm Muller failed to convey to his student Carl Sagan). H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, now held in higher regard than during his lifetime, expresses a disgust with non-Anglo immigrants, race mixing and racial degeneration. And many American science fiction writers during the field's "golden age" in the 1930-1960 era professed similar racist, Social-Darwinist, elitist and anti-democratic sentiments.
   
   Today's elites at least have the sense not to promote such beliefs in public, even if they express them privately. The open avowal of racism has moved down the social scale, along with fighting duels to settle disputes over matters of "honor." The individual today who expresses racist beliefs, or regularly gets into street fights, signals himself as lower class.
   
   Ironically, Lindbergh's and Carrel's other ideas, about treating the human body as a machine with potentially replaceable parts and greatly extending human life thereby, make them seem remarkably visionary even by 21st Century standards. You have to wonder how far they could have gotten if Carrel had secured funding for his own lab after the Rockefeller Institute had forcibly retired him, and trained a scientist to carry on the work with Lindbergh after his death; and if Lindbergh's crushes on Goering and Hitler hadn't distracted him from helping Carrel with their joint project. Lindbergh and Carrel's experiments anticipated today's research into regenerative medicine, engineered negligible senescence and transhumanism.
   
   Other interesting aspects of the book: We think we have a celebrity-obsessed culture now, but Lindbergh and his family received a level of press harassment that looks extreme even by today's standards. And Carrel combined legitimate scientific accomplishments with some very crank-sounding ideas, especially about the paranormal; today he would make a plausible guest for "Coast to Coast AM."
   
   I would have given the book more stars, but Friedman really hadn't done enough homework to show how Lindbergh's and Carrel's less defensible beliefs (from our perspective) reflected the thinking of many early 20th Century intellectuals. These intellectuals' beliefs formed a continuum with what became official policy in Nazi Germany. They didn't arise in a vacuum, in other words.