Booknotes 5.12

Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer, by Kathy Kleiman, published 2022, history, 276 pages. Though the prose is regrettably monotonous and wooden, and facts are sometimes inexplicably repeated after a few pages, it’s an important part of early computing history that I hadn’t learned about before and was overall worthwhile. (I’ll note here, by the way, that I’ve worked with many great female software engineers, and I firmly believe the field would as a whole be better off if the demographics were more balanced.) Partway through the book I realized to my surprise that I’ve been programming for around 43% of the time digital computers have been around, if we go with ENIAC’s 1945 creation as our start date. I … don’t know how that happened. Suddenly I feel old.

The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, published 1922, fiction, 299 pages. I loved it! Delightful, witty, well-wrought, and the voice was a great fit for me. Very much looking forward to reading all the rest of von Arnim’s books. Her Vera was apparently an inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I still haven’t read but need to.

Truth Has a Power of Its Own: Conversations About A People’s History, by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez, published 2022, history, 155 pages. I would rather know the truth even if it’s ugly, and I have zero interest in whitewashing history to be more palatable, but whew, this book ended up being depressing and deflating, because the actual history is depressing and deflating. Greed continues to wreak havoc throughout the human story. Slavery: bad. Wealth disparity: bad. War: bad. Speaking of which, here are a few war-related passages from the book that resonated with me: “War is terrorism on a very large scale.” “I came to the conclusion that war itself should not be tolerated, not even a so-called Good War, not even a war against an evil enemy. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of innocent people, and I don’t think it can be morally justified.” “We can no longer accept war as a way of solving problems. In fact, you might say that this is the great challenge before the human race in our time: how to solve problems of tyranny, aggression, and injustice without killing huge numbers of people.” Hear, hear.

Richard Nixon: The Life, by John A. Farrell, published 2017, biography, 940 pages. I really liked this and recommend it for those interested in political biographies. It’s readable and seemed reasonably evenhanded, at least as far as I could tell — I went into it not liking Nixon at all but came out with more understanding and compassion, even if I still disagree with much of what Nixon did. (I also don’t think every book needs to be evenhanded; there’s value in reading books from other perspectives.) The Chambers/Hess part was particularly compelling for me and I’m looking forward to reading Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers.