by Colson WhiteheadCopyright (c) 2016 I picked up this book because it won a Pulitzer for Whitehead and because it had the recommendation of Barack Obama, who reads widely. I was not let down. Its picturesque depiction of slavery and of slavery’s effects brought this historical event to life to me. Further, Whitehead vividly shows how the human heart – even those from “uncivilized” Africa – longs universally for freedom. I read it cover-to-cover in…
by Tilar J. MazzeoCopyright (c) 2018 Like many, I fell in love with the protagonist of Broadway’s biggest hit in recent years Hamilton. The true protagonist of that story is not Alexander Hamilton but his wife Eliza Hamilton. Her life as one of our country’s founding mothers brings accolades that stack up well alongside her husband’s. She bore seven children. Mindful of her husband’s past and her children’s present, she helped found the country’s first…
by Frederick P. BrooksCopyright (c) 1995 What is relevant about a book, in its second edition, that was originally written a generation or two ago about managing computer projects? The author Brooks led the management of the project for IBM decades ago. The answer to this question is simple and is evident in the title. Scaling software projects from smaller-to-larger does not scale linearly. In case you don’t know what this means, scaling non-linearly means…
by Peter Ackroyd Copyright (c) 1998 Thomas More is one of the few beatified English lay-persons in history. He was beheaded for resisting the coming Protestant Reformation. What comes around, goes around, however; More, in the years before King Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, oversaw the exercise of the death penalty to several Protestant heretics. He stood, as Ackroyd tells it, for the old way of medieval Christendom. He was unwilling to accommodate the…
The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine edited by Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Soderqvist Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas edited by Carroll Pursell and Merritt Roe Smith