Challenger by Adam Higginbotham

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham is subtitled A True Story of Heroism and Disaster of the Edge of Space and details the history of the space shuttle program and 1986 Challenger disaster.

The shuttle, with Columbia in 1981 the first launch, was pitched as something that would go into space like regular plane flights, with trips on a roughly weekly basis. Higginbotham covers the bureaucracy of NASA decision making and how the desire to move forward with shuttle launches despite raised safety concerns led to the death of the seven astronauts, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.

There's detail about shuttle booster contractor Thiokol and the O-rings that led to the disaster. Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly was one of those concerned about the cold weather and impact it would have on the O-rings. The cold hindered the ability of the rings to seal a gap, allowing hot gas to shoot past. This was raised in an evening meeting prior to launch, but Larry Mulloy from NASA pushed Thiokol to change its don't launch recommendation. Thiokol was hoping to not have the booster contract go out to bid and a "management decision" changed it to a launch recommendation.

Video of the Challenger launch shows the O-rings going, with a black puff of smoke prior to the explosion and NASA Public Affairs Officer Steve Nesbitt, announcing to the crowd "obviously a major malfunction."

The initial investigation led by NASA was looking at virtually everything except for the cold weather and decision to launch in it despite warnings. Allan McDonald from Thiokol spoke up in a meeting and noted the objections raised by Boisjoly and others, with this new information causing the investigation to go to being not one of technical, but human failure. It came out that the recommendation had been to not launch below 53 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at launch was 29 degrees. Caltech professor and physicist Richard Feynman conducted an impromptu experiment during a commission meeting, showing how O-rings lost their resiliency in cold water. Feynman published an appendix F report, one where he was very critical of NASA and those involved, both pressuring the launch to occur and disregarding warnings about the O-rings.

It also came out that evidence suggested that at least one member of the crew remained alive the entire time the capsule plummeted from the sky to the surface of the Atlantic, and the end of the book covers the shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. A piece of foam insulation breaking off during ascent, smashing a hole through the heat shield, leading to the shuttle breaking apart during reentry. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that many of the lessons of the Challenger disaster had gone unheeded.

Fire Weather by John Vaillant

Fire Weather by John Vaillant is a compelling work of nonfiction subtitled A True Story From a Hotter World. Vaillant writes about the May 3, 2016 fire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, a community of 88,000 people. 

There had been a fire burning outside of town and at an 11:00AM news conference on the 3rd, people were told to go about their lives, but be prepared. Shortly after the press conference, the weather-aided fire reached a point known as "crossover," with it in the tree canopies. The wildfire manager was giving an interview on air at 12:30, which he hustled out of when he saw how the smoke had changed. By 2:05, the first neighborhood evacuation order came and by 2:30, the fire was in the neighborhoods and streets. By 7:00, the entire city was under a mandatory evacuation order. 

Vaillant makes the statement about what people expected the fire to do of "it happens every year. which was true until it wasn't." People couldn't consider events they weren't familiar with. The worst-case scenario wasn't really the worst case, rather it was the worst case they knew about happening previously. Mention was made in the book of Nassim Taleb and his book The Black Swan, as well as the Lucretius Problem, where people have trouble imaging and assimilating things outside their personal experience. Vaillant references how the 9/11 Commission Report noted that the most important failures was one of imagination. 

Covered in the book are two people that were able to picture the worst-case scenario. Father and son firefighter Jamie and Ryan Coutts from the small town of Slave Lake had five years before seen more than a third of the houses in their town burned down in a matter of hours. They had a much more accurate view of what the fire could and likely would do than Fort McMurray officials, and they knew traditional firefighting methods wouldn't work. Entire houses were being consumed in three minutes during the peak flashover stage of the fire. What worked in combatting the fire was to see how quickly it spreading through a neighborhood, and then take down a house five houses in front of the fire, pushing it into its own basement, making it so there no fuel when the fire got there. Only by destroying a house would they have a chance of saving others. 

Incredibly, it seems there were no fatalities in the fire, but the city was closed for a month, with residents allowed back in early June. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire. More than 2,500 homes and other structures were destroyed, and 2,300 square miles of forest burned. The Fort McMurray Fire became the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, and burned for months, with it not being declared fully extinguished until August of the following year. Its behavior was entirely new, with towering pyrocumulus clouds, those usually seen over volcanoes, formed over the fire. There's also solid content about the town of Fort McMurray, oil industry in Alberta, and the impact of climate change on fires, the increased numbers of them globally and their behavior and impact. Covered are the fire tornados in Canberra, Australia in 2003, and then in 2018 in Redding, CA. 

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides

The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides is a solid book subtitled Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook. The book jacket notes how it an examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration and Sides covers the trip Cook started in London on July 12, 1776, then his death two and a half years later on Hawaii.

The main point of the voyage was for Cook, leading the Resolution and the Discovery, captained by Charles Clerke, in a search for a Northwest Passage, something that would enable ships to sail from London to the Pacific over the pole, a hypothetical route much shorter than going around Africa. The expedition went around the Cape of Good Hope, then stopped in the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Tahiti (where a Tahitian, Mai, who had gone to England, was dropped off). The two ships than happened across Hawaii, and after reaching the Pacific coast, went up through the northwest, not going into the Columbia River Bar, then British Columbia, and Alaska, where Cook in 1778 explored Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet as he searched for a way over the top of North America back to England. He continued north around Alaska and was stymied by the ice pack, and chose to return to Hawaii for the winter, rather than stay in Russia.

Cook's plan was to return to Alaska early the following year and continue searching for the elusive, and nonexistent, Northwest Passage. Returning to Hawaii culminated in his death, though, and it was fascinating reading how his arrival there fulfilled a prophecy, with how he arrived in the middle of an extended period of ceremony locals were having to welcome their God, Lono, including Cook coming into the harbor in the exact direction Lono was foretold to come from. The story of his death is an interesting one as while he was first feted as a perceived God, the locals began to realize he likely wasn't Lono. They expected him to not be there after the duration of the ceremony ended, and then when Cook and his men left for Alaska, they ran into trouble with the ship and returned, not something expected of an infallible God. A small boat from one of the vessels was taken by locals, and Cook formed a plan to kidnap the local chief until it was returned, leading to his murder. 

The ships returned to Russia and left word of Cook's death to travel across the continent to England. Then the two vessels arrived in London October 7, 1780, 1,548 days after departure. It's a good book from Sides, an interesting travelogue with great history told well.

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live by Paul Kix

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live by Paul Kix is an excellent work of nonfiction subtitled Ten Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America. Kix starts the book talking about what it was like for he and his wife Sonya as an interracial couple with kids in 2020, when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, MN by Police Officer Derek Chauvin. Kix focuses on a pivotal place and period of time in 1963, where the events in Birmingham, AL helped bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and provides fascinating reading of the inflection points that triggered events happening. 

In January 1963, leaders from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) met in Savannah, GA. Participants including Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttleworth, James Bevel, and Martin Luther King Jr. met to plan a campaign to end segregation in the city of Birmingham, led by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor. The SCLC had suffered a defeat in an effort in Albany, GA, where police recognized the need to not be seeing being brutal to blacks, neutralizing any public story. SCLC leaders intended to model the nonviolence shown by Ghandi, and shock America into changing. They planned a four-stage effort, starting with sit-ins at businesses, and then a boycott of the downtown business district by black citizens. The third stage was to be a protest march, and fourth much larger marches that would come from people seeing the brutality suffered by protestors and joining them en masse. The plan was contingent upon white people heaping abuse, and black people taking it and not fighting back.

The ten-week campaign started out known as Project X, for X marking the spot of confrontation, and transitioned into Project C, for confrontation. Money was needed for the effort and covered in the book is famous people like Harry Belafonte trying to raise for the cause, and Fred Shuttlesworth at a fundraiser in New York uttered the line the book title came from, with this helping raise $475K that night for the campaign. Things got off to a slow start, without a huge amount of support from the black community in Birmingham, as to be involved was to risk their livelihoods, freedom, and safety. The SCLC needed to antagonize Bull Connor and others in position of white power in order to have images of brutality captured and broadcast by the press. At first Connor was holding back, but then he resorted to violence, unleashing police dogs on marchers, leading to the famous photograph from May 3 of a police dog appearing to lunge at a young black man, Walter Gadsen. 

An injunction was issued saying that the black community couldn’t march or they would go to jail, and while daunting, this proved to be a trigger helping the effort be successful. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a march, was arrested, and wrote Letter from Birmingham Jail, which would become famous as a rallying cry for the cause. Then there was an outreach to black youth in Birmingham, enlisting them to march, and in one day, 973 children were arrested and jailed. The news showed the arrests and attacks on black marchers, with fire hoses spraying down children. This garnered national attention, including from Bobby and John F. Kennedy in the White House, and in Birmingham, some numbers of firefighters became unwilling to spray black children for simply marching and singing.  On May 6 there had been over 4,000 arrests, 2,500 of them children. Eventually the city of Birmingham backed down from some of its racist actions, and the brokering of segregation in the city then spread to other cities. As the eventual Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being put together, Kennedy himself said to black leaders, “but for Birmingham, we wouldn’t be here today.” 

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson is a really good work of nonfiction subtitled A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War. Larson delves into the period prior to the war and the specific events at Fort Sumter, on an island in the harbor just off the shores of Charleston, SC. 

It's fascinating how Larson takes a large event and then focuses on a specific thing that helped bring it about. The lobbing of munitions at U.S. military personal at Fort Sumter by forces of South Carolina, who had announced a succession from the Union, could be considered a powder keg prior to the blast that was the Civil War, which would kill 750,000 Americans. 

Lincoln won the presidential election on Nov 6, 1860, enraging southerners who felt that Lincoln wanted to end slavery, taking away the forced labor that harvested their cotton. The results of the election triggered people to align themselves with either the government of the U.S. or those who wanted to continue slavery. South Carolina led the charge to succeed, holding first a session of the legislature on Nov 10 about whether to leave the Union, and then a succession convention at the start of January. Mississippi then joined in succeeding on Jan 9, again due to slavery. 

 The certification of Electoral College votes was Feb 13, and leading up to it, there was concern that there would be disruption from people who didn't want Lincoln in office, and inauguration was Mar 4, with there rumors of planned assassination attempts on Lincoln while on the way to Washington. The outgoing president, James Buchanan, had hoped that Lincoln would be defeated in the presidential race, as he simply wanted to harmony before leaving his responsibilities. Lincoln's speeches leading up to his assuming office were critical as people wanted to know what he would do both about slavery and the states wanting out of the Union.

During this time, Major Robert Anderson in South Carolina consolidated U.S. forces from other forts around Charleston Harbor into Fort Sumter, an action viewed as an affront by those in Charleston as the state declared itself outside the government. South Carolina began making preparations to attack the fort if Anderson wouldn't abandon and hand it over to them. When Lincoln was sworn into office, Anderson had been at Fort Sumter some three months and he others there had dwindling provisions  and not a great deal of guidance, much less timely guidance, coming to them from Washington. Confederate President Jefferson Davis wanted to be done with the American flag flying from Fort Sumter in view of Charleston and on the April 12, 1861 day that artillery was lobbed at Fort Sumter, Anderson had been there for 113 days. The bombardment caused a fire, compelling Anderson to surrender the fort and evacuate with his men. 

Many people in the South thought this was all a grand adventure, one that would be over quickly, but Lincoln responded by calling for troops to assemble to reassert the authority of U.S. law, and the war commenced. Four years later the U.S. retook Fort Sumter, with the Civil War killing a full third of the 60,000 men in the state who fought. Also, the war brought what southerners feared, the end of slavery cost South Carolina planters some three hundred million dollars in human capital. Larson does a great job in the book of detailing this specific place and event at the start of a conflict that wound up killing a quarter of a million people, and all the sliding door moments that led up to the Civil War.

Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson

Dogland by Tommy Tomlinson is an excellent work of nonfiction about the Westminster Dog Show, dogs in general, and Tomlinson and his relationship to dogs, especially his dog, Fred. 

Tomlinson in this book starts off by writing about the mockumentary Best in Show and he covers how dog show judges pick winners based on the dog that best epitomizes the breed. The most popular dogs aren't usually going to win. He writes about a dog show champion Samoyed named Striker, Striker's handler, Laura King, and a great cast of characters different than most. I love reading about cross-sections of people that are passionate about something that others aren't, fully enveloped in a world they love, that they inhabit not for money, but because it's who they are and what they do. 

There's also great personal narrative included, bringing to mind Tomlinson's first book, The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America. The part of the book about Tomlinson's dog Fred is definitely my favorite. As he writes, the unspoken contract of having a pet is you will die before them. As is talked about by John Wick, dogs make us be "unalone." They provide companionship, force us to exercise, and keep us engaged with the world by forcing a schedule on us, making us get up in the morning. Tomlinson also tells the story of ESPN Sportscenter anchor Scott Van Pelt and his dog Otis. 

Tomlinson quotes from a story by his friend Chris Jones, one of my favorite writers, on the magician Teller for Esquire. Teller is quoted saying "sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." Tomlinson connects how that sort of like the dog-human relationship, perhaps dogs figured out the path to their survival is becoming indispensable to humans. The book is nominally about Westminster and dog shows, but uses that frame to tell about relationships and how we feel about our dogs, what they give to us, and what we seem to give to them. It's a book about connection, it's lovely.

South of Broad by Pat Conroy

South of Broad by Pat Conroy is a beautifully written novel set in Charleston, SC and includes richly drawn characters and great writing about place, with Conroy from the South and drawing from his experiences.

The book features the characters of Leo King, three sets of siblings in Sheba and Trevor Poe, Chad and Fraser Rutledge, and Niles and Starla Whitehead, Betty, Ike Jefferson, and Molly Huger. South of Broad (which is a part of Charleston) begins prior to their senior year of high school in 1969 and each person came to the friendship with their own unique hurdles to overcome. Sheba and Trevor had an evil father, Niles, Starla, and Betty were orphans, Chad and Fraser were blue bloods with the expectations of Charleston society, Ike was a young black man in the South, and Leo had to deal with the suicide of his older brother, Steve.

Sheba and Trevor moved across the street from Leo, and Leo and Ike were co-captains of the football team, with Ike's father the new head coach in a often-racist town. Sheba and Trevor were memorable characters, with each like glamorous comets shooting through the world. Trevor was flamboyantly gay and a bringer together of people and Sheba the center of attention, and they lived with their alcoholic mother, who had taken them and fled from their perfectly evil father. Leo had a domineering mother, and tremendously decent father and was a remarkable character, someone who tried to do what was right, becoming the glue of the group. 

The book jumps forward twenty years in time, with Sheba coming back to Charleston from Hollywood, where she had become a goddess-like movie star. During the intervening years, Leo married Starla, Niles married Fraser, Ike married Betty, and Chad married Molly. Sheba enlisted the group to go with her to San Francisco in search of Trevor. They then return to Charleston, and Hurricane Hugo comes into their lives. There's so many fork in the road moments for the characters, where the arc of their lives could have gone a different direction had different choices been made or outcomes occurred. There's also quite a bit of painful to read heartbreak in the book, and the bond between the group is remarkable with how they rally around each other.

Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel

Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel is a novel set in Seattle that tells the story of software engineer Sam Elling and the computer simulation he creates for his girlfriend Meredith so that she can communicate via email, and later via video chat, with her grandmother Livvie who recently passed away. 

Sam scrapes the digital record of how Livvie communicated with Meredith when they would email and video chat, and writes the program so that it provides back the communication to Meredith that she likely would have given. Sam, Meredith, and her cousin Dash then create a company, RePose, to provide this service for others, with people coming to the RePose space rented in Sam and Meredith's apartment building where they can communicate electronically with loved ones who have passed. A community of sorts then forms with those people sharing in common recent loss, and Sam and Meredith trying to help them through it.

The idea is to provide people a way to say goodbye and deal with their grief, but it's an open question whether the technology a healthy thing for people to have available, with it both a tool to say goodbye and to not move forward. It's an interesting and heartfelt story, with a turn taken towards the end making it that much more profound.

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Fairy Tale by Stephen King is a novel that tells the story of 17-year-old Charlie Reade. He meets and decides to care for a dog, Radar, and her aging owner, Howard Bowditch, after Bowditch suffered a fall.

Charlie learns that something seriously amiss in the locked shed on Bowditch’s property, and that the man had at least a bucketful of gold pellets. After Bowditch dies from a heart attack, Charlie listens to a recording Bowditch left for him, and hears a story of how the shed on top of a passageway to another world.

Part of what Bowditch tells of is a sundial in the other world that reverses the aging process, something Charlie desperately wanted to do with the dog who was now his, Radar, near death from old age. Charlie a third of the way through the book travels with Radar down the spiral staircase in the shed, and are in the other world.

When Charlie and Radar return home, he had been gone from October to February and King tells well the story of myth and wonder, one he notes as having wanted to write from early in the pandemic. 

One Two Three by Laurie Frankel

One Two Three by Laurie Frankel is a good novel that tells the story of the Mitchell triplets, Mab, Monday, and Mirabel. They're teenagers in the town of Bourne, where many of citizens were afflicted with disabilities almost certainly caused by Belsum Chemical that once operated in town. 

Runoff from the plant was said, but refuted by Belsum Chemical-hired specialists, to have gone into the town's drinking water, leading to high rates of cancer and other maladies. The girls' father died of cancer just before they were born and their mother Nora leads the decades-long uphill battle to hold the Belsum and its owner, Duke Templeton, liable for what they did. People died, moved away, and those who remained live with their afflictions. 

Of the girls, Mab is the most scholarly, Monday particular, with an affinity for all things yellow, and Mirabel dealt a body that betrayed her constantly, leaving her wheelchair-bound and unable to easily communicate outside her family. The story introduces how the dying town that never had anything new happen in it then very much does. 

Someone shows up at the High School, River Templeton, grandson of Belsum owner Duke and son of Nathan Templeton, sent by his father to reopen the plant. River develops a relationship with one of the sisters and is enlisted in their efforts to expose Belsum and the harm it did, and would likely do again if the plant were to reopen. The people of the town actually were going to make reopening a reality, voting for repairs needed to a dam on the river near the plant, until Mab, Monday, and Mirabel take action. It's a cool drama-filled conclusion, and the book an entertaining and satisfying read about people, the circumstances thrust upon them, and what they choose to do about those circumstances.

The Escape Artists by Neal Bascomb

The Escape Artists by Neal Bascomb is a work of nonfiction subtitled A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War. It details a 1918 World War I escape from the German POW camp Holzminden by a group of Allied Airmen and David Grann on the book jacket describes it as "a remarkable piece of hidden history, told perfectly... brims with adventure, suspense, daring, and heroism.” 

The book starts out with the story of Jim Bennett, one of the escapees who then in WWII was working for British Military Intelligence, showing people how escapes could be made. Bascomb details many different escape attempts by prisoners, and then the ultimately successful one led by pilot David Gray, with twenty-nine men going through a dug out path that came to be known as the Holzminden Tunnel. 

The part after the escape, where the men travelled in small groups towards freedom, was the most engaging of the book. One group of three featured a former prisoner feigning being a patient from a lunatic asylum, and the other two his handlers. Of the twenty-nine, a number noted as the greatest breakout of the war, one in which 192K prisoners were held in Germany, ten men ultimately made it to safety. It's an interesting story, with the book description giving a good summary...

"Their plot demands a risky feat of engineering as well as a bevy of disguises, forged documents, fake walls, and steely resolve. Once beyond the watch towers and round-the-clock patrols, Gray and almost a dozen of his half-starved fellow prisoners must then make a heroic 150 mile dash through enemy-occupied territory towards free Holland."

Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg is an excellent book subtitled How to Unlock the Secret Language of Communication. Duhigg notes that the goal for conversations should be to have learning conversations, ones where we learn how the people around us see the world and they understand our perspectives. 

The prologue covers the idea of reciprocating in conversation, connecting by showing people that you're hearing what they're saying and sharing your own stories while you're asking people to share theirs. This matching principle in conversation means that you're doing equivalent things to what the person you're talking to is doing, becoming neurally aligned. If they're sharing, you're sharing. If they're either excited or restrained, you're the same. Also, looping for understanding is the technique of asking questions, summarizing what you heard, and asking if you got it right. There should be lots of questions asked, but more importantly, follow-up questions. Ones that don't have a straightforward answer, but rather ask how someone feels about something, or asks about something impactful to someone. 

Rules for learning conversations: 

1. Pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring (what someone hopes to get from a conversation). 

2. Share your goals and ask what others are seeking. 

3. Ask about others' feelings, and share your own. 

4. Explore if identities are important to this discussion (keep in mind how important peoples' identities are to their world view). It's helpful to prepare for a conversation, think about or even write down what you want to discuss, what you hope to say, what you plan to ask.

Duhigg writes about connecting with others as having empathy and emotional intelligence. He details astronaut selection and how if someone isn't doing the things to connect, they likely could have a difficult time being successful on a long space mission in close quarters with others. The story is also told of The Big Bang Theory, and how the pilot reveals people trying to connect (by saying "hi"), but who don't know how. 

Three types of conversations: 

1. What's this really about (practical, are different things being discussed)? 

2. How do we feel (emotional, does someone feel controlled or do they feel understood)? 

3. Who are we (social, what's the world view of the person and how can that not be compromised)?

There's also interesting content about online communication and how it important to overemphasize politeness, underemphasize sarcasm, express more gratitude and hedges, and avoid criticism in public forums.

Duhigg closes with the need to invest in relationships, connect with more people, and avoid social isolation as it's an unhealthy thing. He notes that if he gets an email at charles@charlesduhigg.com, he'll respond and that "what's important is wanting to connect, wanting to understand someone, wanting to have a deep conversation, even if it is hard and scary, or when it would be so much easier to walk away." 

The Boys of Winter by Wayne Coffey

The Boys of Winter by Wayne Coffey was written in 2005 and subtitled The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team. Coffey intersperses a recounting of what happened in the game with backstory on head coach Herb Brooks, who died in 2003 at the age of 66, and many of the players.

It's fascinating how Brooks bonded players together against him, and Coffey notes that Brooks called his year coaching the team his loneliest in hockey. Even years later, it was hard for Brooks to connect with the players, twelve of whom played in the NHL. 

There were twenty players on the team and profiled in order in the book (along with Soviet coach Viktor Tikhonov, U.S. goalie coach Warren Strelow, and 42-year-old Brooks) were Billy Baker, Buzz Schneider, Jack O'Callahan, Mark Johnson, Ken Morrow, John Harrington, Neal Broten, Eric Stobel, Steve Janaszak, Mark Pavelich, Steve Christoff, Jim Craig, Dave Christian, Mark Wells, Dave Silk, and Mike Eruzione. The end of the book covers that prior to the Olympics, none of the 1,780 players selected in the 17 years of the NHL draft had been an American high schooler, two years later, 47 of 252 players were.

Coffey notes how Brooks scheduled a pre-tournament game against the Soviets, who won 10-3, so that they would be over confident. In the Olympic matchup between the teams, Vladislav Tretiak, the star Soviet goalie, was pulled after giving up the tying goal at the very end of the first period. Shots on goal in the game were 39 to 16 in favor of the Soviets, with Jim Craig playing an outstanding game in goal and Mark Johnson and Mike Eruzione scoring a minute and a half apart midway through the third period of the 4-3 U.S. win. It was a solid read and interesting how the movie Miracle closely followed real-life as chronicled in the book. 

The Women by Kristin Hannah

The Women by Kristin Hannah is a compelling novel about Frances "Frankie" McGrath, who served in the Army Nurse Corps in Vietnam. The first half of the book covers Frankie in Vietnam following the enlistment and death in combat of her brother Finley, and second half is about her life after returning from the war.

While in Vietnam, Frankie worked numerous MASCAL, or mass casualty, events at the same time that the American government was lying to people about how successful the war was. Hannah wrote that on a day the Stars and Stripes newspaper reported no American casualties, seven men died in Frankie’s operating theater. Also, she saw cases of South Vietnamese civilians being killed by American bombs and napalm. 

Returning home, she had strangers proclaim her a “baby killer,” people at the VA tell her that services weren’t for her as "women weren't in combat," friends from school say she was joking about having been in the war, and her father get revealed as having told friends while Frankie gone that she was studying in Florence. 

The book jacket notes how idealism and courage come under fire in this era and as a female veteran, Frankie had to face people telling her “there are no women in Vietnam.” This was particularly cruel because as Hannah notes, “remembrance matters.” The ending is well-written and shows that people can start anew, and help others do the same. Also, it's noted that “being proud is something people have for themselves, even if others don't say they should be.”

Family Family by Laurie Frankel

Family Family by Laurie Frankel is a really good novel about actress India Allwood, her adopted children Fig and Jack, her two biological children that she placed for adoption, their birth fathers, and adopted parents, and their interconnected lives. 

The book covers how adoption stories aren’t all either horrifying ones of abused children or uplifting ones about overcoming abuse. They’re life stories about people, and those stories don’t always fit into the small boxes we might think they do. 

India Allwood is a compelling character, someone who worked tirelessly to succeed, would write plans on index cards, and rip them up and throw the confetti in the air to celebrate successes. 

Frankel notes of how India didn’t “give up her babies for adoption," she placed them with loving families, leading to wonderful outcomes. Along with India, the book is about Robbie, and Bex, and Camille, and Davis, and Lewis, and Andrew, and Drew. They’re all part of one another’s stories, making each other who they are.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is a lovely novel about the characters Vianne Mauriac and her sister Isabelle in occupied France during World War II. 

It's so important have books like this that keep alive the stories of German atrocities during the war, and Hannah does a great job telling of the heroic actions of the sisters, with a great conclusion to the book about the lasting impact of both women.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein is a compelling nonfiction book subtitled A Trip into the Mirror World. Klein writes about herself and Naomi Wolf, someone she has been often mistaken for, and provides an interesting examination into our society and the extremist beliefs held by many. Klein and Wolf at one time were both writing about individual autonomy and corporate power, with Klein in 2007 publishing The Shock Doctrine about exploitation of large-scale events, and them being mistaken for one other seems understandable.

Wolf began to espouse more conspiracy theories prior to pandemic, and then with it, her statements became much more unhinged. Her anti-vax views went to the level of writing about "vaccine shedding," the idea that vaccinated people could infect the unvaccinated. She also put out videos like "Why Vaccine Passports Equal Slavery Forever" and became a regular guest on Steve Bannon's show. 

Where the book gets particularly interesting is in how Klein points out that Wolf takes ideas and questions that are legitimate and should be asked, but goes so far with them to make any discussion around the topics seem wrong or like binary opposites, basically the legitimate argument gets co-opted by the outlandish one, rendering it moot.

The extremist right argues against governmental controls, and does so in such a wild manner, that normal people can't argue against them also. Basically, government conspiracists take over the argument about government in general. Extremists talk about government spying on us and Liberals react with how crazy Extremists are, and lose the ability to make arguments about privacy from governmental incursion. 

Another example is criticism of the role Bill Gates had in COVID-19 policy and drug companies having patents on COVID vaccines when vaccine development was so heavily government subsidized becomes muted, lest that discussion be confused with people demonizing Gates and vaccines in general. Klein writes that legitimate debate functionally gets killed when you have situations that this, with about Wolf, her noting that it felt like Wolf took Klein's ideas and fed into a bonkers blender, with the  thought-puree then shared with Tucker Carlson. 

Klein raises the concept of diagonalism, or diagonal alliances, where different conspiracy theories or grievances all roll together, or at least align together. The term pipikism is also used, with it from writer Philip Roth and about the idea of inconsequentializing or trivializing things, with perhaps the most dangerous form of pipikism being the make-up possibility that perhaps the Nazis weren't so awful, and also invented idea that vaccine cards are sort of like Star of David that Jews were forced to wear. Equating vaccines with the attempted extermination of an entire race makes the extermination seem less of a big deal, a dangerous and horrifying slope to go down when the actions of Nazis are trivialized. There's a lot to the book that Klein writes. It starts with the idea of Wolf as her doppelganger, but then covers well so much more.

Going Infinite by Michael Lewis

Going Infinite by Michael Lewis is a compelling book about Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-convicted founder of FTX and Alameda Research. Lewis first heard of him at the end of 2021, when Sam took FTX to $1B in revenue, up from $100M in 2020, and $20M in 2019. The book largely chronicles his rise, with the end covering his rapid fall. It felt like a satisfying conclusion was lacking, largely because it not clear where the money went. 

Lewis covers how Sam went to MIT and interned and then was hired at Jane Street Capital. It's a high-frequency trading firm and it was fascinating reading about the interview process there, one centered around probability and chance. It was to determine how someone operates in an environment of uncertainty, how do they go about making decisions? The questions were all mental math around odds, like what amount of money would someone trade for a possibility of a larger amount of money. It was testing someone's relationship to information. 

Lewis covers how these type of calculations fit Sam perfectly and his decisions involved an expected value calculation. He would at the spur of the moment change a plan based on a new calculation he made of how he wanted to spend his time. 

Sam loved things where there was only partial knowledge of a situation, and when he discovered crypto trading, he found it a perfect fit for him. Sam quit his job in 2017 to start Alameda Research as a crypto trading firm and by November 2018, Alameda Researched traded more than 5% of the total volume of crypto markets. He then founded FTX as a new company, a crypto exchange, and as this was occurring, Sam was living in Asia, and then moved to the Bahamas. In late October 2022, it all came crashing down, triggered by a crypto crisis. On November 11, FTX went into bankruptcy in the United States, as FTX should have been holding some $10B in customer deposits, but only had a fraction of that.

It's a shame that Sam flamed out given his donations to various causes, including fighting climate change and promoting democratic principles, including how he toyed with the idea of paying Donald Trump billions to not run again for President. The book closes with the bankruptcy efforts to try to figure out what happened with the money, before the trial of Sam, and it's an interesting read.

Gallop Toward the Sun by Peter Stark

Gallop Toward the Sun by Peter Stark is a solid book subtitled Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation. Stark tells the story of the Indian leader and his efforts to prevent the encroachment of white settlers onto Indian lands, in opposition to Harrison who was attempting to expand American lands further and further west.

Harrison was appointed governor of the Indiana Territory, some 260,000 square miles, in 1800, briefly serving under John Adams as President, followed by Thomas Jefferson, then James Madison. Jefferson relentlessly pursued land acquisition, and was in office for the Louisiana Purchase, where France under Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory for $15M, or half a billion acres at roughly three cents each. 

Harrison pushed to increase the U.S. footprint, wanting to get the Indiana Territory to 60,000 residents so it could get statehood, with he perhaps a Senator. James Madison became President in 1809 and wanted land acquisition done without conflict, but would rely on Harrison's promises of fairness in dealing with the tribes. Harrison would appease the White House with his statements, but then do whatever it took to get more land, getting tribes to sign agreements that harmed other tribes. 

Tecumseh was a Shawnee warrior and worked to bring together various tribes, attempting to unite them into an alliance against American expansion. There was first negotiations and then armed conflict between Americans and tribes led by Tecumseh. Eventually came the War of 1812 between the U.S. and Britain, with Harrison taking a military command and Tecumseh fighting on the side of the British in an effort to maintain Indian lands. Tecumseh was killed as he advanced on someone he believed to be Harrison, and the territory governor ultimately realized his goal of national office, becoming the (short-lived) ninth U.S. President.

The book is an interesting story of two opposing forces and Stark quotes historian Colin Calloway who described the contest between the leaders as "a war for America's heart and soul."

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant

Hidden Potential by Adam Grant is an interesting book subtitled The Science of Achieving Greater Things and split into three sections, with three chapters in each:

Skills of Character - getting better at through character skills

Chapter 1: Creatures of Discomfort - embrace awkwardness and do things, don't be afraid of being embarrassed 

Chapter 2: Human Sponges - rather than asking for feedback, it's better to ask for advice on how to improve at something, asking what you can do better elicits more specific suggestions and input that can help you

Chapter 3: The Imperfectionists - it's not a perfect world, it's ok to make mistakes, or deal with things as they are and appreciate flaws, judge on your best moments, not your worst, ask multiple you trust people to score the work you do

Structures for Motivation - get the scaffolding to help you when you need it

Chapter 4: Transforming the Daily Grind - make practice fun, enjoy the time you spend on things, play at things, make a game out of drills

Chapter 5: Getting Unstuck - try different things, be willing to start over or go backwards in an effort, take a detour and spend time on something else to get unstuck or reach a goal

Chapter 6: Defying Gravity - work together to accomplish something, the tutor effect... be a teacher of something at the same time you're a student, encouraging others helps us find our own motivation, making progress can be about simply bouncing back and not quitting

Systems of Opportunity - open doors for people underrated or overlooked

Chapter 7: Every Child Gets Ahead - Finland's educational system has created a culture of opportunity that assumes everyone can excel, just some might need more personalized support

Chapter 8: Mining for Gold - the 2010 rescue of 33 men from a Chilean mine, with ideas of how to keep them alive and then get them to safety sourced from a wide spectrum of people, the best leaders have prosocial skills and are often the best listeners

Chapter 9: Diamonds in the Rough - astronaut Jose Hernandez and his path to getting accepted by NASA into the program, setting up people for success in interviews by helping them be comfortable and talk about their interests and passions

It's an excellent read and Grant in the epilogue tells about interviewing for admission to Harvard, getting in and then once there, turning down the remedial writing course that he was pointed to and getting an A in the regular course, which led to his interest in psychology and writing. Grant closes the book with "success is more than reaching our goals - it's living our values. There's no higher value than aspiring to be better tomorrow than we are today. There's no greater accomplishment than unleashing our hidden potential."

The Last Politician by Franklin Foer

The Last Politician by Franklin Foer is a really good book subtitled Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. Foer provides great writing about Biden and his first two years as President.

The book starts with the inauguration, 14 days after the storming of the Capitol, and then passage of the American Rescue Plan stemming from the pandemic. After this is detailed production of the Covid vaccine and its rollout, something that had to have the plan created for it as the Trump Administration apparently didn’t have one. Also written about is the withdrawal from Afghanistan, an incredibly difficult task that was hit at the end by a suicide bomber, resulting in the loss of 13 American soldiers. 

Legislation that Biden fought successfully to have passed included the Inflation Reduction Act, a significant investment in alternative energy, and CHIPS Act and infrastructure bill investing in technology and manufacturing. Also during these two years was the backing of Ukraine with Russia’s invasion, while avoiding direct conflict between the U.S. and Russia, and management of the relationship with China. 

Foer shows himself to be a wordsmith in the book and writes of the tasks Biden faced in his first two years in office. He had up times and down times, with both his leadership propelling causes forward and gaffes holding them back, and in his first two years in office accomplished much for the country and beyond.

Breathless by David Quammen

Breathless by David Quammen is a thorough work of nonfiction subtitled The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus. The book jacket notes that it "traces the journey of SARS-CoV-2 through the human population, as seen by the scientists who study its genome, its ever-changing nature, the much-argued question of its origin, and its capacity to kill us." 

Quammen provides a detailed investigation of Covid-19 through his interviews with close to 100 experts and while it can be a heavy read at times, it's a well-done book. He details where the argument for the virus being lab-made came from, and how the evidence shows that to be unlikely. 

It's fascinating reading of how scientists in late December started to hear about patients in Wuhan, most of them having connection to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, with an unknown cause of pneumonia. By January 19, 2020, the Wuhan CDC noted a case count of 198 and were calling the disease a novel-coronavirus-infected pneumonia. At this time, the virus had already spread beyond the country and the thing that scared scientists perhaps the most about the new virus was that people could have and transmit it without showing symptoms themselves. 

It was fascinating reading of the work that went into understanding the novel coronavirus and interesting information about how the virus spreads between both human and animal populations (with spillover occurring when it crosses between them). This makes the virus much more difficult to eradicate, and increases the mutations and variants that occur in it. Quammen notes that transmission to humans likely occurred in the market, from an animal source, and then spread from there with Wuhan a hub for travelers. He also covers how the Chinese government restricted access to information, likely both because restricting access to information is what they do, and from their experience with another coronavirus, SARS-CoV in 2003 that originated in China. Quammen also discusses the fallacy of herd immunity. especially with something that travels between humans and animals, and the rapid development of mRNA covid vaccines. Also noted is Dr. Peter Hotez and the effort to create non-mRNA vaccines, recombinant-protein methodology-built ones that are cheaper, more stable, and can be taken orally or as a nasal squirt.

The Midcoast by Adam White

 The Midcoast by Adam White is a novel set on the coast of Maine, with White telling a suspenseful story of families involved in drug running in a small community. There's some compelling writing about the choices people make and social classes and the juxtaposition between wealth and just getting by.

Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski

Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski is an entertaining book subtitled A History in 50 Moments. Posnanski covers the moments in baseball that stuck with him, ranging from the well-known moments of triumph to the simply interesting. It's noted in the introduction that there's actually 108 moments covered in the book and some of those that stood out are listed below:

- Five unlikely homers - including pitcher Bartolo Colon homering in 2016

- "There's no crying in baseball" from A League of Their Own

- The pine tar homer by George Brett in 1983 during a Royals-Yankees game

- The Bo throw by Bo Jackson vs. the Mariners in 1989

- A home run off Jose Canseco's head in 1993

- The Edgar Martinez double scoring Ken Griffrey Jr. for the Mariners against the Yankees in game 5 of the ALDS

- The 1947 embrace of Jackie Robinson by Pee Wee Reese (which may not have been an actual embrace, but likely still was a big moment)

- Joe Carter of the Blue Jays homering against Mitch Williams of the Phillies to win the 1993 World Series

- The bat flip by Jose Bautista in the 2015 Blue Jays-Rangers playoff game

- Vin Scully's call of the Sandy Koufax perfect game September 9, 1965

- One-handed pitcher Jim Abbott throws a no-hitter September 4, 1993

- Dee Strange-Gordon homers in September 2016, the first Marlins game after the death of Jose Fernandez

- Cal Ripken in 1995 passing Lou Gehrig's streak of 2,130 consecutive games played

- The last .400 season in 1941, with Ted Williams going into the final day at .3995 and then going 6-8 in the final day doubleheader, taking his average to .406

- Armando Galarraga throwing a near-perfect game in 2010, taken away by Jim Joyce blowing the call on what should have been the final out, and Galarraga graciously accepting his heartfelt apology

- David Ortiz in 2013 speaking to the crowd at Fenway Park after the Boston Marathon bombing and saying "this is our fucking city. And nobody's gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong."

- Kirk Gibson of the Dodgers homering off Dennis Eckersley of the A's to win game one of the 1998 World Series, with Vin Scully simply saying "high fly ball into right field... she is GONE!"

- The speech by Jason Hayward during the 9th inning rain delay of the 2016 World Series 7th game between the Cubs and Indians, helping end the Cubs long run of failure

Graveyard of the Pacific by Randall Sullivan

Graveyard of the Pacific by Randall Sullivan is an interesting book subtitled Shipwreck and Survival on America's Deadliest Waterway. The book is about the Columbia River Bar off the coast of Oregon, where the massive Columbia River flows into the Pacific Ocean, creating frenzied water conditions that have claimed over two thousand ships and to this day remains an extremely dangerous area.

Sullivan in the book tells stories from the Columbia River Bar, and weaves in the story of his life as he and his friend Ray Thomas (who had a similarly troubled childhood with a domineering father) set out to cross the bar via a trimaran two-person kayak. 

The book has a solid blend of personal narrative with history about a fascinating area, the calamities that occurred there, and the people who lived and worked around it. Among other stories, Sullivan covered the Tonquin, a ship sent by John Jacob Astor and written about in Peter Stark's book, Astoria. The parts about shipwrecks are great, but equally as interesting are those about people (especially the Coast Guard, but also the Columbia River Bar Pilots) putting their lives in danger to rescue others and to help get boats successfully through the dangerous waterway.

The Underworld by Susan Casey

The Underworld by Susan Casey is a wonderful book on deep sea exploration, following other books Casey has written about the ocean, including The Devil’s Teeth and The Wave.

She notes that the deep ocean is the waters below 200 meters, approximately six hundred feet, and has a fascination with the deepest parts of the ocean, including the twilight zone region described as being from six hundred to thirty-three hundred feet deep, midnight zone from thirty-three hundred to ten thousand, abyssal zone from ten thousand to twenty thousand, and hadal zone from twenty thousand to thirty-six thousand feet deep. The deepest part of the ocean is Challenger Deep, at 35,786 feet within the Mariana Trench. 

Rather than being barren as was once thought, the deep ocean is alive with fantastic creatures, bacteria, and microbes that are the source of life, whose understanding yields new medicines and treatments for disease. Also, the deep ocean buffers carbon and regulates conditions on earth.

Covered in the book are deep sea submersibles, the ships that a very few people have taken to the bottoms of the ocean. In 2012, James Cameron touched down at the bottom of Challenger Deep, the third person to ever reach that point, and Casey writes heavily about billionaire explorer Victor Vescovo. He in 2018 commissioned a submersible, the Limiting Factor, that he could pilot to the depths of the ocean and set out to dive to the deepest points in all five ocean basins. The effort was known as the Five Deeps and carried a roughly 50-million-dollar price tag. Vescovo has also been to the top of the seven summits, to both poles, and to space.

It’s a great story of eclectic and fascinating people along with amazing geography. Casey was to go in a submersible down to explore Lo’ihi, the next Hawaiian volcano, thirteen thousand feet tall, and a mile below the surface, which should poke out of the water in perhaps a hundred thousand years. She details how we have to understand the deep ocean, its geology, and the life there to fully understand our world, including its plate tectonics and accompanying earthquakes. Casey covers hydrothermal vents, the giant squid discovered in 2012, and the Lost City, an underwater area of more than thirty white pinnacles and spectacular formations, formed by chemical reactions between mantle rock and seawater.

Not unexpectedly, there is detail about people wanting to effectively destroy the ecosystem of the ocean, by deep-sea mining nodules containing metals. Mining is controlled by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an organization noted as akin to oil executives deciding on forest ecology. Petitioning the ISA on behalf of energy companies is the country of Nauru, containing some 11,000 people, with leaders who have stripped their land bare and now seem to want to do the same to the ocean. There is also a chapter about shipwrecks and treasure, specifically the San Jose, as written about in The Wager by David Grann. She includes mention of the nonprofit OceanX started by Ray Dalio, the marine research group Inkfish, and the BBC series Blue Planet II. The book is a great narrative about Casey's love of the deep ocean and desire to see it. 

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel is an excellent novel with characters that stick with you long after reading the book. Frankel tells the story of the Walsh-Adams family - Rosie and Penn and their kids Roo, Rigel, Orion, Ben, and Claude, the last born. 

Claude as he was getting ready to start elementary school was more and more drawn to dresses and things traditionally favored by girls, and eventually became known as their daughter, Poppy. It's an emotional tale of Rosie and Penn, and their other kids as they work to support and do right by the youngest member of the family. 

Frankel provides a beautifully written story that stretches from Wisconsin to Seattle to Thailand. It's filled with great pain, great love, and then the Buddhist concept of a middle way of living, one betwixt opposites.

The Heartbeat of the Wild by David Quammen

The Heartbeat of the Wild by David Quammen is a solid book from someone with a two-decade career as a National Geographic magazine science writer. It's subtitled Dispatches from Landscapes of Wonder, Peril, and Hope and contains twenty-one different accounts of his travels, with stories including:

Three different pieces on walking with ecologist Michael Fay on his Megatransect journey across Central Africa. He traveled 2,000 miles on foot over 15 months, going through often heavily forested areas to Gabon on the African coast. Fay along the way cataloged the ecosystems he came across.

An account of time on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far Eastern Russia, an isolated area that went into disrepair with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with salmon fishing an important part of the economy. 

Two stories about C-Boy, a Serengeti lion that escaped death after being attacked as a youth by a pack of lions dubbed the Killers. C-Boy lived to old age, with an image of him on the cover of the book.

A story about the Ebola virus, the impact it has had on Africa (both people and animals) and search by scientists for the origin of Ebola outbreaks and the reservoir host of the disease. 

An overview of the Okavango Delta, an area in Botswana critical to both the ecology and economy of the country, and how the Delta needs water that flows from elsewhere, particularly Angola, to survive.

A chronicle of what tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Greg Carr has done in Africa, helping create parks and reinvigorate wildlife as well as educate and empower young African girls. 

The tale of Doug Thompkins and Kristine McDivitt Thompkins and their conservation efforts in Chile and Argentina, started by each and continued by Kristine following Doug's death from hypothermia after his kayak capsized in a Chilean lake.

The Book of Charlie by David Von Drehle

The Book of Charlie by David Von Drehle is a solid book subtitled Wisdom From the Remarkable American Life of a 109-year-old Man. Von Drehle recounts the tale of his Kansas City neighbor Charles Herbert White. 

It's an interesting story of someone who grew up in an entirely different time. His father was killed in an elevator accident when White a young child, forcing him to develop the resilience he would carry with him for another century. 

Von Drehle wrote about his friend and the idea friend and the idea of Stoicism, nothing that "people think it has to do with not having feelings or not caring about the world. But what it teaches is, we can only control our own selves, our own will, decisions and actions. We don’t control people; we don’t control the world; we don’t control the future. I think Charlie finally drove home that wisdom for me.” It was fascinating to think about what White lived through, including two World Wars.

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel

The Art Thief by Michael Finkel is a solid work of nonfiction subtitled A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession. Finkel tells the story of Stéphane Breitwieser, who carried out more than 200 art heists across Europe over a 10-year-period. He stole, usually with the help of his girlfriend, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, more than three hundred works of art, worth an estimated $2B. 

Singular in the world of art thieves, Breitwieser stole not to then sell the pieces, but rather to just keep and look at them. He displayed the work where he lived with Kleinklaus, in the attic of his mother's house. 

It is interesting reading of the audaciousness of many of the heists and Breitwieser's self-professed love of art is at first somewhat endearing, but his view of himself as a liberator of art is impossible to reconcile with what eventually happens to the pieces. It felt inevitable that things would end poorly, regardless of whether Breitwieser expected or intended them to, making him come across less as sympathetic and more as someone who caused great harm.

Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson

Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson is an entertaining novel by the author of the excellent book Nothing to See Here. 

In his latest work, Wilson tells the story of Frankie and Zeke, teenagers in the fictional town of Coalfield, TN who unwittingly start a local panic that becomes national news. They created and surreptitiously put up with a poster with Zeke's drawings and sixteen-year-old Frankie's phrase "The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, the law is skinny with hunger for us."

The book tells of them putting up hundreds of posters, and then people copycatted them, putting up scores more, with many in the population latching on to fanciful ideas of the posters having been created by a satanic cult looking to bring harm to the town. Interested people descended on Coalfield in such numbers that the town for a period of time was shut off from outside visitors to try to maintain order. The poster was then recreated and distributed outside of Coalfield, entering the popular imagination and discourse, featured on 20/20 and mentioned on Saturday Night Live.

Wilson tells about the summer this all took place, and then what happened twenty years later with Frankie (who became a popular novelist), Zeke, and the creation story of the poster. It's a good tale from Wilson that deals in friendship, adolescence, art, hysteria, and secrets.

The Time Has Come by Will Leitch

The Time Has Come by Will Leitch, who also wrote the novel How Lucky, is a short and interesting novel.

This latest work of fiction from Leitch is also set in Athens, Georgia, and tells a story set around Lindbergh’s Pharmacy, run now by Theo Lindbergh after he took it over following the death of his father, Jack.

The book covers various characters separately and then brings them together at the end, with the principles Theo, Daphne (a nurse), Jason (a contractor) and his son Jace, David (who run a music venue and has a daughter named Allie), Karson (an activist with a law degree), Dorothy (a widower whose husband Dennis passed away from covid), and Tina Lamm (a schoolteacher once known as Mommy Mario and whose family was impacted by Jack Lindbergh).

When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance

When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance is a solid book subtitled The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach.

Vance notes Space X and Elon Musk as starting the concept of private companies operating in space, but the bulk of the book is his writing about four other companies, Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Astra, and Firefly, with each focusing on low-earth orbit rocket and satellite launches. He covers how from the 1960s to 2020, the number of satellites put in space had slowly and steadily increased to about 2,500, and then from 2020 to 2022, the number doubled to 5,000. Over the next decade, though, the figure is projected to be between 50,000 and 100,000 satellites in space. The general trend has been towards making less expensive satellites, and the rockets that take those satellites up, that way failures aren't financially cataclysmic. 

Planet Labs is noted as building small satellites that work in space as clusters, or doves as the company calls them, taking photos of things on earth, and selling access to those images. Planet Labs enables there to be evidence of what's happening on earth, including things like troop movements, weapons buildup, and illegal deforestation, with the idea that images are used for good in the world. Vance covers how Planet Labs was started by people who worked for Air Force General Pete Worden at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. 

The second company covered is Rocket Lab, started by Peter Beck in New Zealand, an area nobody would have expected a rocket genius to come from, and the government there created space rules for the first time as Beck's efforts made them required. He was all about rockets, building them and launching them, so that satellites could then catch rides into space. There's also a lot of fascinating content about New Zealand and the self-sufficient, resourceful people who live there. Additionally interesting is how Beck's company was started with a $300K investment that handed over 50% of the company, and Beck bought back almost all of that 50% from the investor, with Rocket Lab then going on to being worth billions. 

Also detailed in the book is Astra, a rocket company in the same space as Rocket Lab, this one based out of Alameda, California, right by Oakland. Interesting about Astra is the hubris of CEO Chris Kemp. There's a ton of compelling stuff about how many failures the company had, with many of the launches occurring at US military property in the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island in Alaska. Astra seemed to have more difficulties than either Planet Labs or Rocket Lab, but the company went public in mid-2021, not based on a string of success, but rather promise, hope, and the chase of money.

The fourth company featured by Vance is Firefly, with it the story of Max Polyakov, an internet entrepreneur from the Ukraine, which contained significant space knowledge from workers there. Firefly was actually founded by Tom Markusic, and then the rocket company went bankrupt and was bankrolled by Max, who let Tom remain in charge. Max was then forced out by the U.S. government based on his Ukrainian background, with concerns that he would feed information to Russia. It's another interesting story from Vance, one to go with those that he tells about the other companies working in space.

Find a Way by Diana Nyad

Find a Way by Diana Nyad is a great work of nonfiction about her life and 2013 swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of sixty-four. The trip covered 110.86 miles and took her 52 hours, 54 minutes, and 18 seconds. 

It’s a remarkable story of achievement and determination, with it Nyad’s fifth attempt to make the crossing. The first was in 1978, followed by some thirty years of no competitive swimming—when she instead worked as a journalist and broadcaster, reporting around the globe for Wide World of Sports—and then subsequent attempts in 2011 (two that year) and 2012 before the successful 2013 swim.

The book is a great personal story, one that covers the sexual abuse she received as a teenager at the hands of a swim coach, one who was never formally punished. She had a fascinating family, with a caring mother, and a charismatic, deceitful, and violent father. Nyad wrote about the eight years she spent with her mom after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's before her 2007 death. Nyad turned 60 two years after that, and then decided to train again for another Cuba to Florida attempt.

The book features many great quotes, including from Nyad that life is not what we expect, and how she strove to tackle every day with no regrets, so that each could “not be done a fingernail better.” Also noted as important to Nyad is a Mary Oliver quote "tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

It’s a great story of teamwork and pain endured, including the box jellyfish that were a constant source of life-threatening danger, and the reason for multiple failed attempts. The stories of stings, and then preventative measures taken to try to avoid them were remarkable. It was inspiring stuff from Nyad and a really good book.

The Lemon by S.E. Boyd

The Lemon by S.E. Boyd is a fun and entertaining novel written by Kevin Alexander, Joe Keohane, and Alessandra Lusardi, with S.E. Boyd a made-up author from the three writers of the book. 

They tell a story that starts with the death of Joe Doe, a beloved food travel show host, and then details the coverup of the more unseemly aspects of the hotel room death, including the actions of local Irish bellhop Smilin' Charlie McCree, and Doe's famous chef friend Paolo Cabrini. Two other great character in the book are Nia Greene, Doe's agent/business partner and Katie Horatio, a website writer who fabricates a connection with Doe and parlays it into an entirely new career.

It's definitely a fun read, one highly recommended.