On the Rocketeer: The Complete Adventures
I got this because I have vague positive memories of the
movie, especially the gritty steam punk art deco vibe they had going on. I
barely remember the plot except for the rocket pack and German bad guys. I have
to say in reading it, it makes sense that the style is what I remember since neither
of the two main plot lines make a lot of sense and are full of holes and coincidences.
What’s more interesting to me is that the art is more cartoonish than I would
have thought based on the movie. The one thing of note is that the artist
really likes drawing the female form in sheer fabrics – that’s where he goes
for the “realism.” It’s an adventure comic studded with pinup girls.
On The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze.
Years ago, I read Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke
the World, by Liaquat Ahamed. Afte reading that, I was interested in finding a
good English language biography of Hjalmar Schacht because I was interested in
seeing how the German War Machine ticked at a financial level. I didn’t find it
then, but I came across this, and it was better than what I thought I wanted.
Tooze goes into great detail about the war and how much the need for materials
and food and hard currency really shaped the decisions the Nazi leadership were
making about the war effort.
On a side note, reading this made me realize why reading
about WWII or the Civil War is so appealing. You already know the outlines, but
different histories just focus on different details. You know how it ends
though. The bad guys lost. It’s a great feeling and not something you can
guarantee with anything more contemporary.
On The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre.
This is one of those books that I normally wouldn’t have
picked up, but I got it as a gift. I’m glad I read it though, as it was an
intriguing look at the cold war and the espionage on both sides. It’s mainly
the story of a KGB officer who moved up the ranks and spied for British intelligence.
There’s also a bit about Aldrich Ames, but that part is not as developed and he’s
not as interesting a character in the text. It’s a fast-paced read I couldn’t
put down and it was enjoyable.
Structurally, there are a couple of places in the book that
sort of give away the ending, which isn’t great since it is a thriller and if
you don’t know the case, you don’t know how it’s going to end. Weirdly, though
you’re in the spy world, there was something about it that felt both high and
low stakes to me. It was like everyone involved was children playing high
stakes games. The other thing is that the whole thing is biased to a western
reader – with Gordievsky being on the side of the good (327) – when things really
feel more ambiguous than that black and white reading.
Chantal Mouffe: Towards a Green Democratic Revolution
Verso has been putting out some of these thin books that are
essays, and they are nice because they are a quick read in the afternoon. The
problem is that they have to really grab you to be memorable, and Mouffe’s text
did not do that for me.
Nature’s Metropolis
Look. There’s a lot of ways to do economic history. A lot of
them are bad. Many are good. But there’s only one Nature’s Metropolis. It’s the
story of Chicago. But it is more than that, it is the tale of the growth of the
Republic in the nineteenth century. You will learn more about grain and trees
and railroads than you thought you wanted to know and be thirsting for more.
On Managing & Using Information Systems: Pearlson et
al.
This was the textbook for an entry-level MIS class in my
data analytics course progression. Overall, I liked the text. The chapters were
well laid out with well developed examples of the chapters’ main ideas that
carried though the whole chapter. Each of the thirteen chapters could easily be
a course in itself, but in paring down each topic to the most pertinent
details, not much is lost in the legibility of the topic. The only thing I didn’t
like was partially structural with my course. There are case studies at the end
and the answers are hosted in various places online. My instructor used these
as discussion prompts and it was clear a quarter of my peers just copied the
answers and ran them through a remix software.