Book Review: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (2019). Andy Greenberg.

This book is about the rise of cyber war over the past 15 years, particularly with respect to the Russian intelligence teams that have developed, stolen and tested attacks that shut down and destroyed physical infrastructure as well as computing and data resources in Estonia, Georgia, and especially Ukraine. 

With the NotPetya worm, they attacked major businesses and organizations around the world, causing billions of dollars in losses, and disrupting key social infrastructure, including transportation, power grids and utilities, financial institutions and many other businesses and health care organizations. 

The notorious social influence operations of these Russian teams (including the U.S. 2016 presidential election) is mentioned throughout, but the main focus is on their attacks with direct impacts on the physical machinery and computer systems that support modern life and civilization.

One of the best behind the scenes accounts I've read on these ongoing IT security threats to our infrastructure, which is of elevated importance now due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Russia's deteriorating geopolitical and financial situation.  Recommended.

Book Review: Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers, and Why They Matter (2018). Ben Goldfarb.

One of the best full-length books about nature and ecology that I've read recently, this book by writer and "Beaver Believer" Goldfarb explains how the beaver, that funny-looking rodent with the big tail that chops down trees to make ponds, is actually one of the most important mammalian species for restoring natural environments and landscapes.  

In the course of the book, we learn about how beavers, who Goldfarb describes as “nature’s engineers”, shaped the earlier natural environment of America before the European settlers arrived, with its endless marshes, swamps and wetlands full of life, but how that rich and boggy terrain was transformed and damaged by the wholesale slaughter of beavers during the fur-trading era of North American exploration and European settlement.  

We also find out about the modern naturalists who have figured out how brilliantly these little nuisances can design and build dams and ponds, to great effect in restoring and reclaiming damaged landscapes, and how the more annoying results of their work (as they affect farmers and cattle ranchers) can be successfully managed and mitigated.  

A wonderful story of wild animals, their complex roles and inter-dependencies in the natural world and our ongoing human attempts to understand and interact with them.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing (2018). Delia Owens.

One of the best-selling and most acclaimed novels of 2018, this haunting story set in rural North Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s focuses on the childhood of a small girl, growing up alone in the coastal marshes after she is  abandoned by her mother, her siblings and ultimately her abusive father. 

It's a story of survival against the odds, nature, family dysfunction and prejudice in a small impoverished community, with a murder mystery interwoven to drive the backstory.  

Beautifully told and engrossing.  I saw recently that it’s coming very soon in a film version to a screen near you.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer (2019). Bren Smith.

This fascinating autobiography recounts the unusual path by which the son of American ex-pat refugees from the Vietnam war draft, growing up rough on the coast of Newfoundland, became a wild and rebellious commercial fisherman at an early age, but then slowly matured into a thoughtful, educated pioneer in the new world of modern ocean farming.  

Along the way, he coined the phrase "Kelp is the new Kale", formed alliances with high-end gourmet chefs, rediscovered the history and methods of aquaculture in human societies, and became a leading advocate for using ocean farming in distributed small farms to meet resource needs, while helping to keep the oceans healthy in the face of climate change and other forms of pollution.     

An inspiring personal story, with important information and background on the recent rise of aquaculture and kelp farming here in the United States and elsewhere, as a new set of solutions to help feed us, improve the quality and health of the oceans, and create other positive effects in support of our efforts to slow the pace of climate change.  Recommended.

Book Review: Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (2020). Anne Wiener.

The author, a millennial who became a writer for The New Yorker on technology topics, has written a sort of tell-all memoir about her experiences in her late twenties, when she left the New York publishing scene to try to get ahead in her career and her life by working in customer support for high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley.  

 

Although she doesn't name the several companies where she worked (choosing instead to use descriptive words such as "the social media company" rather than explicitly naming them, although it's not hard to guess), we get a full tour of her experiences as a young woman from the East Coast in the Bay Area start-up and venture capital tech scene.  

 

She describes how excited she was to be part of small teams doing big important new things, but how she also felt discriminated against, both because she was female, and because her educational background and interests were not in technology, but in literature. 

 

I found it an insightful and touching personal account of a young millennial woman's coming-of-age experience, with a nice amount of snark thrown in about the precious world of the high-tech entrepreneurs and workers of her generation. 

 

It takes us back to that time (not long ago) when the Great Recession had just happened, and young tech entrepreneurs were busy selling venture capitalists and the public on their dreams of vast wealth creation (mostly for themselves), and the transformative social power of apps.  Recommended.

Movie Review: The Courier (2020). Amazon Prime.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Rachel Brosnahan star in a cold war spy thriller and docudrama about the Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, and the British businessman who was recruited to carry his secrets from Russia to MI6 and the CIA.  Cumberbatch plays the businessman courier, and Brosnahan plays the role of his wife. 

Taut, suspenseful and based on the real life story, with an excellent and believable performance by Cumberbatch.  Recommended.

Book Review: Under Occupation (2019). Alan Furst.

For those not familiar with Alan Furst, a quick summary:  Furst is an American novelist who has written more than a dozen novels about the period in Europe leading up to and during the early years of World War II, which are in the “spy thriller” genre, but are so much more. 

As he has commented, his stories, which take place in various capitals and countries all over eastern and western Europe, try to capture the lived experience of ordinary people faced daily with unavoidable moral choices between going along with evil or resisting that evil, and having to risk or choose life or death for themselves and others as the price of the choices they must make.  This perspective and Furst’s skill as a fiction writer make for some of the best spy novels ever written about World War II and its prelude.

Under Occupation features the latest in his obligatory middle-aged male leads, this one a writer of detective novels living in occupied Paris.  I had the feeling that this particular character was particularly close to Furst's heart and personal identity, almost as though he was imagining himself (a real-life writer of spy novels) trying to survive and participate in the World War II Resistance.  Most of his other heroes don't do exactly the same kind of work he does. 

But in any case, it’s a very compelling story, with a new set of interesting, likable and complex characters, a couple of artful sex scenes, moments of tension and fast action, and of course some treacherous Nazis and collaborators to overcome.  Recommended.

Book Review: Everybody Lies (2017). Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

The essence of this book, by a former Google data scientist, is an exploration of how Google searches reveal more about what we're really like than we ever previously knew or wanted to admit. 

This book is similar in its analysis and impact to OK Cupid founder Christian Rudder’s 2015 book Dataclysm, which made use of huge volumes of personal information collected from online dating sites to dissect the realities of sex, dating, race and other aspects of society, and our true beliefs and feelings about them. 

Both books are entertaining, thought-provoking and of great value for understanding why "big data" about everything we want to know and do, and what we thereby unintentionally reveal about ourselves, is such an important new tool for the social sciences, and for gaining a better understanding of our world and society. 

The author calls Google search and other search engines "digital truth serum" (that is, what we ask search sites, from the hoped-for privacy and relative anonymity of our web browsers, where we’re not trying to create a brand or image of ourselves for public consumption, as we do on Facebook and other social media platforms).  It’s a very good analogy.  Recommended.