His Excellency by Joseph J. Ellis

Ellis, Joseph J. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Knopf, 2004.


Ellis organizes his biography of the first President of the United States along the lines of Henry Lee’s statement about the man, “First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” though he breaks Washington’s life into a few more categories than that. He begins with Washington’s youth on the frontier and follows it through his vigorous retirement.

Ellis presents a man who does not rehearse his past, but seeks lessons from his experience. I’ll take a similar attitude in this review.

One of the things that stands out about Washington is his understanding of models and how to use them. As a youth, he looked up to the landed aristocracy that ruled Virginia and proceeded to become a man in much the same mode. As head of the Continental Army, he looked to Roman general Fabius Cunctator who won through retreat, preserving his army from battles he couldn’t win, even though Washington warred against his on adventurous nature to fight such a war. As a retiring general who could have received great political power from a grateful nation, he looked to Cicero, who retired to his farm when his duty was completed.

Washington also knew how to break with models and go his own way. He twice came out of retirement to lend his reputation to efforts to build an American nation, first to preside over the Constitutional Convention, second to serve as president under the new constitution.

Another notable thing about Washington’s life is the balance he struck between ambition and virtue. Only an ambitious and opportunistic man could have accomplished what he did; he accumulated great wealth and power. However, he held on to power lightly and readily let it go, though he seemed a little more attached to wealth. His virtues restrained his ambitions.

Finally, Washington was a realist. He was certainly a man of high ideals, but he didn’t expect to see people and nations conform themselves to ideals. Just as he had to restrain himself from excesses, so did others. This is clearly where he differed from Thomas Jefferson and his Ant-Federalist faction; Washington didn’t believe in a naturally virtuous class of citizen who would naturally uphold republican values. People pursued their interests; that went double for nations.

Washington was the right man at the right time. His insight into models, ambition, virtue and realism were just what the nascent nation needed to rally it together and lead it through the rough patches that could have broken it to pieces.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic of English literature. I’m writing a review of it because I want some horror to feature on Halloween.

Dorian Gray is, in my mind, a weird tale. Wilde produces a sense of creepiness that begins even in the seemingly light and hopeful first chapter. The title portrait is a supernatural object that horrifies and fascinates Gray. He is preserved in youth and beauty, and possibly even saved from the consequences of evil deeds, but the portrait become a mirror to his dark and sinful soul, something that eventually becomes too horrible for him to endure.

In addition to being a weird tale, it is a moral tale. Gray has beauty, wealth, and status, but he gives himself over to any kind of wickedness if their might be pleasure in it. At first, it is the infatuation of a hollow love for the actress Sibyl Vane. When she disappoints him on the stage by failing to present an ideal picture of love because acting it seems shallow compared to her real passion, he rejects her. Her suicide nearly turns him off the path he is pursuing, but when the thrill of the moment passed, he nearly forgot her. The sins of youth and ignorance turn more willful as he falls into using drugs and prostitutes. Eventually he murders a man. The book hints at other wrongdoing, possibly homosexuality, affairs with married women, seduction for the sake of its own pleasure, gossip, excessive drink, greed, blasphemy and leading  others into all these things.

The book could be a social commentary on the upper class of his time. With all the advantages they had, they were still corrupt. A fortunate life is not a sign of a good person. As with Job, poverty and hardship are not indications of an evil life.

Some think Wilde is exploring own life in the book. One can read hints of homosexuality in Basil Hallward’s feelings toward Gray (Basil paints the portrait), and in Gray’s feelings toward Lord Henry Wotton. Possibly Wilde was critiquing his own aestheticism, finding that it did not necessarily lead to a higher morality, but could as easily lead one to an immoral, selfish, and consuming pleasure-seeking.

In the book, Wilde never comes out and says what his intentions are, if he has any at all in terms of exploring himself, his society, or notions of beauty, art and morality. It seems clear, though, the Wilde suggests a person cannot be separated from his deeds and his consequences as Gray is with the aid of his magical painting. A man, his deeds, and their consequences may not be the same thing, but they are linked in a powerful way. When Gray tries to destroy the painting that bears the ugliness of his soul, he plunges the knife into his own heart.

Though some have accused Wilde of writing an immoral book, one could as easily argue that he wrote a very moral book. Gray is sympathetic to a degree, but he is an evildoer destroyed by the evil he did. The reader can contemplate issues of art, beauty, and morality for himself. Along the way, he can enjoy a creepy thrill.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray.  1890. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003.

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Hedwig Kiesler was a headstrong Austrian girl with visions of becoming a Hollywood star. She was so determined that she dropped out of school to star working at a Berlin film studio, and by 16 she was acting professionally. She eventually achieved Hollywood stardom as Hedy Lamarr.

Lamarr had another, lesser known life, as an inventor. She, along with avant-garde composer George Antheil, invented a technology that makes much of modern communication possible. Richard Rhodes focuses on this part of Lamarr’s life in Hedy’s Folly.

The woman known for her beauty was interested in technology from youth. She enjoyed walking with her father, a banker, who explained how things worked. Her first marriage was to munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl. Though she was mostly a trophy to be shown off to his friends, she paid close attention as he and the people he entertained discussed weapons and other technology. When she moved to Hollywood, she sat up a little shop in her home and took up inventing as a hobby.

When Lamarr learned of the sinking by U-boats that were intended to carry children from Britain to safer locations in Canada, she put her head to the idea of improved torpedoes to combat the underwater threat. The torpedo would be remote controlled. To avoid attempts to jam the signal, the torpedo receiver and controller transmitter would can radio frequencies rapidly in a synchronized manner.  She enlisted the assistance of Antheil, who had experience trying to control and synchronize multiple player pianos, to work out a practical implementation of the concept.

The idea was received well by the National Inventors Council, apparently even receiving the endorsement of automotive engineer Charles Kettering. The Navy did not think the idea was practical, but it did by the patent that was awarded to the Hollywood pair in 1941. Eventually, the frequency-hopping technology invented by Lamarr was developed by the U.S. military for many communication applications.

Spread spectrum, a somewhat broader category of radio communication of which frequency-hopping was the original type, was unveiled from the military secrecy in 1976 with the publication of a textbook on the subject by Robert C. Dixon. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) moved fairly quickly to make room in the radio spectrum for applications of spread spectrum. These were mostly junk frequencies that had been set aside for non-communication uses. Because it broadcast on multiple frequencies, spread spectrum is less likely to be disrupted by interference by other transmissions, like a microwave (Lamarr invented frequency hopping to avoid jamming). Another important aspect of the FCC rule was that these frequencies could be used without a license.

This technology is widely used today. Wi-fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and RFID all use spread spectrum communication. It is the basis of the wireless communication between computers that has shaped the way we live, work, and behave in coffeehouses.

Lamarr and Antheil didn’t receive much recognition for their groundbreaking invention until after it started making its way into American households and pockets. In 1997, Lamarr (and posthumously Antheil) received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award when she was 82 years old. By then she had retired to a very private life in Florida, where she live until January 2000.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Rhodes, Richard. Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

Changing Minds by Howard Gardner

Psychologist Howard Gardner considers the ways people alter their thoughts and behavior in his book Changing Minds. Gardner is known for his work in multiple intelligences, which play a part in changing minds, though I won’t focus on that aspect of it here.

The heart of the book is the mind-changing factors. To be effective, a mind-changing effort will use multiple factors. Some appeal to the mind such as a rational approach (reason) and relevant data (research). Some appeal to the heart such as right feeling (resonance). Others could appeal to both: resources and rewards and real world events. In addition, a mind-changer must prepare for resistance; it is difficult to change a mind, especially to change the theories of how the world works the people form in youth.

Garnder illustrates these concepts at work through several historical examples, some recent, as well as some examples from his own life. These are arranged by scale, from influencing the large, heterogeneous population of a nation down to an individual changing his own mind (even if he won’t admit he did). He also discusses direct attempts to change minds (by political and business leaders) and indirect attempts (through science and the arts).

As someone who spends part of his time presenting training on safety in an industrial setting, changing behaviors is important to me. My coworkers need to be able to recognize hazards in our workplace and take appropriate steps protect themselves or each other (that is only part of a safety program, but it is an important part). I haven’t decided yet how to apply these concepts, but it seems to me that the mind-changing factors identified by Gardner give me a framework for estimating how effective a training might be by seeing which factors I am using and incorporating additional factors.

Gardner, H. Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People’s Minds. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Interesting Stuff Dec. 2, 2010

Al Gore tries to interest youth in math, science (because nothing screams excitement like Al Gore)
Belgian cub report takes on weird alien evil
Bypass Planned for Leaky New York Aqueduct
Why more women aren’t becoming engineers
Curing crumbling infrastructure and other government waste
Engineering is Not Science (according to Henry Petroski, a guy who ought to know)
Graphic Books Best Sellers: Absolute Morrison
Growing pressure on water supplies affecting one in five global businesses

If I can’t have an invisibility cloak, maybe I can have a Romulan cloaking device:
-A Real Invisibility Cloak
-Scientists Close In On Invisibility Cloak
-Time-Space Cloak Seen Within Grasp

Interesting Stuff Nov. 8, 2010
Minimalist Superheroes

Pat-Down Blues:
-Higher costs, more frustrations forecast for holiday travels
-Sunday roundup: TSA's new enemy
-TSA screen pat-down superheroes

Scientists confirm existence of Kirby Krackle
Yemen: Think things are bad now? Don’t let it run out of water.

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

As I get older, I start noticing some strange connections. If Peter Parker aged naturally, he’d be the same age as my father. I also learned that Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders (one of my favorite bands), is only three years younger than my parents. I can hardly believe it, though there is an unreliable part of my mind that seems convinced that I’m still in my early 20s.

This bit about Hynde’s age is hardly the most interesting thing in her autobiography, Reckless. You find many things you normally find in autobiographies. For instance, her early childhood in Ohio was surprisingly and pleasantly normal.

Things get more interesting in her teen years. She became a teenager in the 1960s and she was swept up into the youth culture of the time. She had two loves, music and drugs.

Hynde did a lot of drugs. She doesn’t dwell on the term addiction, but she doesn’t hide that she clearly was addicted. She subjected to herself to may dangers and abuses for the sake of getting high. A person would not do that if she was thinking straight, but addicts don’t think straight.

Unfortunately, drugs got in the way of the music. Drugs took the lives of many innovative musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and Hynde mentions many of them that she knew. Two members of the Pretenders, Jimmy Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug-related causes. It seems that there are several occasions in her story, before the Pretenders, when her dream of being in a band was interrupted by drugs, either her own pursuit of them or her potential bandmates’.

Hynde was adventurous. She traveled far from her childhood home in Akron to Canada, Mexico and France before settling in London. London became her home, largely because of the music scene. There she finally put together a band, though an unusual British band with an American lead. She met an amazing number of other musicians, famous then or later, who were there. It may seem like name dropping to discuss the Clash or the Sex Pistols, but these were people she knew and she lived their ups and downs with them.

The final section of the book, covering the career of the Pretenders, is surprisingly short. Admittedly, the original line-up did not last long due to the deaths of Scott and Farndon.

Hynde’s tone is not nostalgic. She has nostalgia for a Midwestern urbanism that was almost dead by the time she came along. She speaks frankly about her own days. She expresses a strong sense of agency and does not blame anyone for the way they treated her or depict herself as a victim. She seems to regret that the drugs people thought would set them free did not, and that as addicts they kept using drugs long after they knew it was a trap.

If you’re interested in rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and punk), you’ll likely enjoy this book. Hynde clearly loves this music and was around when it was undergoing much innovation. She was friends with some of the first stars of punk. He story is also an interesting section of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, she was a student at Kent State University and witnessed the protests and other events that led to the National Guard firing on students.

If you’r interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hynde, Chrissie. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont (234) & The Revenge of Kali-Ra by K. K. Beck (235)

Malmont, Paul.  The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Beck, K. K.  The Revenge of Kali-Ra.

Paul Malmont clearly loves pulps. The Chinatown Cloud Peril is one of the most fun books I’ve ever read.  He revisits this territory in The Astounding, the Amazing and the Unknown.

Astounding places fictional versions of science fiction authors in a scientific mystery adventure some of them might have been glad to write.  Some of the characters are pulp authors who appeared in Peril (Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Walter Gibson, and Lester Dent, a fellow Missourian).  Others are authors of the era when the old pulps gave way to comics and sci-fi magazines (Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and editor John Campbell).

A group of science fiction writers, most of them scientist and engineers as well, are working for the Navy to turn crazy ideas into reality in a proto-DARPA.  They’re not producing a lot of results and their leader, former Naval officer Heinlein, is feeling the pressure.  They stumble upon the suggestion that inventor Nikola Tesla accidentally created a superweapon at Wardenclyffe, which is why the tower he built there came down.  Their search for answers leads them on a twisting trail from the underground rivers of New York to the heights of the General Electric hierarchy.  Red herrings about and these clever authors don’t catch on to the biggest one in the book.

The character development is interesting, too.  Heinlein is feeling left out of opportunities to make a real difference, but eventually gets an inkling that his stories can make a difference.  The seeds of Scientology are planted in Hubbard.  I think the strongest character development occurs in the fictional Asimov.  He goes through something like a conventional coming-of-age story.  He starts as a frightened youth, faces his fears and becomes a man.  In addition, is a loner struggling in his marriage who finds a way to bring his wife into partnership with him, having a passion for her that matched the passion he had for his work.  That is good stuff; it adds depth to a story that is mostly and-then-and-then suspense.

For the geeks (that includes me), there are appearances by fictional versions of many other people.  Authors include Nowell Page of The Spider, Hugh Cave, aka Justin Case, and Kurt Vonnegut as an Easter egg.  Actor Jimmy Stewart lends his skill as a pilot.  Mystic and rocket scientist Jack Parsons could spin off a weird tale of his own.  Even Manhattan Project physicists Robert Oppenheimer, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman make an appearance.

While I’m writing about an homage to pulps, I’d like to mention The Revenge of Kali-Ra by K. K. Beck.  I wrote a review of it that got lost in a hard drive crash (even so, I named it one of the best books I read in 2010).  The story focuses on fictional pulp stories featuring the villainous vixen of the title, which may no longer be public domain and may be valuable because of a proposed movie base on them.  The scent of money is in the air, bad characters pick up the scent, decent people are caught up in the events, and mayhem ensues.  Kali-Ra isn’t as good as Astounding, but it’s a fun read.  Beck includes clips from ersatz Kali-Ra tales that are full of the type of florid language one might expect, even hope for, in pulp.

Paul Malmont also wrote The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Google

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Jones, Gerard.  Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.  New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Reviewing Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry makes me feel like I’m pitching a new show to the cable networks.  It’s a little like Mad Men.  There is less suavity, but plenty of smoking, drinking, and womanizing.  There is room for some gratuitous nudity.  Many of the comics publishers came from got started in spicy pulps and nudie mags.  They were hustlers from the street, too, many with mob connections.  So we can have a touch of Boardwalk Jungle, though the violence is contained to the muscular fantasies of young men wanting to overcome a sense of powerlessness.  Of course, there may be comparisono to The Big Bang Theory, especially when you have scenes of young men working side-by-side at typewriters and drawing boards, helping and competing with each other.  Most aren’t geniuses, but plenty are awkward and pretentious.  It even has a great name: Men of Tomorrow.

The book is a mostly chronological look at the development of comics.  It starts with the pulp publishers.  As the pulps declined for various reasons of economics and taste, the comics rose their peak in World War II.  Patriotic superheroes were depicted punching Hitler in the face before America entered the war.  Superhero comics declined after the war, especially due to competition from television, though other genres did well.  Some of them, especially crime and horror, attracted the attention of reformers who wanted a clean and upright media safe for children and a culture longing for conformity and peace.  Comics found a new life as baby boomers came of age, partly because of interest in new dysfunctional heroes of Stan Lee and his collaborators and partly because cheap underground comics were exploring the youth counterculture.  Finally, comics became an almost mainstream medium, especially superheroes who successfully moved into film and other media.

There are almost too many people discussed in this book to mention.  Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz built a shady distributor of sex stories and porn into a pillar of a major media corporation.  Along the way, their conflict with Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster became the stuff of comics legend that occasionally broke into mainstream consciousness.  In many retellings of this story, Donenfeld and Liebowitz are demonized and Siegel and Shuster lionized.  Jones mostly resists this urge, treating the New York publishers with some fairness and showing how the cartoonists from Cleveland were the cause of some of their own trouble.  There is a host of other notables from trash publishing (Hugo Gernsback and Bernarr McFadden), organized crime (Frank Costello and Mayer Lansky), failed teachers and academics (Charlie Gaines and William Moulton Marston), and finally from comics (Charlie Biro, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, Jack Kirby, and many more).

Many of these people grew up in Jewish immigrant families.  Their successes and failures in the 1920s and 1930s, their readiness for war in the 1940s, and their search for an identity both American and Jewish in the postwar year reflects the journey of a larger community.  In addition to being a story of comics, it is a story of how Jews, immigrants, science fiction, and geeks moved from the edges of American society toward the mainstream—or maybe the mainstream widened to encompass them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

American Splendor (Film)

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Google

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Earlier this year, the last of the major comics publishers to use the Comics Code Authority dropped it in favor of their own rating standards. The seal of approval was one almost ubiquitous on newsstand comics. It lingered as sale shifted to comic book stores and older readers.

What led to the industry self-censorship represented by the little square seal is an interesting combination of social, political, and economic forces in American history. David Hajdu tells the story. (When The Ten-Cent Plague was published, major comics publishers were still using the seal.)

When comic strips first appeared in newspapers, the intent was to make the papers more appealing to the lower classes and immigrants who might not speak English, or even read. These cartoons appealed to the interest, problems and culture of this audience, along with other minorities, often thumbing their noses at the cultural establishment, the wealthy, political elites and others who had or represented power. As you might expect, the funnies had many detractors among the defenders of decent society.

This same countercultural element was transferred to comic books when they were invented in the 1930s. By the post-war years of the 1950s, the main countercultural was youth. People had been criticizing comics for their possible effects on children almost from the start, but the growing concern about juvenile delinquency (and possibly Communism) led to a successful campaign against comics. Rock and roll hadn’t been invented, so there wasn’t much else to blame.

Actually, a lot of the more reasonable explorations of the connections between comics reading and juvenile delinquency found it to be tenuous if it existed it all (delinquents read comics, but so did nearly every kid who could get an occasional dime). Detractors of comics thought they had evidence enough, especially Frederic Wertham, who’s Seduction of the Innocent added a sense of scientific respectability to the anti-comics camp.


The comics publishers reacted to save their industry from the wave of parental discontent and pending legislation. The Comics Code was a self-censorship standard like the film industries Hays Code, except much more restrictive. The code, and the forces that led up to it, almost killed the comics industry. It mostly eliminated the crime and horror comics that inspired the most ire through their excesses.

While Hajdu agrees that the crime and horror comics of the 1940s and early 1950s often had material that was unsuitable for children, he finds the roots of the anti-comics movement to be in the fundamental shift in culture between generations that occurred during the cold war. He also exhibits a lot of sympathy for the writers and artists that created comics, some of whom who left the arts altogether after the industry contracted.

Hajdu’s style is journalistic, like other works of popular history. The bibliography is extensive for those who are looking to make a study of comics. There is a touch of humor, which is bound to come up given the sometime goofy nature of comics and the ironies that abounded in the arguments both for and against the medium.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Golden Age of DC Comics by Daniels, Kid and Spear
Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions by Andrew Hacker

In the last decade or two, many have called for increased education in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). As an engineer, I may hear more of it than others, or perhaps I am more attentive to it. Math, particularly algebra, trigonometry and geometry, has been seen as a foundation of STEM education with much support from the tech industry that has made it central to the Common Core curriculum used in the majority of states. However, this math requirement has become a stumbling block for many on the road to high school and college graduation. As when I was in school, students ask, “Am I ever going to need to use this?” The answer political scientist (and sometimes math professor) Andrew Hacker proposes in The Math Myth is no.

"This country has a problems. But more math is mathematics is not one of the solutions,” Andrew Hacker, The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions

 One of the first myths that Hacker tackles is this issue of the usefulness of algebra and other higher math for STEM careers or adult life in general. Most people never need anything more advanced than arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), including most scientist, technicians and engineers. In the 25 years since I graduated from engineering school, I have never need to solve a differential equation. Easily 80 percent of the math I do is arithmetic—possibly more. The rest is basic algebra and basic statistics. On the rare occasion I’ve needed some more esoteric piece of math, I’ve learned or relearned it on the job.

 In spite of this, the move in the U.S. has been to require four years of high school math through Algebra II or beyond, plus a college level course in algebra or more advanced math. This applies even to students who plan to study liberal arts, humanities and other subjects that make practically no use of math. This requirement is the number one academic reason people do not complete high school or college (there are other reasons, of course, but they are not related to a required class or subject). Even youth form affluent families with educated parents can find algebra to be an insurmountable hill. Hacker wonders how much human potential goes undeveloped because educational opportunities are denied to people who do not need math beyond arithmetic, but must pass an algebra course to get their diploma or degree.

 Why is math, and especially algebra, a near universal requirement? Hacker points to college math professors and their influence on lower level curricula. They want prospective students to be prepared to move to the advanced subjects they study, though only on percent of undergraduates major in math, and that drops lower in graduate schools. These same professors almost never teach the entry level (and especially not remedial) math classes in their own colleges. For colleges generally, math can be a weed-out course. Even if most students don’t really need algebra, the requirement is a quick way to knock down the number of students. (As an engineering student, my fellows and I understood the sequence of calculus and math-heavy physics classes required of us as freshmen and sophomores was a way of persuading us to study something else—I almost did.)

 Tech companies also call for a math intensive education and lots of STEM graduates. Hacker points out that, in spite of the hype, there are actually not that many STEM jobs in the U.S., nor is there a lot of growth in these fields. A glut of STEM graduates, in addition to the foreign tech labor market opened up by H1-B visas, keeps wages low in the tech sector. If there was an actual shortage, employers would respond with increased wages. Computer programmers don’t use much math and great majority of them don’t earn high salaries. Sadly, the same is increasingly true in engineering. My advice to someone interested in an engineering career would be to pursue it if you find the work interesting, but don’t do it with the expectation that you’ll get a high salary or rise quickly because of the demand for your technical skills.

 I’d like to mention one more thing that Hacker brings up. Though the math people learn in school often has no practical utility in their work or daily life, people have a knack for math and often do complex mathematical things as part of their jobs. Hacker uses the example of a carpet layer, but I have seen it in machinists, carpenters and other skilled laborers. The use and shape materials in ways that require some complex math, but they don’t write out a page full of equations. They instead apply tools and methods they have learned on the job. I’m a little fascinated by some of this tool-based, mechanical math, and it seems to be just as effective and more understandable that school math, especially since very few of us aspire to study math for its own sake.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Numbers behind NUMB3RS by Keith Devlin & Gary Lorden

The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

 Hacker, Andrew. The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions. New York: The New Press, 2016.

Mr. America by Mark Adams

Benarr Macfadden was named Bernard McFadden by his parents; he chose the modified name to suit himself. He was born into severe poverty in the Missouri Ozarks shortly after the Civil War. He would become a self-made millionaire famous for his physique, his stunts and his opinions. Mark Adams recounts his story in Mr. America.

Macfadden became fascinated with health and bodybuilding as a youth in St. Louis, where is visited a gym with his uncle. He had been sick much of his childhood, which is not surprising given the poverty, malnutrition and undeveloped medicine of the time. With hard work and a knack for self-promotion, he was eventually able to afford to join the gym (it cost $15 for an initial membership, close to $400 today).

Macfadden pursued a lot of jobs as a kid and young adult, spending very little time in school. In bodybuilding and training he found his way into a career. Particularly, he started to follow a career path that had been blazed by another strongman, Eugen Sandow. Mcfadden saw Sandow’s performances, organized by Franz Ziegfeld, Jr., at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. He began doing a version of Sandow’s act and even took it to his distant mentor’s adopted homeland, England.

When he returned from his year in England, he brought back another idea borrowed from Sandow. He began publishing a magazine titled Physical Culture. The magazine was an outlet for him to sell exercise equipment and promote his ideas about fitness, diet, sex, nudity, marriage and other topics related to health and happiness. It was the foundation of what grew into a publishing empire in which Macfadden helped to pioneer true confession (long before Jerry Spring and Oprah Winfrey), celebrity culture and tabloid journalism. He is promotion of health information set the path for American health experts that followed with a mix of quackery and sound notions that turned out to be ahead of their time.

I’d be glad to go on about Macfadden, his accomplishment and his sometimes strange life. Instead, I should just suggest you read Mr. America.

Actually, I had been looking forward to reading Mr. America. I’ve seen Adam’s book referenced by other who have discussed Macfadden in the context of fitness, health culture and popular publishing. Macfadden led and interesting life suitable for a novel. Adam’s biography doesn’t quite read like a novel, but it is entertaining and approachable, and I recommend it to those interested in Macfadden or in the popular culture of the early 20^th Century.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Making the American Body by Jonathan Black

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Adams, Mark. Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet. New York: It Books, 2009.