Biography

American Spartan

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Cross-posted from Zenpundit.com

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American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant  by  Ann Scott Tyson  

When I first posted that I had received a review copy of American Spartan from Callie,  it stirred a vigorous debate in the comments section and also a flurry of email offline to me from various parties. Joseph Collins reviewed American Spartan for War on the Rocks  ,  Don Vandergriff posted his review at LESC blog  , Blackfive had theirs here,and there was an incisive one in the MSM by former Assistant Secretary of Defense and author Bing West, all of which stirred opinions in the various online forums to which I belong. Then there was the ABC Nightline special which featured Tyson and Gant as well as an appearance by former CIA Director, CENTCOM, Iraq and Afghanistan commander General David Petraeus:

Major Gant was also a topic here at ZP years ago when he released his widely read and sometimes fiercely debated paper “One Tribe at a Time“, at Steven Pressfield’s site, which launched all of the events chronicled by Tyson in  American Spartan.  To be candid, at the time and still today, I remain sympathetic to strategies that enlist “loyalist paramilitaries” to combat insurgencies and other adversarial irregular forces. It should only be done with eyes wide open as to the potential drawbacks (numerous) and it won’t always work but the militia option works often enough historically that it should be carefully considered. With that background in mind, on to the book.

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Nautical Book Project: Volunteers Needed

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Who wants to sign up to do a review of:

1) One or more Joseph Conrad nautically-themed novels?

2) Moby Dick?

3) The Aubrey-Maturin series (either the series as a whole, or the early books)?

4) Other?

Ones I’m planning to do myself are White Jacket (Melville), The Hornblower Series (at least the early ones), and The Cruel Coast.

Michael Kennedy, with your considerable sailing experience I hope you’ll sign up to do at least one review for this series.

Announcing the Nautical Book Project

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The Classical Unities are three principles of drama (derived , or perhaps misderived,  from Aristotle) which, according to certain Italian and French literary critics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, should govern the construction of any drama. They are:

–unity of action: a single plot line with no sub-plots

–unity of place: the events should be constrained to a single location

–unity of time: the events should be limited to the period of a single day

One of the reasons that nautically-oriented fiction can be so powerful, I think, is that by its nature it often establishes certain unities: the action typically occurs in a single place…albeit a moveable one, the ship…with a consistent cast of characters belonging to that place…and, although unity of time in the strict classical sense of all action occurring within a single day may be rare, another sort of unity of time is often established in that events occur over the course of a single voyage.

I’m launching an ongoing project to post reviews of worthwhile nautical fiction, recent and not-so-recent, well-known and not-so-well-known. All ChicagoBoyz and ChicagoGrrlz authors are invited to participate. Movies may also be included under this review category, as may some nonfiction books, especially personal memoirs.

Books/movies I’m planning to review myself, in the not-too-distant future, include: The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk…The Hornblower series, by C S Forester, and White Jacket, by Herman Melville.  Also To the Last Salute, by Captain Georg von Trapp (yes, that Captain von Trapp.)

Other books definitely deserving of reviews as part of this project include the nautical novels of Joseph Conrad, Melville’s Moby Dick and Billy Budd, and Nicholas Montsarrat’s The Cruel Sea.

Please post your suggestions for worthwhile books for this project in comments; also, for Chicago Boyz and Grrlz and anyone else who feels especially motivated, any books you would particularly like to sign up to review.  I see this as an ongoing project since the universe of books under this category is vast.

 

Book Review: Father, Son, & Co., by Thomas Watson Jr and Peter Petre (rerun)

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(Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the IBM System/360 series (original press release here)…seems like a good time to rerun this book review, which I originally posted in 2011)

Buy the book:  Father, Son & Co.

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When Tom Watson Jr was 10 years old, his father came home and proudly announced that he had changed the name of his company. The business that had been known as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company would now be known by the grand name  International Business Machines.

“That  little outfit?” thought young Tom to himself, picturing the company’s rather random-seeming collection of products, which included time clocks, coffee grinders, and scales, and the “cigar-chomping guys” who sold them. This was in 1924.

This is the best business autobiography I’ve read. It’s about Watson Jr, his difficult relationship with his father, the company they built, and the emergence of the computing industry. It is an emotional, reflective, and self-critical book, without the kind of “here’s how brilliant I was” tone that afflicts too many executive autobiographies. With today being IBM’s 100th anniversary (counting from the incorporation of CTR), I thought it would be a good time to finally get this review finished and posted.

Watson’s relationship with his father was never an easy one. From an early age, he sensed a parental expectation that he would follow his father into IBM, despite both his parents assuring him that this was not the case and he could do whatever he wanted. This feeling that his life course was defined in advance, combined with fear that he would never be able to measure up to his increasingly-famous father, was likely a factor in the episodes of severe depression which afflicted him from 13 to 19. In college Watson was an indifferent student and something of a playboy. His most significant accomplishment during this period was learning to fly airplanes—-”I’d finally discovered something I was good at”a skill that would have great influence on his future. His first job at IBM, as a trainee salesman, did little to boost his self-confidence or his sense of independence: he was aware that local IBM managers were handing him easy accounts, wanting to ensure success for the chief executive’s son. It was only when Watson joined the Army Air Force during WWIIhe flew B-24s and was based in Russia, assisting General Follett Bradley in the organization of supply shipments to the Soviet Unionthat he proved to himself that he could succeed without special treatment. As the war wound down, he set his sights on becoming an airline pilotGeneral Bradley expressed surprise, saying “Really? I always thought you’d go back and run the IBM company.” This expression of confidence, from a man he greatly respected, helped influence Watson to give IBM another try.

The products that Watson had been selling, as a junior salesman, were punched card systems. Although these were not computers in the modern sense of the word, they could be used to implement some pretty comprehensive information systems. Punched card systems were an important enabler of the increasing dominance of larger organizations in both business and government: the Social Security Act of 1935 was hugely beneficial to IBM both because of the systems they sold to the government directly and those sold to businesses needing to keep up with the required record-keeping.

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In Another Era, She’d Be a Gigantic Star

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At the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago they have a lot of great films. In addition to interesting and artistic films, I also enjoy the fact that they have very few previews and no commercials as well as the fact that you can buy a beer while you are watching a movie.

Bettie Page Reveals All is a documentary about the iconic fashion / fetish model Bettie Page. For me, the most interesting facet of the movie was not discussed at all; what would have happened had Bettie Page been a modern celebrity instead of one who retired from public life in the late 1950s.

When Bettie Page stopped doing photo shoots, she simply fell off the face of the earth. In those days it was easy to hide; records weren’t online, the web doesn’t provide a central place for people to (inadvertently) pool information, and it doesn’t take an instant to upload a stalker photo to twitter. She never provided any other photos after her shoots, so that’s how the world knows her today. As George said in Seinfeld, she “left on a high note”.

Bettie Page, however, had actual skills and intelligence. In the documentary they showed her high school transcript and she barely missed being the valedictorian of her high school class which would have given her a college scholarship. Unlike modern “celebrities” who became famous solely due to a “s*x tape”, Bettie Page designed and sewed many of her own costumes. She also had a lot of personality and took control of the photo shoots and could (sort of) act. Compared to 99% of the “celebrities” today, she had talent.

Alas, like many of the modern celebrities we wouldn’t name her because we don’t want the traffic, she was bi-polar and ended up spending several years in a mental institution after she stabbed her landlord in a psychotic episode. In the end her story had a semi-happy ending because Hugh Hefner found her a lawyer who got her royalties for all the various things being made with her iconic image on it so that she at least had some money in her retirement years.

Cross posted at LITGM