A Technical Reader’s Take on a Quarter of Books

Eli Bendersky's mid-2023 reading list covers a wide range of subjects, from the intricacies of nuclear weapons to life in remote Alaska. For readers with a technical bent, the collection offers a mix of deep dives into engineering culture and works of varying relevance to the field.

Technical and Engineering Titles

The most directly technical book on the list, WebAssembly: The Definitive Guide by Brian Sletten, unfortunately, fails to impress. Positioned as a survey of the WASM landscape, the book seems intended as a companion to the more spec-focused The Art of WebAssembly.

However, the execution falls flat. The book is padded with lengthy explanations of computer basics and tutorials for beginner-level C and Rust. Bendersky notes the ambiguous target audience: is it for programmers, or for non-technical readers wanting an overview? The code samples average "Hello World" level and are drawn from documentation introduction pages. Despite clear effort on the author's part, the book is deemed ultimately not worth the time.

A more favorable review is reserved for Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger. It's a decent read, although a stronger focus on the technical details and less on the business school aspects would have made it considerably better.

Historical and Scientific Explorations

In Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, Richard Rhodes delivers a detailed history that could be more accurately titled "The Story of Soviet Espionage in the US Nuclear Program." In fact, the book gives more coverage to espionage than to the bomb's title subject. While good, it would have been great with additional detail on the underlying physics and engineering of the weapons.

From weapons development to spaceflight, Failure Is Not an Option by Gene Kranz provides an in-depth, firsthand account from the NASA flight director behind the Apollo 11 and 13 missions. The book explains the critical, and often underappreciated, role of mission control and the problems it manages. It demonstrates why mission control deserves more of the limelight typically reserved for astronauts and engineers, and it is good at detailing that relationship.

Physics, Math, and Autobiographies

Feynman fans get another installment with What Do You Care What Other People Think? While it contains fun, new stories, a significant portion overlaps with Surely You're Joking. The lengthy section on the Challenger disaster investigation occupies a good chunk of the book. It's enjoyable, but it's clearly nearing the point of diminishing returns for such a sequel.

Matt Parker's Things to Make and Do in the 4th Dimension is an accessible tour of mathematical topics, but the promised 4D subject matter isn't a major element, and those chapters were less than insightful. The book is "not bad," though not amazing.

Continuing the autobiographical theme, Gersh Taicher's Inventor focuses on the late 1980s and early 90s, when the author founded a well-logging company based on nuclear magnetic resonance. Bendersky found this installment a bit better than the previous one, appreciating its insightful take on the creative process.

Other Notable Mentions

The list also includes a few mixed and positive reviews of non-technical works. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years was a tedious and unsatisfactory read, particularly the section on early Christianity, which lacked organization and evidence. Randall Munroe's how to is lauded as "Another fun book," applying absurd scientific advice to common problems. Richard Feynman’s Surely You're Joking appears again as a re-read, as do What If? and Interpreter of Maladies.