Reading Notes: April to June 2025

This quarter's reading list spans military history, deep learning theory, biography, and a few technical classics. Several titles stood out for their quality; a few were disappointments.

Highlight Reel

"Pacific Crucible" and "The Conquering Tide" by Ian Toll anchor the Pacific War Trilogy with exceptionally engaging narrative history. The former covers Pearl Harbor through Midway; the latter picks up at Guadalcanal and continues to the Marianas campaign. Both are remarkably compelling for nonfiction, though the second volume tends to spend more time on individual battles than on the American industrial capacity that proved decisive.

"The Frontiersmen" by Allan W. Eckert chronicles the pre-Revolutionary frontier through the lives of an American frontiersman and Tecumseh. It is informative, but the heavy reliance on oral accounts of Tecumseh leaves an unavoidable blend of history and fiction.

Medici and Churchill: When the Tudor Era Isn't About the Tudors

Paul Strathern's "The Medici" covers 350 years of the family's dominance in Florence, starting in the late 1300s. The book offers solid insight into European power dynamics of the era, though the frequently repeated family names make it easy to lose track of the specific Medici in focus.

Winston Churchill's "The New World", despite its title, deals mostly with the British civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, with additional coverage of conflicts against Scotland, Spain, and the Netherlands. The core theme is sobering: much suffering stemming from religious differences.

"The Idea Factory" by Jon Gertner examines Bell Labs from the post-WWII decades through its most influential inventions. It is a decent history, but offers limited fresh analysis of what exactly made the institution so uniquely innovative.

Deep Learning and the Perils of Intermediate Physics

"Understanding Deep Learning" by Simon J. D. Prince is a solid textbook on modern deep learning with a mathematical bent. It concentrates on CNNs, transformers, and GANs, augmented by Colab notebooks with working code. The author's effort is practical: explain why the techniques work, not merely how to apply them.

Sean M. Carroll aims for a middle ground in "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion" — more rigorous than popular science, less complete than a textbook. He assumes the reader can handle equations without understanding every derivation, but the gap proves wide: someone with high school calculus is not ready for Riemann curvature tensors and Minkowski metrics for black holes. Despite some genuinely fresh intuitive insights and solid writing, the book misses for readers who need deeper mathematical grounding.

Engineering and Fringes

"Reentry" by Eric Berger is a detailed history of SpaceX from early Falcon 9 work through 2023, just before Starship flights began. The prose is dry, but the technical density and minimal editorializing make it an enjoyable read for those interested in rocketry specifics.

"Starting FORTH" by Leo Brodie has aged reasonably well as an introduction to the language. The early chapters pair useful exercises with good structure, but the I/O coverage is, according to our reviewer, rushed and confusing.

"Poisoned Water" covers the Flint, Michigan water crisis with urgency, but its stilted prose makes it a chore to read. The underlying story of citizen advocacy is important, though it deserves better delivery.

Two lighter reads merit mention: Christina Soontornvat's "All Thirteen" on the 2018 Thai cave rescue is a strong account, and E. B. White's "Essays" serve as a calm, reflective companion for winding down, best appreciated outside their original New Yorker historical context.

Re-Reads

  • "The Martian" by Andy Weir — enjoyed again with kids thanks to a recent classroom edition.
  • "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond
  • "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse
  • "We the Living" by Ayn Rand