Book 4 of the series.
“‘Optimist’ is a word which here refers to a person, such as Phil, who thinks hopeful and pleasant thoughts about nearly everything. For instance, if an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say, in a pleasant and hopeful voice, ‘Well, this isn't too bad. I don't have my left arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me whether I am right-handed or left-handed,’ but most of us would say something more along the lines of ‘Aaaaah! My arm! My arm!’”
Sequel to Diving Into the Wreck and City of Ruins, both of which I first encountered as novellas in Asimov's. I don't know whether part of this one was published separately too; I'm almost a year behind on my Asimov's.
This is the first of Hill's books that I've read. (Alas, I was reminded of him by reading his obituary.) I chose it mostly at random. It's part of his best known series: the Dalziel/Pascoe books, centered on a couple of Mid-Yorkshire police detectives. I liked it, and I'll have to read more, probably this time paying a little bit of attention to the proper order.
The title is, of course, both a simple literal description of some of the book's plot elements and also a reference to the Aeneid. Reminds me that I haven't reread the Aeneid in quite a long time.
In the mid 60s, Fred Brooks was the project manager and one of the lead designers for IBM's System/360. It was a huge and important project (descendents of that architecture are still sold), and Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, first published in 1975 and inspired by his experiences at IBM, is one of the classic pieces of writing about the software engineering process.
The Design of Design also includes stories about, and lessons from, System/360. It attempts to be more general, though: it's about the design process itself, whether designing a computer, or a kitchen remodel, or a book. Is there such a thing as “design” at that level of generality, such that you can talk about a design process that cuts across fields? What makes a great designer, and how can you recognize one, or become one?
Space opera, set in a world where there are long established colonies in much of the solar system (Mars, Luna, the Belt, even as far out as the moons of Saturn), but no interstellar travel. As is often true of space opera, it's a story where the world changes fundamentally, and where events turn out to be more sinister and more important than they first appear. It's the first book of a trilogy, but it still feels like a complete story.
Continuing the story that began in volume 2, this is a graphic novel about a time of transition: an alternative version of Tokugawa era Japan that was forced to change its ways drastically when a plague killed (and continues to kill) 80% of the men in the country. This book is set in the days of the first female Shogun, in the days when it seemed to many people that the country would soon fall into ruin. We know from reading volume 1, however, that within a few decades there's stability again, everyone takes it for granted that merchants and samurai and farmers and feudal lords are all women, and nobody remembers that gender roles were ever different.
I read an earlier edition of this book a few years ago. This is the 2011 edition. It's still recognizably the same book. The list of useful money saving techniques has been updated to include new discount Web sites, and the discussion of index funds has been updated to include equal weighted and fundamentally weighted funds. It's an interesting point — it's not clear if there's any good reason, other than custom, to use weighting by market capitalization.
Or, in the original title, Quatre-vingt-neuf, or Eighty Nine. Fair enough. As is suggested by the title the translator chose, this book is mostly about the early phase of the Revolution.
My copy says that it's the “Bicentennial Edition,” which mainly means it has a new translator's preface discussing the history of the book itself. Lefebvre originally published it in 1939, in honor of the sesquicentennial. The counterrevolutionary Vichy regime soon came to power and suppressed the book; fascists, unsurprisingly, had little sympathy for a celebration of the Rights of Man. The English translation was published in 1947, and, according to the translator, the book was better known in the English speaking countries than in France.
This particular book may not have been all that well known in France, but Lefebvre himself was one of the most eminent experts on the French Revolution, and this book expresses the traditional 20th century French interpretation of the Revolution. (Traditional, as I understand it, in large part because of Lefebvre's work.) There are of course revisionist accounts, but Lefebvre's account is the one they're challenging.
It's an interpretation that's clearly inspired by Marxism. In its simplest form: during the 18th century a new class, the bourgeoisie, became economically important but its political power lagged behind. In the Revolution, the bourgeoisie became politically as well as economically dominant. But of course Lefebvre didn't think it was that simple. If he did, then he wouldn't have bothered devoting his life to understanding the Revolution; he would have just told us to reread Marx. The growing importance of the bourgeoisie was true everywhere, but only France had a French Revolution. Contingent and specific facts matter: France's fiscal crisis caused by military spending and insufficient taxation of the privileged, the institutional role of the ancien régime parlements, decisions taken by people like Necker and Louis XVI and the duc d'Orléans and the marquis de La Fayette, even idiocy like the affair of the diamond necklace.
A more complete version of the thesis of this book: not just the bourgeoisie, but also the aristocracy, the common populace of cities, and the peasantry, all wanted an end to the ancien régime, each for reasons of their own. The Revolution began when the aristocracy used the fiscal crisis to try to regain some of the power that the nobles had lost to the central monarchy; if it hadn't been for the parlements there would have been no Estates-General, no Tennis Court Oath, no National Assembly. But it didn't end there. “After having paralyzed the royal power which upheld its own social preeminence, the aristocracy opened the way to the bourgeois revolution, then to the popular revolution in the cities and finally to the revolution of the peasants — and found itself buried under the ruins of the Old Regime.”