The Art of Her Deal by Mary Jordan was a surprising read. The best analogy might be how once in ancient Egypt, every Pharaoh would depict himself with abs that were like six-packs, and arms like small tree trunks while holding a spear showing how he subdued some other foreign nation. After awhile, though, a reformer by the name of Akhenaten came into view and demanded that the artists depict he and his wife as they actually were which included a Pharaoh with a bit of a pot-belly and some sinewy looking arms that were anything but muscular. Trump projects the former in his book, Melania’s book is the latter.
Perhaps if Melania had written it herself, the tone would be different. Maybe she would have told the story from a slightly different perspective than the one adopted here. This book starts off right into the thick of some of Donald Trump’s worst character flaws–having affairs and so on. It is not so much that one cannot discuss the foibles of a given person–if anything the odd thing is the magnification that happened(s) with the Trumps in general of whatever is perceived as a “bad trait”.
There are plenty of presidents who had affairs that had zero coverage of the issue, and some that only had coverage of the issue because they were reckless. Still others seemed to somewhat relish having the coverage and mystique of bedding certain people. JFK, for instance, bedded nearly the entire female population of DC.
While the candor is refreshingly honest, it is also curious. Why this angle and why so quickly?
This book does cover a lot of other interesting behind-the-scenes happenings in the White House that make some sense of what the news coverage was mirroring. Some of it makes perfect sense, and some of it feels a bit like paranoia that everyone is out to “get” the Trumps–although it is not as though the feeling is without ground. There is plenty of material in here to make one wonder exactly why the Trumps are treated as they are by the media and otherwise.
Even more interesting is the fact that the Trumps are what America usually aspires to be in its collective psyche. Melania was a model if not a supermodel, and Trump was as rich as Solomon. Usually America loves its celebrities as people that hold these positions are in some way living out the dream of what it means to be an American. Add in the fact the Trump’s father was an immigrant and came from “nothing” and you have the pieces of what are usually considered to be a “fairy tale”.
Not so in this book. Everybody is seemingly pissed alternatively at each other and then collectively against those who are trying to manipulate the Trump’s to some agenda or another. The feelings that jump off the pages are assuredly both “stress” and “pressure”. The media is a constant background noise which is seeking, it seems, to try to exaggerate or make mountains out of anthills. Sometimes they get just enough of the truth to do some damage, sometimes not.
There is a feeling here that one gets in reading this book whether intentional or not, where one starts to feel “Bad” for Melania in the sense that she is an immigrant and she is going through this meat-grinder we call America mostly while being silent and considered “foreign”. To be sure, this is not at all what she wants anyone to think. She wants people to see she is strong and tough and is more than just a pretty face. She surely has those qualities, but nonetheless, one feels bad as an American that Melania as someone “outside” of the US rises to the level of first lady and gets treated as she does by the entire country.
It is also interesting to see how much influence the First Lady has when she occupies the White House, and how that influence places Melania in a lot of difficult diplomatic positions. It seems like everyone is trying to assert their right to being an “influence on the King and Queen” and Melania does an admirable job of making sure the power rests back upon her, and her alone, where such power makes sense to be attributed as such.
While I am sure Trump has weaknesses as a man sitting in the top positions of power, it seems to me that if the Trumps were as ABUSIVE of power as everyone and everything else suggests, the book about Melania would have never covered a single controversial fact about either herself, or Trump.
Much emphasis is placed on how “cold” and “business-like” Melania is, while also in at least one case showing how nobody really fully respects her work or business skills even enough to figure out how to properly spell her name. I would imagine, after reading this book, if Melania is cold, it can only be a way of dealing with a world that is, most often, rather cold. Her response is to, it appears, go silent, and focus on the business at hand. There are certainly worse coping mechanisms.
If this book crosses your path, it is worth the read simply to fill in the blanks of a lot of missing information. While a certain suspicion should be cast on the motives of the author, it still fills in enough detail to allow the reader to understand a lot of the decisions being made in the Trump White House, and no, they were not as “crazy” as the media made them appear. In most cases, it seems more of a “sane response” to an “insane establishment”.
To glance around the internet is to discover that highly influential people love Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson. Of course, if one pays careful attention, one also notices an undercurrent of something that one does not typically see when one thinks of Stephenson and his fan base–disappointment.
When one embarks upon an epic Sci-Fi novel like Seveneves, there is a definite “warm up” period that one has to observe while the world is being steadily constructed with descriptions and characters. The first half of the book offers quite a lot of build, although the central event–that of the moon blowing up–is never really “answered.” It is more of a existential moon that blows up, and then everyone has to deal with the fall out of its explosion. It is a curious omission that the moon just “explodes” and we never especially learn why. For a Sci-Fi book, not explaining a scientific why to an event is a little like writing a murder mystery with no killer. It is an annoying omission.
The first of the rest half of the book, though, does a reasonably good job explaining the political fallout and various strategies adopted due to this mysterious calamity that is sure to cause a “Fiery rain of rocks” upon the face of the Earth. A lot of creative physics solutions are built into the reading and we see the beginning of a kind of “Space Earth Savagery” begin to unfold where a Darwinian mode of existence is imposed along with the potential for genetic editing to produce certain kinds of characteristics in offspring.
After all this excitement, we flash forward to the future and everything is well–boring. To be sure, there are some unique conceptions of space stations and how they are built along with the mechanics of how certain space suits work and how social stratification has occurred along genetic lineages, but all in all there really is not too much to get excited about until, surprise, the semi-space people discover that the people who stayed on Earth did not all perish in the raining down and subsequent destruction caused by all the moon debris. Needless to say, these survivors are “somewhat pissed” at those who shot off into space and now are trying to return to the surface of the Earth they left.
This, of course, is the prelude to an inter-tribal civil war over the Earth split between the “Red Group”, and the “Blue Group”–like some kind of Planet of the Apes redux. The ending rather trails off along these lines, leaving the possibility of an equally boring sequel, open. One can certainly visualize another agonizing 880 pages titled something clever like “Red Shift” or “Blue Shift.” Wait, the video game series Half-Life all ready beat everybody to that. In fact, the writing in Half-Life is actually much better than that in Seveneves. The mysteries that go unanswered there at least make sense.
Of course, if you happen to be Bill Gates, this book is the best thing ever since it is some kind of wish fulfillment of semi-alien-tech-cyborg-billionaire entrepreneurs. One gets the feeling though that Gates has missed the memo on this being science FICTION and not “something Bill Gates should spend billions on” trying to bring into this world…
Put bluntly, if you have ever seen any Sci-Fi or read any Sci-Fi ever, then Seveneves has nothing to offer you that you have not seen before, and instead presents the chance to be annoyed by what it lacks. It is better to take a hard pass on this one unless you are just a Stephenson fan that wants a complete body of work. While the first half is fairly well done, the second half is more of an exercise in the abilities of tolerance and discipline. The riveting conclusion, civil war being imminent between two dystopian future lineages, is standard Sci-Fi procedure with no conclusion. Who cares?
Note: This review centers on the First Edition of the work as it was later re-released in 1996 with updated declassified material.
The Code-Breakers is a classical work in cryptography circles. The subject matter is fittingly dramatic: A group of code breakers in Britain must break the codes of the Axis powers or else face military casualties and possible defeat. The scope widens after some time in the work to include code breakers from elsewhere in the world.
When reading any specific work which is considered a classic in certain communities, one often wonders how much of the reputation of the work is based on reality. In every circle, there tends to be “that book”, that defines how deeply a person is a part of “the group”. The Code-Breakers is rare in that it actually has earned and retains its reputation whether you happen to know anything about cryptography or not. Part of the allure comes from the subject matter but mostly, one can simply state that it is a well-crafted book that includes details that were probably difficult to come by at the time the book was published. In other words, there are many pieces of data in the book that probably were classified and so the author had to find the right balance between items that could be discussed and lines of interest that could plausibly be disclosed without giving away too much detail that might still be somehow relevant in a modern setting.
Within the pages we find the stories of some of the leading code-breakers of the generation that defined WWII. From Von Neumann, to Alan Turing, many of the well-known big names are present along with some history concerning how the Japanese conducted themselves in cryptography matters and diplomatic relations that are not widely known.
Additionally, we find in these pages certain kinds of codes and how they were broken. We learn about many hobbyists from Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce who employ various kinds of coding in their works. The basic principle of most of the cryptography in the book involves how to “hide something in plain sight” but also concerns generating the appropriate keys once something hidden in plain sight has been identified such than an intelligible message is the result.
The thesis is advanced throughout the book that the victory in WWII is directly attributable to having a robust decryption apparatus. In the cases of both Japan and Germany, there was a laxity present which allowed their codes to be broken and thereby exploited strategically by the breakers to change the tide of battle. Sometimes these breakthroughs come from the “older method” of code breaking which involves finding a scuttled enemy craft or vessel with the code book still within it. These kinds of finds allow one to begin to eliminate certain possibilities of meaning or outright break a cipher. Of course, within the parameters of war, there is a definitive time limit by which the information is no longer actionable intelligence.
There is also the rather confusing and conflicting practice of sending out “Falsely-encrypted” messages meant to mislead the adversary into thinking they have discovered valid codes with actual plans. Sometimes a false key is planted. Extreme measures up to and including using dead bodies with code books planted on them were employed and the book tells us how and why and what the considerations were concerning the use of such tactics whether one was on the deploying end of it or the receiving end.
The machinery of code breaking and the birth of computing and how it is used is also present within this book. It provides a unique insight as to how and why the computational model that formed became what it is today. In short, the faster a machine could chew through possible meanings, the faster the potential code was broken. This began the kind of permutation computational race that we still see although in a more attenuated form to this day.
Between the history of the book, and the informational content of codes and how they are breaking, The Code-Breakers makes for fascinating reading. Should this book come across your path, plunk down the money for it and do not look back. Just do not expect to have your weekend dedicated to anything other than reading.
