January 13, 2012

Aravind: A social enterprise with scale and impact to match Grameen Bank

A review of Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion, by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

“At first glance, it seemed a venture far too quixotic to be effective. But when intuitive goodness is pitted against unthinkable odds, it stirs the imagination and awakens possibility.”

This is the spirit in which Pavithra Mehta, with co-author Suchitra Shenoy, approaches her history of the world-famous vision care center her great-uncle founded in South India 35 years ago. It is a truly astonishing story — one with profound implications for development throughout the Global South.

“Today, the Aravind Eye Care System is the largest and most productive blindness-preention organization on the planet. During the last 35 years, its network of five eye hospitals in South India have treated more than 32 million patients and performed more than 4 million surgeries, the majority either ultrasubsidized or free.” Equally important, Aravind also serves as a global resource center for opthalmology, training one out of every seven Indian eye doctors, consulting on management and technical issues with eye hospitals in 69 countries, and operating a state-of-the-art research center.

In 1958, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy reached the mandatory retirement age of 58 in his government post and retired to Madurai, a celebrated city of one million people in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Inspired by his guru and the deeply felt spiritual values he had long held, he enlisted his brothers and sisters (virtually all of them opthalmologists like him) to help him found an 11-bed eye hospital. Dr. V (as he was widely known) set the fledgling nonprofit hospital on course to provide cataract surgery to all who needed it, regardless of their ability to pay.

He and his family implemented a staggered fee schedule, charging market rates to those with the ability to pay and a heavily subsidized rate to those with limited means, but worked free of charge to those who could pay nothing — allowing every patient to choose his or her own level of payment. (A future President of India once received free care.) Miraculously, this approach allowed Aravind to earn a profit from its earliest days until the present. Surplus funds permitted Dr. V. to build first one new eye hospital, then three more, and later to fund a manufacturing plant for intraocular lenses and a world-class opthalmological research center.

The quality of Aravind’s eye care services and of the lenses produced in its factory match or exceed the standards of the West. In fact, a recent study compared Aravind’s surgical outcomes to those of the members of the Royal College of Opthalmologists of the UK — and “found Aravind’s complication rates to be less than those of its British counterparts.” Similarly, when one senior Aravind surgeon lectured on corneal ulcers at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, “the faculty adviser told his residents, ‘The amazing stuff you just saw — don’t try it here. We don’t have that kind of expertise.’”

Today, Aravind employs 3,200 persons. Dr. V passed away in 2006 at the age of 88, but his younger brothers and sisters remain involved in Aravind — although they have passed the reins of management to first one and then a third generation of this truly remarkable family. (Aravind currently counts 21 opthalmologists in Dr. V’s family among its staff.)

Aravind’s business model is unique in many ways. It’s a nonprofit that consistently turns a profit. It subjects the most modest and obscure processes at work in the hospital to exacting statistical analysis — everything from the manner in which custodians clean the floors to the number of sutures its surgeons employ — and as a result has attained a level of efficiency that would bring smiles to the faces of the most demanding Japanese plant manager. It shares its management secrets (and they are many) with all comers with an openness and a willingness to train competitors that is simply extraordinary. It pioneered the use of eye care “camps” — one-day events staged in towns and villages throughout the state of Tamil Nadu to generate large numbers of surgical patients, busing them into the nearest hospital in the Aravind system.

Dr. V’s daily journal, assiduously updated throughout his days at Aravind, reflects the breadth and depth of the questions he never stopped asking. For example, “How was Buddha able to organize in those days a religion that millions follow[?] . . . How did the disciples of Christ spread their mission around the world[?]” Yet Dr. V also frequently spoke of his dream to bring efficiency, consistency, and low cost to eye surgery the way McDonald’s did to hamburgers. Aravind remains today a pure expression of the vision and the spirit of unending inquiry that he brought to the venture from the outset.

3 Comments

Filed under Nonfiction

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

January 11, 2012

Third World development: A reading list

To my mind, the emergence of new nations out of a colonial past was one of the most significant developments of the 20th Century, and their uneven struggle to attain the comforts and possibilities of life to be found in Europe, North America, and Japan continues to loom large in the 21st Century. As a consequence, a fair proportion of my reading bears on these issues.

Much of what is written about development in what is variously called the Third World, the Global South, the under-developed countries, or the developing nations is self-serving and less than useful as a guide to understanding the true issues involved. The underlying reality is that since World War II the countries of the “West” have invested a total of nearly $2.5 trillion in “foreign aid” (as it’s popularly known in the USA) or “overseas development assistance” (as it’s termed elsewhere). You might think that investments of that magnitude would have produced dramatic improvements in the quality of life for the billions of people who live in poverty. However, the truth is appalling: there is precious little to show for this outpouring of aid other than the most obvious advances in education and public health.

Here are some of the books I’ve read in recent years that cast light on this reality. Some of them directly address the issues surrounding foreign aid. Others illuminate the backdrop to those issues. But I don’t pretend this list is comprehensive in any way. It’s simply a starting-point. I’ve listed these books in alphabetical order by the authors’ surnames.

Bornstein, David, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Oxford University Press, 2007. Much of the social change taking place today in the world’s poorest countries is a result of the work of the venturesome folks called “social entrepreneurs” — and Ashoka, the USA-based organization that supports them by the thousands. This box profiles nine of the better-known Ashoka Fellows, demonstrating the role of local leadership in making the world a better place.

——, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank. Oxford University Press, 2005. Muhammad Yunus gained global fame when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, but the story of his decades of dogged efforts in Bangladesh — and of the immense organization he built — is much less well know. This book demonstrates how home-grown solutions to development programs are often superior to anything imposed on developing countries by the international community.

Clark, Gregory, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press, 2007. Clark puts the question of economic development in historical perspective, dispelling long-popular myths about the supremacy of the West.

Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking, 2005. A fascinating exploration of the historical influence of environmental factors in the failure of “developing countries” — and a sobering perspective on the prospects for development breakthroughs in much of today’s overpopulated world.

Easterly, William, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press, 2006. This is the best book that tackles the issue head-on and makes the clearest case for an explanation.

Guha, Ramachandra, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. In global perspective, the greatest challenges to narrowing the inequities among nations lie in sub-Saharan Africa and India. This history of the subcontinent after independence helps to convey the complexity of the issues faced by change agents in the world’s second most populous nation.

Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1998). The most dramatic portrayal of the legacy of colonialism I’ve ever read.

Kamkwamba, William, and Bryan Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. HarperCollins Publishers, 2009. The astonishing story of a brilliant, self-taught young man who demonstrated the vast potential that underdevelopment leaves behind.

Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Knopf, 2009. It is impossible to tackle the issue of economic and social development without considering the central role of women: it’s become a truism in the field that the education and empowerment of women is the surest first step toward meaningful social change. Nick Kristof, a long-time New York Times columnist, is one of the world’s most incisive observers of the daily reality lived by people in the Third World. Previously, Kristof and WuDunn reported jointly from China for the Times.

Mehta, Pavithra, and Suchitra Shenoy, Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011. The Aravind Eye Care System, based in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, has had an outsized influence on the treatment of eye disease throughout the world. Pavithra Mehta, a grand-niece of Aravind’s founder, tells the astonishing story of this extraordinary institution, illustrating the potential for indigenous development that shuns outside support.

Prahalad, C. K., The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. In this paean to the multinational corporations of the world, the late C. K. Prahalad, one of the most celebrated management consultants of recent times, presents a host of case studies about the potential of business to foster development while increasing profits. Although the general proposition seems shaky to me, some of the case studies are impressive and thought-provoking.

Sachs, Jeffrey D., The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Penguin Press, 2005. Here is the cheerleader’s polyannish case for large-scale development assistance. Useful as a counterpoint to Bill Easterly’s White Man’s Burden, which far better reflects my own experience in developing countries.

Sullivan, Nicholas P., You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones Are Connecting the World’s Poor to the Global Economy. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2007. Grameen Telecom is much less well known that the grassroots bank that spawned it. This intriguing story is a great case study of the long-familiar “leapfrog effect” that allows underdeveloped countries to advance rapidly by skipping over the use of technologies long dominant in the West.

Wrong, Michaela, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower. HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. No consideration of Third World development is complete without taking official corruption into account. This story, which focuses on one courageous Kenyan man who tried to expose corruption, brings to light some of the complications it poses.

Leave a Comment

Filed under FAQs & Commentaries

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 8, 2012

Another hilarious tale about inept bounty hunter Stephanie Plum

A review of Explosive Eighteen, by Janet Evanovich

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

You might think that after 17 novels featuring the same implausible characters acting in similarly stupid ways that the humor in the 18th would pale. Not so. In Explosive Eighteen, the exploits of incompetent bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and her sidekick Lula, a former ‘ho, continue to evoke laugh-out-loud embarrassment in public places, and, yes, her ongoing affairs with detective Morelli and bad boy Ranger continue unresolved. As Lula says to Stephanie, “It’s like you’re a reality show, all by yourself.”

Stephanie and Lula set out on the trail of a series of “skips” who have failed to show up in court, among them Stephanie’s old nemesis, Joyce Barnhardt. After a series of misadventures involving the repeated loss of Stephanie’s car (as usual), the two find themselves embroiled in a complex set of relationships with Joyce and a rumored international gang of jewel thieves called the Pink Panthers. It’s pointless to sketch out the story any more than this. The book is worth discovering for yourself.

Here, for example, is Lula in action:

Lancer [a bad guy] “eyeballed the rocket launcher and turned white. “I’m going to have to get tough now. I’m going to have to force you to leave.”

“Do you got one of these babies?” Lula asked him, patting the rocket launcher.

“No.”

“Then how you gonna force us to leave?”

“I have a gun,” Lancer said. And he pointed his gun at Lula.

“I don’t like when people point a gun at me,” Lula said. “It makes me nervous, and it’s rude. Do you see me pointing my rocket launcher at you? I don’t think so.”

Coincidentally, this month the first film built on the Stephanie Plum novels will open, with Katherine Heigl playing Stephanie. Heigl is too blonde, too tall, and too busty to match the character of Evanovich’s imagining, but her skills as a comic actor and her delightfully breezy manner are perfect, and she’s pictured as a brunette in stills promoting the movie. Sherri Shepherd will play Lula, and Debbie Reynolds, Grandma Mazur, one of the series most unforgettable characters. (Grandma Mazur protests: “I’m not so old. There’s parts of me don’t sit as high as they used to, but I’ve got some miles left.” Grandma packs a .45 in her purse. Her hobby is attending viewings at funeral homes.)

2 Comments

Filed under Mysteries & Thrillers

Tagged as , , , , , , , , ,

January 4, 2012

“Wrong Man Running?” I’m tempted to say, “Wrong Man Writing”

A review of Wrong Man Running, by Alan Hruska

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Sometimes I wonder when I finish a book why I picked it up in the first place. This was one of those times.

As thrillers go, Wrong Man Running works. It’s suspenseful (which probably explains why I felt compelled to finish reading it), and the protagonist elicited sympathy.

Rick Corinth is a hotshot lawyer nearing 40 who currently serves as deputy DA in New York City, heir apparent to his long-incumbent boss. Mystifyingly, when a series of violent rapes begins to surface, the victims are all women he knows well, and in short order Rick is suspected of the crime. Once he is formally charged, he flees in order to devote himself to finding the real perpetrator. Then the plot thickens.

Unfortunately, like so much pulp fiction, the tale hangs on a series of unlikely coincidences, and practically every character in this book is either drop-dead gorgeous (women) or just gorgeous (men) — or, in a very few cases, ugly. I don’t know about you, but I find this pandering to Hollywood producers tiresome. Oh, yes, we’ll probably see Wrong Man Running on the big screen one of these days. If you like looking at beautiful people and being shocked by what they do, you might consider going. Otherwise, save your ten bucks.

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Mysteries & Thrillers

Tagged as , , , , ,

January 3, 2012

1491: Astonishing new evidence about the Americas before Columbus

A review of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Forget just about everything you learned in school about the peoples who lived in the Western Hemisphere before 1492 — and about the land, too. It turns out that yesterday’s historians, anthropologists, paleontologists, and ecologists got it pretty much all wrong.

As Charles C. Mann explains, in this recently revised edition of his 2006 bestseller, latter-day investigations in all these fields have turned up persuasive evidence that the Americas before Columbus were far more heavily populated, the leading civilizations far more sophisticated, and their origins far further back in time than earlier generations of scholars had suspected.

  • “In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire.” And population density both in the Andes and in Mesoamerica was the highest in the world: “the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants.” Central Mexico housed more than twice as many people per square mile as China or India.
  • The deciding factors in the Europeans’ legendary ease of conquest were disease (smallpox above all) and political infighting within native communities. Compiling recent studies, Mann estimates that “In the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died” — and, more to the point, smallpox and other virulent diseases sped through both North and South America far more quickly than the conquerors. “Smallpox visited before anyone in South America had even seen Europeans . . . The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.”
  • The legendary bloodthirstiness of the Aztec (more properly called the Triple Alliance) needs to be seen in context. “If England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the (Aztec) empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England.”
  • “The corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in Classical Greek.”
  • Recent archaeological excavations have pushed back the date of arrival of homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere from around 9000 B.C.E. to as much as 30,000 or 40,000 BCE. One site on the Peruvian coast, Aspero, “might win the title of the world’s oldest city — the place where human civilization began.” And “people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.”
  • The landscape encountered, first by the Pilgrims and later by American settlers pushing ever further West, was anything but the virgin forest and prairie they thought it was. “Native Americans burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; in all probability, a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowbooys was established and maintained by the people who arrived there first.” On the Eastern seaboard, too, Indians extensively used fire, clearing tracts for farming and completely transforming the land before Europeans ever set sight on the coast.
  • Even the Amazon basin, long thought to be pristine territory, was home to millions of Indians long before disease introduced by the Spaniards decimated them and left their extensive works throughout the region to the ravages of rain and the forest. Mann notes that “the Amazon’s wealth of fruits, nuts, abnd palms is justly celebrated” and adds a comment from one of his innumerable interviews with scholars: “‘Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest there and constantly pick fruit from trees. That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.”

As Mann makes clear throughout 1491, practically all these findings have their detractors. Some cling to old findings (often their own) and simply refuse to accept changed views. Others criticize the methodology (or the investigator). But that’s to be expected. In fact, a collection of scientists in just about any field will behave like the Israeli Knesset, divided into nearly as many factions as there are scientists. But the case Mann sets forth is compelling, controversy notwithstanding. And for anyone with even a smidgen of interest in history, anthropology, paleontology, or ecology, these revelations must be surprising. For a history buff like me, they’re mind-bending.

Mann is a science journalist who serves as a contributing editor to Science and The Atlantic Monthly. His research is thorough, as is evident with a glance at the extensive bibliography and notes crammed into both this book and its successor, 1493 (reviewed earlier at http://bit.ly/weutM4).

Leave a Comment

Filed under Nonfiction

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

December 29, 2011

Michael Connelly’s latest: another thoroughly satisfying police procedural

A review of The Drop, by Michael Connelly

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

You might think that after writing 25 other novels and a slew of short stories Michael Connelly’s latest book would show at least a hint of boredom. Instead, the man keeps getting better and better. The Drop, Connelly’s 17th novel about Los Angeles police detective Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch, is one of his very best.

As you might expect in a series of such longevity, Harry is a complex character weighed down by layer upon layer of history. His history in the LAPD takes center stage in The Drop, as a challenging case brings him face to face with his old nemesis, a Deputy Chief of Police now sitting on the Los Angeles City Council and with his former partner, now an aide to the current Chief. If you’re not a Californian, you may not be aware that a seat on the L.A. City Council is a power base of the first order: members of Congress regard election to the Council as a promotion, and Councilmembers frequently run for statewide office. The upshot is that this brilliantly constructed novel revolves around the concept of “high jingo,” police jargon for the intersection of high-level politics with their work.

As the novel opens, Harry is a windower, raising his precocious 15-year-old daughter by himself, and nearing retirement from the LAPD. He holds a plum assignment in the Open Unsolved Unit. During a momentary lull in activity, he is assigned an especially difficult case involving apparently botched DNA analysis and a twenty-year-old rape and murder. No sooner has he begun digging into the mystifying circumstances of the DNA specimen than his old partner calls him from the chief’s office to inform him that the Chief insists he take on a new case: the Councilman’s son has apparently committed suicide, and the Councilman has unaccountably demanded that Harry be assigned to investigate what really happened. Enter stage left: high jingo.

Because Harry lives by the credo that “Everybody counts, or nobody counts,” he stubbornly works on both cases despite the Chief’s assistance he set aside everything else to pacify the Councilman. As the two intertwined investigations unfold with Harry’s customary secretiveness, practically everyone within his orbit becomes upset with him. And therein lies the tale — a particularly suspenseful and satisfying tale.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Mysteries & Thrillers

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

December 26, 2011

The 30 best books of 2010-2011

OK, so they’re not really the “best” books of the last two years. Unlike the arbiters of our literary culture such as The New York Times Book Review, I don’t pretend to read everything. In fact, they don’t either. By some estimates, more than one million books are published each year in the English language. So, big-time reviewers, whatever their resources, are forced to choose titles very carefully, and I do, too, to an even greater extent. After all, I’ve read fewer than 200 books since New Year’s 2010, and some of those had been published long before then.

So, what make’s one book “better” than another? To me, the answer’s simple: those I regard as best are the ones I recall most vividly. Whether fiction or nonfiction, these are the books that fastened themselves in my memory, either because of the emotional wallop they carried or because I learned so much from reading them.

Here goes, then. I separate the books I read into three categories: Nonfiction, Trade (“serious”) Fiction, and Mysteries & Thrillers. I tried narrowing down my choices to five books in each category but quickly found I couldn’t do that. Instead, I’ve listed (in no particular order) ten titles of each type.

Nonfiction

And So It Goes — Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, by Charles J. Shields

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

1493: Uncvovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann

The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder

Trade Fiction

11/22/63, by Stephen King

The Debba, by Avner Mandelman

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, by Paul Torday

Serious Men, by Manu Joseph

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

Homer & Langley, by E. L. Doctorow

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst

Mysteries & Thrillers

Shaman Pass: A Nathan Active Mystery, by Stan Jones

Storm Prey, by John Sandford

The Trinty Six, by Charles Cumming

Faithful Place, by Tana French

The Confession: A Novel, by John Grisham

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre

Three Stations: An Arkady Renko Novel by Martin Cruz Smith

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson

The Man From Beijing, by Henning Mankell

Nine Dragons, by Michael Connolly

Your comments are welcome.

Leave a Comment

Filed under FAQs & Commentaries

December 23, 2011

Hedy’s Folly: Nazi generals, wireless torpedoes, and “the most beautiful girl in the world”

A review of Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, by Richard Rhodes

@@@ (3 out of 5)

A quarter-century ago Richard Rhodes won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction for a masterful history, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and he has received numerous plaudits in the years since, both for nonfiction and fiction. But I don’t see any prizes in his future for this half-hearted little effort.

There’s nothing lacking in the material. It’s relatively well-known that Hedy Lamarr, a stunning film superstar of MGM’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s, invented a secret weapon for the United States during World War II. However, the story — her extraordinary background, her flamboyant collaborator, and the the U.S. Navy’s ham-fisted response to their invention — was largely lost in obscurity and official secrecy until Richard Rhodes took it upon himself to write it up. I turned to the book with great anticipation — and was hugely disappointed.

The story is astonishing even in outline.

A famously beautiful young Austrian woman named Hedwig Kiesler, daughter of a successful Viennese banker, found her incipient stage and film career interrupted when she married one of the richest men in Austria, a munitions manufacturer who happily participated in rearming Nazi Germany and supporting the most extreme of his country’s anti-Semitic Right-Wing politicians. (Hedy — she used the short form of her first name even then — was Jewish, though she hid that fact throughout her life, and her children learned about it only once she died.)

Before she escaped from her first marriage, Hedy silently sat in on dinners and informal gatherings organized by her husband and attended by high-ranking Nazi generals and admirals. With an amazingly retentive memory, she fled with detailed knowledge of the Nazis’ most advanced weaponry — without her husband suspecting a thing, because to him she herself was just an object.

Soon after fleeing Vienna disguised as one of her maids in 1937, the year of the Anschluss with Germany, Hedy was recruited to MGM by Louis B. Mayer. Once in Hollywood, renamed Hedy Lamarr and dubbed “the most beautiful girl in the world” by Mayer (though others had previously tagged her with the phrase), she quickly became a major star. Although none of her films were especially memorable, they were successes at the box office and kept her in the limelight for many years.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to nearly everyone who knew her in Hollywood, Hedy continued her life-long passion for inventing in her spare time. Once war had broken out in Europe, she devised a concept for a naval superweapon — a torpedo guided by wireless radio, unlike the wired torpedoes then in widespread use. Together with her collaborator, George Antheil, an avante-garde composer whose concerts had sometimes caused riots in Paris and New York, Hedy offered the weapon to the U.S. government late in 1940.

Hedy had dropped out of high school to play a part on the Vienna stage, and she was neither a reader nor an intellectual of any stripe. However, she was clearly brilliant. The profound innovation she devised (with practical help from Antheil) was a system to make it impossible for enemies to jam the radio transmissions from the ship to the torpedo. This innovation, first called frequency hopping and much later spread spectrum, “enabled the development of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the majority of cordless phones now sold in the US, and myriad other lesser-known niche products. The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANS) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems.” Rhodes goes on for line after line, citing a plethora of additional applications of this seminal technology. In short, Hedy’s was one of those rarest of inventions that opened up vast new landscapes of possibility for engineers for many decades to come.

So, given the obvious appeal of the weapon she and Antheil had devised, one might think that the U.S. Navy, offered the patent in 1944 after seemingly endless vetting by a series of government scientists and engineers, would immediately put it into production. But no — the Navy classified the file top secret and stuck it in a filing cabinet. It was only discovered nearly 20 years later when an engineer working on a military contract chased down a rumor about Hedy’s invention, turned up the file, and began putting it to practical use.

A more nimble writer than Rhodes might have turned this story into a blockbuster. But sadly Rhodes devoted more space to the ups and downs of George Antheil’s career than to Hedy’s, and he goes on for page after tedious page about the mechanics of the wireless system, making the invention itself the principal character. Years ago, Tracy Kidder managed that beautifully in Soul of a New Machine. Perhaps as yet more information comes to light about this remarkable tale, Kidder or someone of comparable talent will do justice to one of the most remarkable women of the 20th Century.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Nonfiction

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

December 21, 2011

Stephen King’s 11/22/63: A new take on the JFK assassination

A review of 11/22/63, by Stephen King

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Stephen King has won more wrting awards than I’ve written books — and I’ve written a slew of them. 11/22/63 is his 50th work, but it’s the first I’ve managed to read because I’d always associated him with horror stories, which I loathe. However, within the first few pages of this fascinating book I understood perfectly why King has won so many awards, as I found myself completely engrossed in the story.

As a work of science fiction, 11/22/63 is a fairly straightforward exploration of time travel. King’s protagonist, Jake Epping, 35, is a high school English teacher in a small Maine town when an acquaintance named Al tells him about the window or portal in time in the floor of the storage room in his diner. Al persuades him to step through the portal, which leads directly back to September 9, 1958. No matter how long Jake may stay in the past, only two minutes will have elapsed back home in 2011 when he returns. Al is dying and lures Jake into taking up the mission he himself had recently accepted: returning to 1958 and staying in the past for five years until he can track down and kill Lee Harvey Oswald before that watershed day in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Working from detailed notes about Oswald that Al had accumulated in his own, futile attempt to hold out until 1963, Jake manages to talk himself into changing the history of the world. In the course of his five-year sojourn in the past, most of it in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he meets and falls in love with a librarian at the small-town high school where he teaches to support himself. And that’s about as much of the plot as I can share without spoiling the story.

King has consummate skill both at narrative and at dialogue. His treatment of time travel is the most ingenious I’ve read despite my adolescent years as a sci-fi fan. The story races along, building tension and anticipation and, yes, the fear that embues any competent horror story. The climax and the resolution of the tale are satisfying. It’s a real pleasure to read a consummately clever story by a masterful writer at the peak of his game.

1 Comment

Filed under Trade Fiction

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

December 12, 2011

Mass media, genocide, and the fate of the world

A review of Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World, by Maria Armoudian

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

The emergence of mass society was one of the defining characteristics of the 20th Century. Enabled by population growth, industrialization, urbanization, rising rates of literacy, and advances in transportation and communications, mass society became a reality for growing numbers of people in more and more far-flung regions of the planet as the century unfolded. In turn, mass society facilitated the growth of Communism, Fascism, and other varieties of authoritarianism. Among the less extreme effects of this new phenomenon in human affairs were the advent of “public opinion,” the globalization of fashion, and the rapid development of important new industries such as advertising, public relations, and broadcast journalism. The “mass communications” we have taken for granted for so many years now were, properly speaking, an artifact of the 20th Century.

In Kill the Messenger, political scientist and radio broadcaster Maria Armoudian ably examines the central role of mass media in human affairs over the course of the century. Through brief case studies of events in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and the former states of Yugoslavia, she explores the influential — and perhaps essential — function of the media as an enabler of genocide. Armoudian shows how authoritarian regimes in South Africa, Chile, Taiwan, and Burundi made similar efforts to harness the media to help promote the murder, torture, and imprisonment of their own citizens but with much more mixed results. In South Africa, for example, she reveals how new attitudes in the news media helped bring about a largely peaceful conclusion to the era of apartheid. However, Kill the Messenger is about mass media’s place in society, not just its relationship with governments. Armoudian’s examination of public opinion about climate change demonstrates the huge impact of relatively minor investments in media by Exxon Mobil, the Koch Brothers, and other naysayers.

Armoudian puts to work the linguistic concept of “framing” throughout the book, showing, for example, how climate change deniers managed to persuade the mass media to present the issue as open to debate. This frame (“debate”) has dominated coverage not just on Fox News but on most other television and radio networks as well.  Similarly, frames (“blaming” and “heroes-versus-villains”) dominated news coverage in countries where genocide became generally accepted.

Kill the Messenger is an important book because it squeezes between two covers a collection of observations and insights about many of the seminal events of the 20th Century, rendering the history of mass society understandable through the lens of mass media. However, it remains to be seen how much longer Armoudian’s analysis will help illuminate events in the future. The emergence of new communications technologies revolving about the Internet may have thrown a monkey wrench into the phenomenon of mass media. It’s far too early to tell.

This fascinating book would have benefitted from a better publisher than Prometheus Books. The text is rife with glaring typos that even a cursory proofreading would have caught. The cover art is uninviting, an unfortunate sign that Prometheus Books either doesn’t know or doesn’t care how to market a book of this significance.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Nonfiction

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,