Category: Books (Page 1 of 11)

“After struggling to build its products on three continents, Apple was lured by China’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheap labor. Soon it was sending thousands of engineers across the Pacific, training millions of workers, and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create the world’s most sophisticated supply chain. These capabilities enabled Apple to build the 21st century’s most iconic products–in staggering volume and for enormous profit. Without explicitly intending to, Apple built an advanced electronics industry within China, only to discover that its massive investments in technology upgrades had inadvertently given Beijing a power that could be weaponized. In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple’s ascent and who tried to forge a different path, including the Mormon missionary who established the Apple Store in China; the “Gang of Eight” executives tasked with placating Beijing; and an idealistic veteran whose hopes of improving the lives of factory workers were crushed by both Cupertino’s operational demands and Xi Jinping’s war on civil society. Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised “rebels” and “troublemakers”–the company that encouraged us all to “Think Different”–devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.” — Provided by publisher.

Life on our planet as you’ve never seen it before

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments, and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet, although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day

On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution . Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment?

Hampton Sides’ bravura account of Cook’s last journey both wrestles with Cook’s legacy and provides a thrilling narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterized exploration in the 1700s. Cook was renowned for his peerless seamanship, his humane leadership, and his dedication to science-–the famed naturalist Joseph Banks accompanied him on his first voyage, and Cook has been called one of the most important figures of the Age of Enlightenment. He was also deeply interested in the native people he encountered. In fact, his stated mission was to return a Tahitian man, Mai, who had become the toast of London, to his home islands. On previous expeditions, Cook mapped huge swaths of the Pacific, including the east coast of Australia, and initiated first European contact with numerous peoples. He treated his crew well and endeavored to learn about the societies he encountered with curiosity and without judgment.

Yet something was different on this last voyage. Cook became mercurial, resorting to the lash to enforce discipline, and led his two vessels into danger time and again. Uncharacteristically, he ordered violent retaliation for perceived theft on the part of native peoples. This may have had something to do with his secret orders, which were to chart and claim lands before Britain’s imperial rivals could, and to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Whatever Cook’s intentions, his scientific efforts were the sharp edge of the colonial sword, and the ultimate effects of first contact were catastrophic for Indigenous people around the world. The tensions between Cook’s overt and covert missions came to a head on the shores of Hawaii. His first landing there was harmonious, but when Cook returned after mapping the coast of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, his exploitative treatment of the Hawaiians led to the fatal encounter.

At once a ferociously-paced story of adventure on the high seas and a searching examination of the complexities and consequences of the Age of Exploration, THE WIDE WIDE SEA is a major work from one of our finest narrative nonfiction writers.

The dramatic and consequential history of Germany’s short-lived experiment with democracy between the world wars   Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic’s full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future. In the aftermath of World War I, Germany was buffeted by political partisanship, economic upheaval, and the constant threat of revolutionary violence. At the same time, many Germans embraced newly liberated lifestyles. They flouted gender norms, flooded racetracks, and dance halls, and fostered a vibrant avant-garde that encompassed groundbreaking artists like filmmaker Fritz Lang, painter Wassily Kandinsky, and architect Walter Gropius. But this new Germany sparked a reactionary backlash that led to the Republic’s fall to the Nazis and, ultimately, the conflagration of World War II.     Blending deeply researched political history with the firsthand experiences of everyday people; Vertigo is a vital, kaleidoscopic portrait of a pivotal moment in German history.

“Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. Dick was one of the young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Doris was a White House Fellow and worked directly for Lyndon Johnson, later assisting on his memoir. The Goodwins’ last great adventure involved opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents and memorabilia Dick had saved for more than fifty years. The voyage of remembrance revived the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this love story with America”–

A deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek.  The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom. Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had
walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries. Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-
winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors’ camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that
commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness. An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey,

A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose
topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.
Goodreads

John McCarthy, the computer scientist who coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955, defined it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” Nearly 70 years later, AI—as we now call it in almost jaded shorthand—is present in every facet of life. It can be used (to name but a few applications) to cheat on a college essay, treat cancer, play chess and design spaceships. It can also be used to wage war and sabotage elections.

AI is an invention that has the capacity to revolutionize human life, on a par with fire, electricity, the printing press and atomic power. Its profound importance can be gauged from the fact that the late Henry Kissinger focused more intently on AI in the last years of his life than on any other subject. In 2018, at age 95, he startled everyone by writing an essay on artificial intelligence in the Atlantic magazine. In 2021 he co-authored “The Age of AI” with Eric Schmidt (a former chief executive of Google) and Daniel Huttenlocher (an MIT professor), a book that compared the advent of AI with the 18th-century Enlightenment for its ability to shape the human mind. And now, almost a year after Kissinger’s death, we have in our hands another book, titled “Genesis,” about “artificial intelligence, hope, and the human spirit,” which Kissinger co-authored with Craig Mundie (a former chief research officer at Microsoft) and (again) Mr. Schmidt.

Henry Kissinger was one of the great statesman-sages of his time, and the brief but moving “In Memoriam” section at the start of the book describes him as a “student of the nineteenth century, master of the twentieth, and oracle of the twenty-first,” the last accolade referring in part to his drive to educate us on the complexities of AI. In “Genesis,” the Kissingerian imprint—that elegant mix of idealism and realism—is evident everywhere. The tone and thrust of the book, write its three authors, is one of “sober optimism,” which, in fact, encapsulates Kissinger’s outlook on life.

If there is a key question that animates “Genesis,” it is this: Should AI become more like humans, or should humans become more like AI? Put another way: Should we control, or be controlled by, AI? The authors stress throughout that, when it comes to artificial intelligence, the worst thing we could possibly do as a civilization—or species—is to drop our guard: “to declare too early, or too completely, that we understand it.”

If Messrs. Kissinger, Mundie and Schmidt sound resigned, in places, to the primacy of artificial intelligence in human life, it is because of the irrefutable computational and problem-solving superiority of AI—or “AIs,” as they often pluralize it, acknowledging that “there will not be just one supreme AI but rather multiple instantiations of superior intelligence in the world.” How could it be otherwise when the average AI supercomputer is (as the authors tell us) already 120 million times faster than the processing rate of the human brain?

“Genesis” is as much a philosophy book—drawing on all that is best in the Western tradition—as it is a book that grapples with a techno-scientific phenomenon. It raises tough, often disconcerting, sometimes harrowing questions. The authors point out that AI allows humans “to know new things . . . but not to understand how the discoveries were made.” The internal processes of the machine are beyond our grasp, so we must resort to a kind of faith in the machine’s logic and authority. Will the age of AI, the authors ask, “catalyze a return to a premodern acceptance of unexplained authority?” Are we, they ask, on the verge of a “dark enlightenment”?

The development of ever more sophisticated forms of AI, we’re told, is “a project led almost exclusively by private corporations and entrepreneurs.” Could corporations form alliances to compound their already immense clout, even accruing military and political power in the process? What impact would that coup have on diplomacy, global stability and the Westphalian order of sovereign nation-states?

While celebrating the role that could be played by AI in the curing and prevention of disease and talking up its potential to be an almost heaven-sent “library of pharmaceuticals” for the benefit of mankind, Messrs. Kissinger, Mundie and Schmidt address moral questions that should make us squirm. Just as we have begun to use AI to “correct” congenital disease, might we not start using it to “install congenital advantages” in our offspring, “advantages that may not belong to either biological parent or, in the extreme, to any other human”? Would we redesign the human race? “What does the perfect human look like?” they ask. “Should we attempt to find out?” Would such genetic alterations cause the human species to “split into multiple lines?”

AI even raises theological questions. If humans come to believe that they’ve been replaced by machines as the foremost intellectual entities on earth, might not some people “attribute a kind of divinity to the machines themselves, thereby potentially spurring further human fatalism and submission”? While the authors don’t offer answers, it is quite right that they have prompted us to search for them.

“Genesis” is a wise and deeply sane book. But it’s at its least convincing in its expressions of belief that our political and scientific leaders must—and therefore will—find a way to act in a coordinated global fashion to instill into machines the core values of human “dignity.” Machines, the authors write, must be “compelled to build from observation a native understanding of what humans do and don’t do.” They must, in other words, learn how to be human from the examples that humans set.

Therein lies the problem. Messrs. Kissinger, Mundie and Schmidt call for “the inscription of globally inclusive moralities onto silicon-based intelligence.” These moralities include some—Communist Chinese, Putinist Russian and Islamist Iranian—that fall far short of our own standards. Our definition of dignity is quite unlike theirs. So much so that our machines may one day be benign and merciful, while those of our foes may be exactly the opposite. 

Wall Street Journal 11/25/2024