Jennet Conant follows up her very informative and entertaining book The Irregulars with A Covert Affair, focused on Julia and Paul Child and their wartime friends at the OSS. It starts at the beginning of World War II with Julie Child and her friends recruitment into the OSS and continues through Red Scare of the 1950's.
The colonial powers in particular the Dutch and French were singled out for suppressing local independence movements in Indonesia and Vietnam. Jane Foster a mutual friend of Paul and Julia Child was stationed in Indonesia and reported on the Dutch abuses.
The messy situation in China towards the end of WWII also was a source of OSS frustration. The Nationalist Chinese were fighting a war on two fronts with both the Japanese and the Maoists. US pilots risked there lives to make supply drops to China only to have them sold back to the Japanese or diverted to the campaign against the Maoists.
Paul and Julia Child's slow friendship evolving into romance is a study in persistence. Julia works hard to improve her self in an attempt to get Paul to think of her as more than just a friend. While stationed in Paris after the war Julia becomes obsessed with French cooking. She takes classes and begins working with a pair of like minded friends on understanding the nuances of French cooking.
The Child's along with their friend Jane Foster experience the hell of McCarthyism as they find themselves interrogated, spied upon and hounded by FBI and State Department investigators.
I also found the brief discussions about Martha Dodd and her husband interesting as she was a central character in the book In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson.
Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath reexamines what it means to have a perceived advantage. From the story of David and Goliath in the bible to combating crime in a Brownsville New York he illustrates the need for people in power to be careful and caring about how they use it.
With respect to David, he was a stone thrower. They were very effective in ancient battle against slow moving, heavily armed infantry. Goliath wanted David to fight him in a test of strength. David wisely chose to attack choosing a tactic that favored his strength. Mr. Gladwell successfully argues that we have been misinterpreting the power relationship of this story for thousands of years. He also applies this to 12 year old girl basketball players. If you don't have the talent to dribble pass or shoot your only option for success is to press the whole game. The scores may be 6 to 0 but you have no chance if you let the other team get passed half court and into their offense.
He outlines the need for those in power not to respond to unrest with brute force but to listen to the demands of the oppressed. Heavy handed tactics applied by the British in Northern Island made the resistance even stronger. The tactics convert fence sitters into people willing to die for a cause. As an aside: The same heavy handed tactics have also not worked in India by the British and in Burma by the Dutch after World War II. From the Aesop's parable: Sun and the Wind - People will change more when offered warmth and kindness than cold, brutal force.
Limitations can be gift. A surprising number of very successful people are dyslexic including the head of Goldman Sax. The struggle to work around the limitation allowed the individuals to become much stronger than average in other areas. He advocates that the absence of struggle while growing up is a significant handicap. It prevents individuals from becoming stronger through adversity. Although dyslexic individuals all credit the struggle to overcome their disability with success none of them would wish the struggle on their children.
Malcolm's philosophy fits nicely with Nassim Talib's concept of Antifragility. A certain amount of good stress does make us stronger.
This book offers an accessible look into the development of the periodic table and the unique characteristics of the elements. The subject varies from practical application of the elements to medical research such as the use of lithium in bipolar disorders to a description of the scientists who discovered the elements.
I found the discussion of pathological science to be very helpful. The odd cold fusion craze came about just after I finished graduate school. Instead of being skeptical of their findings, Pons and Fleischmann jumped to conclusions about their ideas. The author contrasts this to the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen. He did his best to disprove his ideas. He thought he was loosing his mind when he could see the bones in his hand. He repeatedly did careful tests and was able to repeat his results finding a key inside a book. He had his wife confirm this by allowing him to view the bones in her hand. She was horrified and he was relieved that he was not losing his mind.
The book also provides an indirect way of getting to know the personality quirks of a large number of Nobel prize winners. Linus Pauling's dismissal of some information on a cruise ship prevented him from discovering the double helix shape of DNA after he had correctly determined the alpha helix shape of proteins.
The book is a good introduction for aspiring chemists, physicists and lovers of the scientific method.
The book focuses on Hedy Lamarr relationship with George Antheil an avant garde composer and their unique method of frequency jumping communication. It was designed to provide more accurate guidance for torpedoes in WWII but was never implemented. The technology is now one of the backbones of WiFi technology.
Hedy's doomed marriage to an arms dealer providing munitions to the Nazi's allowed her access to valuable military intelligence through conversations she overheard while entertaining military dignitaries at their home.
The book focuses less on her movie career and more on her life long love of inventing. She was not a party girl but preferred to spend her spare time inventing. She was not taken that seriously by the US government but did her part by raising money through the sale of US war bonds. She was strongly patriotic and wanted to do her part to defeat the Nazi's.
The book did point out an interesting fact about the horrible state of US torpedo technology at the beginning of WWII. Funding for the program had been cut. Many torpedoes launched in the early part of the war either missed their mark entirely or would not penetrate the hull of the ship. The image of a Japanese ship with several torpedoes attached to the hull exterior made it look a bit like a porcupine.
In 2012, Edward Klein wrote a book describing the Obama White House. The book's intent was to persuade the public that Barak Obama did not approach the job of President in a professional manner. The author highlights problems with the administrations handling of US Jewish relations, the Fast and Furious gun scandal and the Solyndra Solar company (Washington Post) loans.
Vallerie Jarret comes out looking the worst in this authors account. She acts as a gatekeeper to the President and limits the range of views that he receives from other people. Her advice is often wrong. She suggested that Obama visit Solyndra against the advice of the President's economic advisors as they correctly determined that the company did not appear to have the ability to repay their loan. She and Rahm Emmanuel reportedly did not get along. Rahm is described as a profane but pragmatic political advisor fitting in better with the Clinton Administration.
Michelle Obama is portrayed as a style conscious materialist person who pushes Obama to be successful. Her marriage to Barak has had its rocky points in the past and she keeps close tabs on Barak making sure he does not stray like JFK. She appears to have a tin ear with respect to public opinion when it comes to choosing to indulge in expensive vacation trips to Spain while the economy is in recession. She also has expensive and specific tastes in jewelry. According to the author she returned a $5000 piece of jewelry given to her as a birthday present by her husband for jewelry costing over $10,000. She also worked with Vallerie Jarret for the University of Chicago Hospital on a patient dumping scheme.
The book describes a falling out between Carolyn Kennedy and Barak Obama. It also notes a falling out between Oprah and Barak Obama. They have apparently patched things up as witnessed by events after the book was published - Carolyn's appointment as Japanese ambassador and Michelle's vacation at Oprah's Hawaiian estate.
The author talks to people that Obama has forgotten on the way to the top and faults him for not expressing gratitude or giving credit to them for his success. Jessie Jackson was very helpful to him letting him speak frequently at his Rainbow Push gatherings. This helped Mr. Obama to develop his skills as an orator.
The President's cabinet meetings are described as more of a one way conversation with the president giving a lecture and little give an take. Mr. Obama is presented as a confident, even tempered man who knows himself very well but does not have the same curiosity about the world as say Teddy Roosevelt. In the author's opinion Mr. Obama's governing style is most similar to Woodrow Wilson.
The foreign policy appears to be shaped by a focus on preventing genocide. In practice, this is a bit difficult to implement because one group will always end up on the losing end of a conflict.
In the end, people seem to approach life in one of two ways according to Bob Merritt in his book, When Life's Not Working. It's either easy hard or hard easy. Barak Obama worked very hard to develop his speaking style with considerable success. He appears to have put less effort into the mechanics of governing as evidenced by the rocky roll out of the Affordable Care Act.
The Billings Gazette now (7/3/2014) has retracted their 2008 endorsement of Mr. Obama. In the newspaper opinion piece they refer to Mr. Obama as "another in a line of presidents long on rhetoric and hopelessly short on action."
In conclusion: the book was a bit too partisan for me although it did offer helpful information about President Obama's approach to governing..
by Sam Kean covers the history and the scientists behind the creation of the periodic table. 
