The book that we slaved over. Highly recommended by the authors.
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Contains a chapter by EJW Whittaker and RM Whittaker (on Penrose patterns). I was surprised to find that this was still available. Expensive.
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Probably the best book available about 9/11. With well over 600 pages, this is the result of very serious research. Ruppert works from published sources and does not build his case upon speculation and rumour. His conclusions are none the less damning, however, and I believe he builds an almost unanswerable case for the proposition that the US Administration were complicit in the events of September 11th 2001.
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Another well researched and serious book about 9/11. David Ray Griffin is a Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Claremont School of Theology. At the beginning of the book he describes how (like most people) he assumed the truth of the "received account" of 9/11 until he started looking at the evidence. When he did look at the evidence in detail, he became so concerned that he wrote this book. He distinguishes very clearly at the beginning between eight different possible understandings of "official complicity", ranging from a cover-up of failure to prevent the attacks to direct involvement in their planning, and he carefully distinguishes the strength of different pieces of evidence and which of the eight views they support.
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In this follow-up to his earlier book about 9/11, David Ray Griffin examines the official report of the "9/11 commission" and shows that rather than trying to establish the truth about the events of 11th September 2001, it is an attempt to exonerate the administration from any blame. In painstaking detail, Griffin examines the report and shows that it is full of distortions and omissions designed to support the "received account" of 9/11.
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Published in 1999, this is both a history of the Internet and an insightful analysis of its importance. It includes a chapter on Free and Open Source Software, in which he writes "if I had to bet my life on an operating system tomorrow, I would choose Linux".

What I like about the book is the way that he connects "getting it" about the internet with "getting it" about Linux and much else. I also particularly liked the first chapter "Radio Days" in which he describes his childhood fascination with short wave radio.
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The history of the Waugh family written by Alexander Waugh (Auberon Waugh's son and Evelyn Waugh's grandson). The book explains a lot about both their characters and in particular how Evelyn Waugh felt excluded and rejected by his father's intense identification with his older son at the expense of Evelyn.
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Diamond describes in detail what is known about how various ancient societies collapsed, including Easter Island and the Norse settlements in Greenland. He also looks at modern examples of environmental damage, and claims that the Rwandan genocide was at least partly the result of population pressure.

The first part of the book is brilliant, but I felt that where he tries to draw general conclusions for the world's future he fails to convince, largely because he does not address the issue of Peak Oil.
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Subtitled: "Options and actions for a post-carbon world", this is a frightening description of the coming collapse of our civilisation as a result of the end of cheap energy. Heinberg's analysis of the situation is grim: he believes it is already too late to do much: the oil is running out and there is nothing to replace it. Economic collapse, famine and widespread war are the likely result. The best option he believes is "Powerdown": an attempt at an internationally managed "soft landing" through a managed policy of drastic reduction in energy usage. Any such policy seems a remote possibility at a time when the most powerful countries in the world are persuing the policy which he calls "Last One Standing": the attempt to grab as much as possible of the remaining resources while denying them to others.

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First published in 1997, Shadia Drury's book is an examination of the influence of Leo Strauss (1899-1973) on American politics and in particular on the "neo-conservative" group who (since the book was published) have become the "new rulers of the world".

She outlines Strauss's belief in the rule of an elite who would make use of "noble lies" to maintain their position and power. An atheist himself, Strauss believed in the necessity of religion and nationalism as instruments of social control.

The relevance to recent events is clear: in articles and interviews since, Drury makes explicit her view that the willingness of the present US administration to engage in such clear and blatant deceit in the pursuit of its ends is related to the strong influence of Straussian ideas on some of its leading members.

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The first book of Su Doku puzzles from The Times.
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The extraordinary story of the author's search for the huge hedge which was used by the British rulers of India as a customs border, mainly to prevent the smuggling of salt.
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The second book of Su Doku puzzles from The Times.
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This book details the author's investigations into the lives of Mohammad Atta and his associates in Florida prior to the attacks. He demonstrates that Atta was certainly not the kind of person he was portrayed as after the attacks, and also that the flying school with which he was associated was also associated both with the CIA and with drug smuggling.
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A description of the author's investigation into the lives of Daniel Pearl, a man who knew far too much, and Omar Sheikh who was involved in his murder.
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The book that we slaved over (new edition). Highly recommended by the authors.
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This is Robert Fisk's enormous story of his life reporting on the Middle East. It is difficut to read at times because he does not spare his readers any of the horror of the terrible things that he has seen. He goes back to the First World War (the title comes from his father's First World War medal), the Armenian massacres and the Balfour declaration and traces current conlicts back through history.
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A book of essays, subtitled "Bush Chronicles", mostly written since 2001. Entertaining but deeply angry about the events of the Bush years.
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Clive Stafford Smith is the legal director of the charity Reprieve. He has regularly travelled to Guantanamo Bay to visit and represent some of those held there.

This book describes the prison, the conditions in which prisoners are held there and tells the stories of some of them, including a description of the proceedings at a "military tribunal".

The conditions of Stafford Smith's work at Guantanamo have prevented him from reporting much of what he knows, but what he has written is a terrible story of torture and misery, and the frightening self-belief of those in charge of the system who think they know that the people they are holding are guilty "Bad Men".

Stafford Smith points out that Guantanamo Bay is only the visible tip of an iceberg of underground secret prisons being run by the Americans all over the world.

One of the most telling stories in the book is that of Sean Baker, a Kentucky National Guardsman, who volunteered to play the part of a prisoner in an exercise in which other troops would go into a cell and "extract" him. The other participants did not know that the cell they were entering contained a colleague. Baker was beated so severely that he suffered brain damage and was discharged from the military as a result.
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Humphrey Hawksley's latest novel, which is set in a "post 9/11 world, where fear is used to control and governments act above the law".

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Rachel North was injured in the bombings on the London Underground on 7th July 2005. She has written a deeply moving and thoughtful book about her experiences. Rachel has been one of those pressing for an independent inquiry into the events of that day: she has also become something of a spokesperson for others who think likewise.

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Norman Baker was suspicious about the "official story" of David Kelly's death from the start. He subsequently resigned from the front bench of the Liberal Democrats in Parliament to pursue the matter. This book is the result. He makes a very strong case that Kelly's death was not suicide, and that the Hutton inquiry was essentially a cover-up, which denied the due process which a proper inquest (which never took place) would have provided. He was in contact during his investigations with various shadowy figures who claimed to know the truth: to what extent their testimony can be relied on is unclear. What does seem clear is that Kelly was murdered: the question then is who benefitted from his death.

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In this book Jean Bricmont's theme is that the new imperialism of the United States which has overturned international law has used selective and often spurious humanitarian justifications. He traces the history of this trend and the way such justifications have been used, particularly in the Balkans and the Middle East in recent years.
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[This review was first published in the UKUUG Newsletter.]

Steve Talbott became well known as the author of The Future does not Compute which, when it was published in 1995, was a fairly rare example of sceptical writing among the avalanche of hype about the liberating power of the Internet and the personal computer which was current at that time.

The full text of Future does not Compute is available online: http://netfuture.org/fdnc/index.html

The material in Devices of the Soul was originally written as a set of essays. These have been woven into a book, and as a result this book does not possess a very clear linear argument. It is none the worse for that, however.

The subject matter varies quite widely, but the unifying theme is a strongly humanistic approach to the nature of knowledge, of learning, and of engagement with the world. Talbott discusses among other things education, disability, science, ecology, the Internet, robotics, baby-walkers, community and marriage.

In each case, he argues for the vital importance of real human engagement as opposed to tempting alternatives, and outlines how technology and modern modes of thinking can mitigate against this.

So for instance, in discussing science education he talks about the need for children to get close to and engage physically with the realities they are studying. He dissects examples of modern ``good practice'' and discusses the ways in which they fail to engage students' imagination and hence fail in their educational aim.

Talbott believes that technologies such as the personal computer and the Internet have a two-fold negative effect.

Firstly there is the way in which the nature of the technology limits the ways one deals with the real matters one uses it for (for instance the use of a spreadsheet to constantly view the business ``bottom line'' blinds one to other less tangible matters which do not appear in the spreadsheet but can be controlled and which do affect a company's success). By making particular aspects of reality visible and hiding others, the technology shapes our view of reality.

But the second and more important negative effect for Talbott is the way in which we begin to model our view of our own activities on our understanding of the technology that we use. Thus education (about which he writes very passionately) is seen as a matter of transferring information from one place to another; management of the environment is seen as simply adjusting certain inputs to obtain the desired results; well-being is seen as measurable through an aggregate of economic or other numerical indicators. Worse, he claims that our internal model of ourselves becomes based on our model of the technology that we use: this impacts on our ability to understand the world.

When we lose awareness of all but the machine-like in ourselves, we also lose the ability to conceive the world as anything but a machine. Those whose intellectual horizons are encompassed by digital machinery tend to see the world computationally, just as their predecessors saw the world in terms of clocks, cameras, steam engines, telegraph lines, and movie projectors. There is security in believing the world is like the things one knows best, and intellectual ease in draping one's well-practiced ideas like a veil over the Great Unknown. [p 179]

The chapter entitled ``Educational Provocations'' consists of a list of bullet points about the question of computers in education, a subject about which Talbott clearly feels strongly. He challenges the reader to deny any of the particular statements in this list, all of which are arguments against the use of computers in the classroom, particularly below secondary level.

It would be wrong to describe Talbott as a Luddite: he is criticising the effects of the technology from the point of view of a person who has been a close observer of its development. But he is always on the look-out for unintended consequences and his critique of the ways that technology can shape its users in its own image is a profound one. In some ways he reminds me of Ivan Illich, who made the same kind of points in the 1970s not only about motor vehicles (fairly obvious and relatively uncontroversial) but also about schools and hospitals (shocking to most).

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[This review was first published in the UKUUG Newsletter.]

This small book examines defines and examines ten widely held assumptions about where innovative ideas come from and how they are developed (the ten ``myths of innovation'' of the title: one for each chapter).

This most definitely is not one of those books that claims to give you a recipe for success: it examines (in straightforward language) the facts about how people historically have come up with creative and world-changing ideas and contrasts those facts with some of the comforting stories we tell ourselves about these things.

Although the book is deceptively simply (and playfully) written, Berkun has clearly spent a great deal of time researching, thinking about and distilling its content. The points he makes are sometimes fairly obvious and sometimes counter-intuitive, but the way he puts them together is thought-provoking and interesting.

One of his most important themes is that we like to delude ourselves about how innovation takes place: in the ``myth of epiphany'' (chapter 1) he stresses both the ``shoulders of giants'' theme and compares the production of an innovative idea to putting in the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle: something that can only happen if you have been working patiently on the puzzle for some time. The idea of a long period of incubation is something that he stresses with various historical examples.

In chapter 5 ``the myth of the lone inventor'' he examines various cases where we think that an invention or idea was the sole work of a particular inspired individual and shows that the reality is far more complex. Berkun takes some of the most well-known and important inventions (the light bulb, powered flight, the automobile) and shows that the stories we are commonly told about them are grossly simplified. But as with the ``myth of epiphany'' the common simplification somehow answers a psychological need in ourselves.

It was good to see Berkun quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on his concept of flow: one of the best descriptions of how the right kind of work (or play) can both be creative and enjoyable at the same time.

There are footnotes on almost every page, many of these will make you want to go off and investigate the fascinating stories they refer to: among others the history of ``post-it notes'', the story of the Phillips screw versus the Robertson screw, the history of tyres and how the art of making concrete was lost and rediscovered.

Although not specifically related to the computer industry, many of Berkun's examples will be familiar: he mentions Xerox PARC a number of times and discusses the conditions of work and management approach which made it so productive of innovation. He notes how Google and others have consciously tried to create the necessary conditions for creative and innovative work to flourish. Other familiar examples which he looks at to illustrate some of his points are Dan Bricklin's development of the idea of the spreadsheet and Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web.

The book cover tells us that Berkun was a Microsoft employee who worked on the development of Internet Explorer: discard any prejudices which that fact elicits -- this book is well worth reading.

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The subtitle of this book is "The Inside Story of the CIA's Secret Rendition Programme".

Stephen Grey is largely responsible for the knowledge which is now in the public domain of the way in which the American authorities have picked people up all over the world and taken them, often by executive jet to be tortured in third countries.

Grey was able to piece this story together from personal accounts and the records of aircraft movements, which he was able to show matched up.

He tells the story of Khalid al-Masri, a German citizen who went for a holiday in Macedonia and disappeared for months, having been taken by US agents to a prison in Afghanistan.

He also describes the experiences of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, who was in transit at JFK airport in New York when he was arrested and taken to Jordan and then to Syria where he was tortured.

Both these innocent men and others were unlucky enough to have vague associations with people the CIA considered terrorist sympathisers. They paid for these vague associations in a terrible way.

The cases which Grey describes in this book are the tip of an enormous iceberg: they are the few who "got way". Meanwhile, at enormous expense, the US authorities are ferrying people around the world in private jets for torture and interrogation on a regular basis. And there is at least some evidence that this is being paid for by the proceeds of the sale of drugs carried on the return journeys (although this is not discussed in the book).

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Latest version of "the book".
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This book is hard to classify: the author himself devotes the book's foreward to explaining why it doesn't easily fit into any of the usual categories. After admitting the difficulty for his publisher of describing the book in a short blurb, the last sentence in the foreward is:

And if the salesman want to pitch it as `Bad-boy critic deploys magic charm against vampire economy', that's all right with me.

The book dates from 1979, but has recently been republished in the UK. Its subject matter is not Free Software. It includes discussion of (among other things): Celtic folklore, the anthropology of the native North American peoples, the history and theology of usury before and after the Reformation, the ethics of organ donation, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, the early history of patents and a great deal more.

Only in the ``afterword'' provided for this British edition does the author discuss in passing matters guaranteed to be of direct interest to readers of this newsletter: the current period for which copyright is protected in the US, publishing of scientific papers under permissive licences, and the briefest possible passing mention of open source.

All that being said, ``The Gift'' is deeply relevant to our concerns. Eric Raymond and others have characterised the Open Source and Free Software communities as ``gift economies'' as opposed to ``market economies''. Hyde describes what that concept means from an anthropological point of view, and also makes a case for his view that serious artistic expression is by its nature a gift rather than a commodity.

In a gift economy, the person who gives most is the one with the greatest status, not the one who has the most. Similarly, in a gift economy, the worst sin is to consume or hide away the gift that has been received: gifts must continually be passed on.

The parallels with the Free and Open Source software world are very clear, and the kind of ``sacred obligation'' entailed by gifts in traditional societies is mirrored in the very strong feelings in our communities about how the gifts that we have received should be used and transmitted.

Although the replacement of tribal and local economies by a global one has converted many of our relationships into purely commercial ones, the examples that Hyde gives of organ donation, artistic expression and scientific publishing show how there is a very strong and persistent feeling that some things can only be transmitted and received in the form of gifts. Such things change the nature of the relationship between the parties involved. New forms of communication (the Internet) and new ways of insisting on the obligations that a gift traditionally carries with it (the GPL) have re-enabled older and wiser ways of organising communities. The book helps to put that process into a wider historical and cultural context.
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Almost my first thought on seeing this book was that out of the five words in the title, Richard Stallman would approve only the third and shortest one: the word ``and''. It is quite clear from the preface, however, that the author is fully aware of the awkward issues that surround terminology in this area: his ``note about terminology'' refers to the FSF's ``phrases that are worth avoiding'' and also addresses directly the question of ``free software'' versus ``open source''. He explains that part of his choice of wording by saying

Where applicable, I will use the correct term to describe how they are both socially and legally different. Nevertheless, because open source software is a strict superset of free software, I will generally use the more inclusive term when discussing legal elements common to both.

Stallman's primary objection to the use of the term ``Intellectual Property'' is that it is often used in such a way as to blur and confuse the differences between the very different concepts of copyright, trademarks, patents and trade secrets. Van Lindberg can certainly plead not guilty to that one: the book defines its terms extremely clearly, and discusses the various concepts separately and in depth, while also describing the way they interact.

In the first chapter he defines different types of good: rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods, excludable and no-excludable goods, private goods, public goods, common-pool goods and club goods, and goes on to examine the legal concept of property. I found these short sections very interesting and enlightening, because they made me realise that I had never really analysed the underlying concepts in any depth.

The same kind of clarity is applied to all the concepts described in the book. The author is clearly a person with a close knowledge both of the law and of the world of software. He uses interesting and sometimes surprising analogies to illustrate legal concepts and practices. For example, he observes that patent applications use indentation to clarify structure in a manner similar to coding conventions. Elsewhere he uses a Simpsons story line to help explain the concept of trade secrets, draws a parallel between credit unions and open source, compares Red Hat's patent policy and India's nuclear strategy, and sees a parallel between contract law and a distributed source code management system.

Many of the most controversial and notorious cases of recent years appear as examples: for instance a discussion of the ``GIF patent''. In the section on trademarks, there is a clear description of why AOL really had no choice but to pursue what was then called GAIM over infringement of the trademark it held on the name ``AIM''.

The book does not attempt to cover the legal issues internationally: the descriptions of the legal situation are all concerned with US law. This means that the sections on patents and copyright both describe different laws from those which apply in the UK and Europe. However, the world of software is an international one, and the one jurisdiction that matters in that world is that of the United States (which has been assiduously attempting to force its intellectual property laws on the rest of the world for some time now). As it is in the US that many of the most important and significant battles for free and open source software are being played out, understanding those battles is largely a matter of understanding the American legal position. So this book is useful and appropriate outside the US, but readers in this country will want to compare with some other source of information about the situation here. The copyright sections were the area where I felt the need for a British parallel text most strongly.

As would be expected there is considerable discussion of the various free and open source licences, and in particular the current state of the law as it applies to the GPL. Appendices include the text of the more important licences, and there are tables showing the interactions and compatibility between them.

Despite my slight reservation about the ``US-only'' descriptions of the relevant laws, this is a valuable book which should be on the shelf of anyone who is interested in the issues it covers.

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