Of all things Geek. I am…
Close Up is about an actor, relationships, the film industry, and an author. It is an amazing fictionalized look into a world, when film was starting to reel from the expanse of television and the idea of celebrity in film stars.
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Let’s start with the cover, the inside cover, because using those words to describe the book seems better than making something up with different words that mean the same thing.
“But What If We’re Wrong? is a book of original, reported, interconnected pieces, which speculates on the likelihood that many universally accepted, deeply ingrained cultural and scientific beliefs will someday seem absurd.”
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Before I get into this book and it’s subject (Claude Shannon), I must borrow from the authors in their acknowledgements, because they have succinctly described the reason that I picked up this book and others, like Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, even Masters of Doom, countless others on tech innovators like Bill Gates, The Steves (Jobs and Wozniak); and will continue to do so.
“…it is not the Internet that is unnatural, nor our feast of information, but a refusal to consider what their origins are…”
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When “Venus, Inc.” was published, the concept of extremely far reaching advertising probably seemed like science fiction, but reading this now for the first time in 2017, it doesn’t feel so far off.
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I always read through entire books. I’m not saying that to be a snob, but most Acknowledgments at the end of a book, give you a glimpse into a short commentary on the book process itself. However, I was thrown for a loop when I was reading the Acknowledgements of Bomber by Len Deighton, when I read the sentence; “This is perhaps the first book to be entirely recorded on magnetic tape for the I.B.M.72IV.”
Deighton’s modesty aside, “this is perhaps,” is definitely modest, the sentence was something that I couldn’t just read, it had to be looked into.
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