Agent Palmer

I’ve always been enamored by the Space Program. I remember putting on a football helmet, backpack covered in tin foil, recreating Armstrong’s first steps on the moon for something, though I have no idea what and that was when I was 8 or 9?

I remember watching The Right Stuff and, what is quite possibly the best miniseries on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo era of NASA Moonshot which was co-written by Deke Slayton and Al Shepherd.

There is something unique about Of a Fire on the Moon by Norman Mailer. Is it that it’s immensely rich with poetry in prose telling one of the great triumphs of modern engineering? Is it that Mailer looks for the lurking evil of the Moon or that he’s not sure if the moon shot itself was the work of the devil?

Could it be the dark humour, the deciphering of the three men who undertook the journey and those organizations and people who helped get them there? Or the curious platitudes on science versus engineering?

There are two reasons I picked up Confessions of a Baseball Purist by Jon Miller with Mark Hyman. One, Jon Miller was the voice of the Baltimore Orioles during my formative years listening to games on the radio and two, he really knows his stuff.

The book originally released in 1998 and the updated edition from 2000 may appear dated, but it is not antiquated at all. In fact, more of his observations are proven out than those that aren’t in the 18 years since this text has last been touched.

Len Deighton’s Blitzkrieg is a focus on the many pieces of innovation, lessons learned, battles fought and won that lead to blitzkrieg, which “was quite different from anything ever experienced in previous wars.”

Deighton doesn’t go into much about the origin of the word, but he doesn’t mince words when describing what the short success of the blitzkrieg has been made of in hindsight where he writes “German triumphs in this campaign have caused their military recklessness to be hailed as genius, their dangerous gambles to be thought of as miracles.”

I always take notes when I read a book. Part of it comes from wanting the ability to add quotes to the reviews I write, but the bigger picture reason is because sometimes I like to go back to those notes and see them at a later date. By actually being able to read through a small document with all the quotes I pulled, I’ll find the one I remember, and it’s easier than paging through and rereading a whole page.

I bring this up because the notes I collected from reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson are more than a lot of the other books I have recently read, even some on the same subject.