This is a murder mystery in reverse: you know who died but don’t know the circumstances. Over the course of the plot, you find out more about the situation from various family members’ points of view. Normally, I find this structure annoying but it works for this novel. By the end of the book, you aren’t even certain who did what to whom. The action takes place mostly around Capri on the Italian coast in some pretty fancy digs, and the family members are all scions of wealth, or so it seems. I liked how things were tied up by the end which I can’t go into more details, the characters were all fascinating studies of family dysfunction and seemed very realistically drawn. Highly recommended.

This well-researched book chronicles the unsung history of computing told from a unique perspective of what went on in the former Soviet Union, particularly the pace of innovations in Ukraine. There are period photographs of both the people and the machines that were built. Most of us in the west are familiar with this story told from our perspective, but there was a parallel path that was happening back when Alan Turing, John Von Neumann and Grace Hopper were active in the US and UK.

The names Sergey Lebedev and Victor Glushkov may not mean anything to most of us, but both were the key developers of electronic computers in the early days in Ukraine. When room-sized computers were being built in numerous labs in the US and UK, the other side of the Iron Curtain had a lot of challenges. For one thing, these scientists couldn’t read Western journals that described their operation without special permission from Communist Party elders. Getting parts was an issue too. And the party continued to not understand the steps needed to construct the machine, and continually blocked the scientists’ efforts.

Lebedev lead a team of researchers outside of Kyiv in the early 1950s to build the first digital computer that had a 5 kHz CPU that performed 3,000 operations per second. Nevertheless, it could solve linear equations of 400 unknowns. He was transferred to Moscow where over the course of his career built more than a dozen computers. This is where Glushkov came into play to help direct these projects both in Moscow and Kyiv, including the first computers based on transistors (and later using integrated circuits) and not the temperamental vacuum tubes. (One of which, the MNP3, is shown above.) Part of the challenges these projects faced were the top-down Soviet system of central planning committees running seemingly endless equipment performance reviews and testing. One of those early machines were used in utilitarian projects such as designing synthetic rubber manufacturing processes, building railroad tracks, and controlling chemical processes. Glushkov was also instrumental in the development of the Soviet internet, which faced a difficult birth thanks to Soviet bureaucracy.

Another chapter documents the rise of the personal computer. The Soviet versions, called the Specialist-85 and ZX Spectrum computers, were developed in the 1980s in Ukraine. Both were widely available as a hobbyist’s construction kit from department stores. The former ran BASIC on cloned Intel-like CPUs. The latter machine was built with its own CPU designed in Ukraine and was a gaming machine which looked a lot like the Sinclair models of that era. As PCs became popular around the world, the Soviet factories began offering their own IBM PC clones running their own versions of DOS and CP/M operating systems such as the Neuron and the Poisk. Many of these machines were built in Ukrainian factories. That all changed in 1994, when imported Western-built PCs were sold in the Soviet Union.

The second half of the book documents eight computer companies who have flourished in the modern era, including Grammarly,  MacPaw – who sells the CleanMyMac utility and one of the sponsors of the book, Readdle – who was early to the mobile app marketplace, and several others.

The book is a fascinating look at a part of history that I wasn’t familiar with, even though I have been involved in the early days of PCs and tech since the 1980s.

The novel The Perfect Home by Daniel Kenitz centers on a power couple who are behind a leading shelter reality TV show and what could go wrong. If you are a fan of such shows you might enjoy the novel, which chronicles the decline of their relationship when the husband plans on getting rid of his family in the quest to garner more fame, more power, and more money on his own. Twin babies are involved, an affair happens, and the wife reunites with her long estranged father, all in the quest to figure out the shifting reality — in this case, their actual lives — rather than what is depicted on screen as they renovate various homes around the country as the cameras and scripted witty banter roll. Having been through a divorce from my own cheating spouse, I still found this novel interesting and engaging, and the exploration of the shifting understanding of marital trust worthy of the author’s treatment.

The Imagination Emporium by Duncan Wardle is an interesting business book. Unlike many books that fall flat after a solid first chapter full of suggestions on how to improve your workaday life, Wardle’s book is a solid construction that is chock full of real tools to help you figure out new ideas, sort and rate them and act on the best after building a consensus from various stakeholders. It is a “What Color is Your Parachute” reimagined for the digital, collaborative age, and like Parachute contains some simple but very effective ideation exercises. The trick is to actually stop reading and work through them to generate the ideas yourself.

Wardle was former head of innovation and creativity for Disney, and the design of the book’s pages show exactly how creative and clever he can be at getting you to use his tools. It starts off by exploring the “river of thinking,” where colleagues shoot down your ideas because that isn’t the Way Things Have Been Done or because There isn’t Any Budget or No, Because types of replies. Sound familiar? We have all been there.

Wardle says that our imaginations began to be stifled the day we went to first grade and told to color between the lines. That attitude creates a river of negative thinking that has lasted all of our lives. Another example — don’t call the person sitting by your office’s front door a receptionist, but as “Director of First Impressions.” See what that does? The person becomes empowered to do something important.

None of us go to work today and say we are going to kill a bunch of ideas, and yet, that is what we all do. Wardle’s book will get you to go to “Yes, and” and become better idea nurturers by building a team of diverse opinions and perspectives, and have naive experts that can stimulate your discussions.

Pam Baker has written a very useful resource for AI beginners and experts alike. Don’t let the “Dummies” title fool you into thinking otherwise. This is also a book that is hard to get your hands around – in that respect it mirrors what GenAI itself is like. Think of it as a practical tutorial into how to incorporate GenAI into your working life to make you a more productive and potent human. It is also not a book that you can read in some linear front-to-back sense: there are far too many tips, tricks, strategies and things to think about as you move through your AI journey. But it is a book that is absolutely essential, especially if you have been frustrated at learning how to better use AI.

Underlying it all is Baker’s understanding on what the winning formula for using GenAI is – to understand that the output from the computer sounds like a human. But to be really effective, the human must think like a machine and tell GenAI what you want with better prompt engineering. (She spends an entire chapter on that subject with lots of practical suggestions that combine the right mix of clarity, context and creativity.  And so you will find out there is a lot more depth to this than you think.) “You must provide the vision, the passion, and the impetus in your prompts,” Baker writes. Part of that exploration is understanding how to best collaborate with GenAI. To that end, she recommends starting with a human team to work together as moderators in crafting prompts and refining the results from the GenAI tool.” The more information the AI has, the more tailored and sophisticated the outputs will be,” she writes.

To that end, Baker used this strategy to create this very book and was the first such effort for its publisher Wiley. She says it took about half the time to write this, when compared to other books that she has written on technology. This gives the book a certain verisimilitude and street cred. This doesn’t mean ripping the output and setting it in type: that would have been a disaster. Instead, she used AI to hone her research and find sources, then go to those citations and find out if they really exist, adding to her own knowledge along the way. “It really sped up the research I needed to do in the early drafts,” she told me. “I still used it to polish the text in my voice. And you still need to draft in chunks and be strategic about what you share with the models that have a public internet connection, because I didn’t want my book to be incorporated into some model.” All of this is to say that you should use AI to figure out what you do best and that will narrow down the most appropriate tools to use to eliminate the more tedious parts.

Baker makes the point that instead of wasting effort on trying to use GenAI to automate jobs and cut costs, we should use it to create rather than eliminate. It is good advice, and her book is chock full of other suggestions on how you can find the sweet spot for your own creative expressions. She has an intriguing section on how to lie to the model to help improve your own productivity, what she calls a “programming correction.” The flip side of this is also important, and she has several suggestions on how to prevent models from generating false information.

She catalogs the various GenAI vendors and their GenAI tools into how they craft different text, audio and visual outputs, and then summarizes several popular uses, such as in generating photorealistic artworks from text descriptions, some of which she has included in this book. She also explodes several AI myths, such as AI will take over the world or lead towards massive unemployment. She has several recommendations on how to stay on top of AI developments, including continuously upskill your knowledge and tools, become more agile to embrace changes in the field, have the right infrastructure in place to run the models, and keep on top of ethical considerations for its use.

By way of context, I have known Baker for decades. We were trying to figure out when we first began working together, and both our memories failed us. Over time, one of us has worked for the other in numerous projects, websites and publications. She is an instructor for LinkedIn Learning, and has written numerous books, including another “Dummies” book on ChatGPT.

Andrew Hahn’s delightful compendium of 40 rare maps of the St. Louis area is informative and an amazing record of the growth — and decline– of the region. He has put together maps from 1767 to the present, including some “fantasy maps” of how contemporary geographers envision the future infrastructure of the city. The maps show how the city developed around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and how events such as the Cyclone of 1896 and the fire of 1846 damaged various neighborhoods.

There are many different styles of maps featured, including maps for exploration and navigation, pocket and atlas maps, development and planning maps and pictorial maps.

Two places in the history of the city are chronicled with maps:

• The 1904 World’s Fair which can be seen in modern Forest Park (and this exhibit at the local history museum further documents) and
• The construction of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which first opened in 1859. The garden worked with Frederick Olmsted on a 1890s-era redesign and is a vibrant oasis of natural beauty in the present day.

There are maps which show the massive population movements of the city — reaching a peak population of some 850,000 in 1950, only to decline to about 280,000 residents today.

Han is a seventh generation St. Louis native, and since 2003 he has worked as director of the Campbell House Museum, an 1851 townhouse in downtown St. Louis.

Andrew Hahn’s delightful compendium of 40 rare maps of the St. Louis area is informative and an amazing record of the growth — and decline– of the region. He has put together maps from 1767 to the present, including some “fantasy maps” of how contemporary geographers envision the future infrastructure of the city. The maps show how the city developed around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, and how events such as the Cyclone of 1896 and the fire of 1846 damaged various neighborhoods.

There are many different styles of maps featured, including maps for exploration and navigation, pocket and atlas maps, development and planning maps and pictorial maps.

Two places in the history of the city are chronicled with maps:

• The 1904 World’s Fair which can be seen in modern Forest Park (and this exhibit at the local history museum further documents) and
• The construction of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, which first opened in 1859. The garden worked with Frederick Olmsted on a 1890s-era redesign and is a vibrant oasis of natural beauty in the present day.

There are maps which show the massive population movements of the city — reaching a peak population of some 850,000 in 1950, only to decline to about 280,000 residents today.

Hahn is a seventh generation St. Louis native, and since 2003 he has worked as director of the Campbell House Museum, an 1851 townhouse in downtown St. Louis.

Normally, I try to write reviews without any spoilers, but the main spoiler has already been revealed in the blurb about this very inventive and realistic novel about a very modern relationship. She has inherited her family business, and falls in love with a handsome gentlemen. What saves this from being another romance is that the business is a casket showroom, and he is actually a representative of Death. His job is to visit someone who is about to die and comfort them in their final moments. It is an interesting conceit, and his business doesn’t get revealed to her until halfway through the novel, at which point their love affair has fully blossomed. The book nicely deals with mutual trust, sharing one’s feelings, and one’s place in the family in a way that is fresh and interesting. This novel could border on the trite or the macabre, but doesn’t. And the topic of death for me personally is a tough one, having lost my adult son a few years ago to cancer. But Evans treats the topic with a great deal of sensitivity and verve, and I won’t give away the ending but this is a book that is interesting and well worth your time as well as well-written. Highly recommended.

Three women nearing 50 share a vacation to celebrate one of them getting divorced. The three share a common tragedy 20-plus years ago involving a grisly mass murder scene in a guesthouse and have since bonded over the experience. This isn’t the most unique plots for a thriller until the bodies start dropping when the vacation turns sour, relationships strain, and the trio meets a mysterious couple of newlyweds. Then things get interesting, and we learn more about the backgrounds of all the parties and try to solve both the original mystery that brought the women together as well as what is happening in the current timeline. One of them puts it quite eloquently when she says she has been listening to the soundtrack of life and she is caught up in her grief over the original grisly murder scene — which somehow she escaped. The characters are finely drawn, and this is the first murder mystery that hinges on an artificial intelligence plot twist which was cleverly conceived. Highly recommended.

I am of two minds with this novel, which chronicles a fictional Jewish family on the north shore of Long Island and how they devolve after the father is kidnapped for a week. The three children are tracked as they grow up into dysfunctional adults with addiction problems, with marital problems, and with various other issues in trying to cope with their father’s ordeal. The Long Island Compromise is really a devil’s bargain — having lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs in America, after escaping the Holocaust, after dealing with numerous anti-semitic people, places, and circumstances. Having grown up on Long Island’s south shore and raised my daughter on the North Shore in a community that mirrors what is described in fictional terms in the novel, this story resonated with me. The excesses experiences with the family’s wealth, and with trying to out-Jew their neighbors is all too real.

So is their reaction to the father’s kidnapping, which manifests itself in different ways to each family member. Some choose avoidance : “any reference to a thing that could later be a trigger to discuss The Thing” — the kidnapping — is a very apt way to describe grief and the fragility of those who are grieving.

So what is there not to like about this book? It isn’t that it cuts too close to home. It isn’t that its scenes of BDSM or drug abuse or numerous hooker and mystic encounters are (as I imagine) too realistic. The descriptions are sometimes just so filled with irony and accuracy that I would often pause while reading to let them sink in. But they could be hard to take for some readers. And for those of you who grew up in suburbia, or who are Jewish, this could be entertaining, poignant, or both. Certainly, its treatment of how families confront their destinies and future potential is laid bare in a way that I haven’t seen very often, and is quite genuine.

The novel is based on this actual kidnapping that happened in the 1970s. Read it here.