Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (1997)

This is a technically informed, empirically minded, and engaging account of an epoch-making invention (arguably one of the two or three most important inventions of the 20th century, other candidates being nuclear technology and antibiotics). Riordan and Hoddeson spend the bulk of their book on the technical aspects of work on the transistor, and they do this well, though after a point I had trouble following (for example, the apparently important difference between point contact and junction transistors). Along the way, they also pen deft portraits of the key figures and key organizations, above all, the incomparable mid-century Bell Labs. In terms of the technical aspects, both theoretical work (much of it coming from Europe) in quantum mechanics, in particular the behavior of electrons, and practical work, in obtaining purified forms of germanium and silicon and manipulating the flow of electrons, were crucial. Serendipity played a more frequent role than I would have imagined. Some of my take-aways and reflections include the following: 1) until reading this book, I hadn't fully understood that the key function of vacuum tubes and of transistors was to boost signals (even after reading the book, I didn't quite grasp how either of them did this). 2) nor did I understand that both of these technologies were developed with the transmission of telephone calls in mind (the primary business of ATT, Bell Labs' sponsor, after all). Their use in computers was, initially, a byproduct. For this reason, the full magnitude of the transistor revolution only dawned on people, including its inventors, a couple of decades after its invention in 1947. 3) the book did an excellent job illustrating the role of both collaboration and competition in scientific progress. 4) I was reminded of Robert Gordon's important book The Rise and Decline of American Growth. Gordon emphasizes the years 1920 to 1950 as a period of unprecedented and since unmatched growth in productivity. I don't think he explains exactly why that was the case (though come to think of it, he may attribute the surge in productivity to a more fully worked out application of electric power). I'm pretty sure he doesn't discuss the development of the transistor. Of course, while the transistor was invented at the tail end of this period, it only came into widespread use in the 1950s and 1960s. Its proliferation has coincided not with the increase, or even just maintenance, of productivity growth, but with its slowing down. Of course, it has changed entertainment, culture, news, politics, and much more quite dramatically. So a bit of a conundrum there. 5) this is not an original point, but this book, in conjunction with Gordon's, has led me to think of the transistor as a third "general purpose technology" of the last 200 years, alongside the steam engine and electricity.

Anton Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023)

I began this book with great hope - after all, Nicholas Carr, whose books on the internet (The Shallows) and social media (Superbloom) I have found so perceptive, had endorsed it. Alas, the work disappointed. Perhaps I was at fault, but I was never able to tap into its argument. A Web reads like an extended piece in the Feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - allusive, polemical, serpentine. The book prioritizes phenomenological observations about the nature of the web, which it renders in often poetical-paradoxical phrases and pretentious words. Barba-Kay provides scant evidence for his claims. He tends toward hyperbole (only "the bomb" - i.e. the nuclear bomb - rivals and parallels the web in eschatological significance). Not only did I not find myself persuaded by most of these big claims; I didn't even find them particularly arresting. After scant 100 pages, I put the book aside - something I rarely do. Given Carr's high standing in my eyes, though, maybe I'll look up reviews of the book and see if any of them can show me what I missed.

Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (1984)

This book was a huge - and very pleasant - surprise for me. I read it in connection with my course (and interest in) Media & Minds. I thought I had read or at least knew of the most important works in the field of media ecology - McLuhan, Ong, Goody, Postman, etc. No Sense of Place had only recently registered in my awareness. So my expectation was that it would, at most, fill in a few new details. Instead, what I found was a book that not only made a new, and very innovative, argument about the impact of television. Much more broadly, I think the book qualifies as a significant contribution to social theory (and it turns out it's been cited more than 8,000 times). Meyrowitz does this by combining Erving Goffman with Marshall McLuhan. Goffman, about whom only the title of his most famous book - The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - had given me an inkling of his ideas, turns out to be more complex and interesting than I had realized. His theory is that we are performing on many stages (not just one, as I had thought), while also retreating to a "back stage" for rehearsal of our "front stage" roles and for rest. So it turns out that Goffman's theory is much more about roles than I had suspected, and hence is also relevant to explaining group formation. But Goffman's theory is static, and this is where McLuhan comes in. Meyrowitz argues that new media change informational flows, as with the introduction of TV, thereby changing "situations." These define roles, and so as situations change, so too do the borders between front stage and back stage. Meyrowitz applies this quite persuasively to explain many of the changes in American society since the 1960s, thus offering a worthy alternative to Ronald Inglehart's account, which revolves around the shift from material to post-material values. Just as Postman's Amusing Ourselves made arguments about TV that now also seem remarkably prescient about our digital age, so too do Meyrowitz's arguments regularly seem to anticipate changes we are now living through.

Randall Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification (1979)

For some time I'd been meaning to read two widely cited classics from the 1970s about American education: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis's Schooling in Capitalist America and Collins's book. I thought of the books as rivals, offering different accounts of education: Bowles and Gintis, who were Marxists at the time, argued that schooling primarily served the function of instilling discipline in workers for the rigors of capitalist work. I assumed that Collins, one of the leading advocates of a conflict theory in sociology, would offer a largely empirical account of how individual competition fueled the race for credentials. The race for credentials, I expected, would only modify, but not constitute, the educational system. To my great and pleasant surprise, Collins turned out to be much more theoretical, and theoretically bold, than I had expected. He argues that education does not provide productivity-enhancing skills. Rather, it's all about carving out "property in positions," i.e. sinecures. Collins supports his claims with evidence of various kinds. Whether he's right or not, I'm not sure; but I found his ideas highly thought-provoking, to say the least. Throughout Collins acknowledges his intellectual debts to Weber and, indeed, reminded me in many ways, both substantively and styllistically, of the master.

Leon Botstein, Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (1997)

This book launched the network (Bard High School Early Colleges) in which I now teach. Frankly, I had mixed reactions to it. The book is wider ranging than I expected - while Botstein makes arguments that lend themselves to our "early college" model, they are not the focus of the book (which, truth be told, meanders somewhat, though often in interesting directions). In short, I was surprised that this book inspired Michael Bloomberg's chancellor of education to reach out to Botstein and propose a collaboration, which led to the founding of BHSEC Manhattan in 2001. The early parts of the book I found less persuasive. Botstein begins by focusing on - and lamenting - the pervasive pessimism he sees around him, which is a surprising commentary on the go-go '90s. If one were being charitable, one might say it's testimony to Botstein's independence of mind. However, he himself provides plenty of evidence - including the stagnation of middle-class wages since the 1970s - that would seem to make pessimism appear quite warranted. Also unconvincing was his main rationale for having students start college earlier - he rests his case on the earlier physical maturation of adolescents today compared to 50 or 100 years ago (for example, the onset of first menstruation is now more than a year earlier). Botstein never even attempts to show that this physical precocity has been matched by intellectual acceleration. The recent work of Jean Twenge on the "safetyism" of Generation Z (Generations) makes the opposite seem more likely - 16-year-olds today, for example, behave much like 13-year-olds of thirty years ago. In the second half of the book I began to warm to my Founding Father. As unachievable as it may be, his desire to inculcate a passion for learning resonated with me. He cites Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's "flow state" - the intense, edge-of-one's-capabilities engagement of the master musician or craftsman - as what we as teachers should aim to inspire and facilitate in our students. Botstein makes appealing suggestions about how to encourage a sense of wonder, curiosity, and intellectual modesty - all attitudes that I hold dear. So by the end of the book, I found myself engaged by Botstein's outlook and stance toward life, if not fully persuaded by his rationale for early college.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories (2016)

Through his writings and organizational work (establishing the Core Knowledge Foundation in 1986), Hirsch has done more than anybody else to promote the importance of knowledge - rather than generic skills and "creativity" - in education. In this persuasive book, he presents evidence that our educational system has been failing for much longer than I understood - since the 1960s, reading comprehension scores of American 17-year-olds have been declining or flat. He attributes this failure to three key ideas of progressive pedagogy: that children's natural curiosity, inclinations, and developmental stages should guide teaching; that education needs to be tailored to each individual ("child-centered" pedagogy is a phrase one hears constantly, and without further explanation, as if its value were self-evident, in these parts); and, most fatally, that schools should aim to teach general skills, rather than knowledge. Hirsch offers plenty of evidence in his indictment of these erroneous idea, but perhaps his most telling evidence comes from France, where a knowledge-centered curriculum was replaced, in 1989, by a progressive approach. Over the next two decades, French education declined on all sorts of measures (see below for more on these criteria). Finally, Hirsch presents his alternative, vocabulary-building and knowledge-rich, curriculum in some detail, and again proffers significant evidence as to its efficacy. In what, though, does this efficacy consist, according to Hirsch? For Hirsch, the advantages of a knowledge-rich curriculum are three fold: it improves all students' chances of becoming competent, successful adults; it especially helps students from poor and otherwise deprived backgrounds, thus helping to close the achievement gap (something that Hirsch comes back to repeatedly); finally, a common foundation of knowledge is necessary for meaningful citizenship, and hence for the health of our democracy. Since his 1987 book Cultural Literacy, which put him on the map in the education wars, Hirsch has often been tarred as a conservative. (It didn't help him in this regard that Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which was, in fact, conservative, came out the same year.) In fact, though, Hirsch's approach is not conservative in any simple sense of the term. It's true that he believes that for children to become successful (in a broad sense of the term) adults, they have to be familiar with what what other adults know - the shared knowledge of the culture, a public good. He thus values this knowledge for pragmatic reasons. But he acknowledges - and even welcomes the fact - that what's shared can grow and change. Another criticism has been that Hirsch's approach requires an even greater emphasis on testing than is the case now. In fact, however, Hirsch expresses criticism of the current scale (and content) of testing, which absorbs a large portion of school time and which, given the fundamental error of trying to teach students generic skills, is bound to produce poor results and frustrated students, teachers, and parents. Hirsch's argument resonates with, and greatly deepens, what I've seen during my last decade of teaching high school. Students' vocabularies and knowledge of the world are suprisingly limited and fragmented. Too seldom does one feel part of a system that is building systematic knowledge.

Moshe Halbertal, Maimonides: Life and Thought (2014)

I knew very little about Maimonides when I started this intellectual biography - basically, only that he was somewhat akin to people like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Thomas Aquinas in that they all sought to integrate their religious faiths with Aristotelian philosophy. By the time I was finished with Maimonides, I was, to put it in technical terms, blown away by him. His intellectual audacity was breathtaking. As a type, he reminded me of Max Weber. John Leizman, a colleague at Bard, compared him to Aristotle himself. Maimonides' first major project was a codification of all of halakhah, the great, overflowing and, by design, contentious corpus of Jewish law encompassing the Mishnah and the Talmud. Maimonides aspired to put an end to the contention by codifying and, in a sense, replacing that corpus. This work - Mishneh Torah- drew extensively on Aristotelian ideas. His other great project, however, The Guide for the Perplexed, more directly addressed the challenge of integrating Torah and philosophy. However, unlike the Mishneh Torah, the Guide addressed an elite audience and concealed its radicalism, making it an esoteric text. Halbertal skillfully guides the reader through the theological and philosophical questions Maimonides wrestled with. The decisive question pertained to God's will and God's wisdom. Emphasizing the former meant that God created the world ex nihilo, intervened purposefully and repeatedly in history, etc. This fitted the traditional, and arguably self-evident, interpretation of the Bible. Contrary to it, however, Maimonides's revolutionary theology focused on the wisdom of God, which implied that the world had existed eternally, God did not intervene, God's wisdom could be found in the orderliness of nature, etc. In short, this was a nearly wholesale reinterpration of Judaism in light of Aristotle's thought. Even prophecy and personal salvation were reinterpreted as natural accomplishments. What made Maimonides's project all the more remarkable were the conditions in which he lived and worked. He and his family fled al-Andalus in the middle of the 12th century, upon the seizure of power by the relatively intolerant Almohads. Unlike many Andalusian Jews, who fled to Provence, Maimonides fled first toward the Almohad power center in the Maghrib. Eventually, they settled in Cairo. Maimonides had lost the safety and familiarity of Cordoba and had to make due as a refugee. To accomplish such a revolutionary rethinking of an entire tradition under such conditions is truly remarkable.