"JoAnne Yates writes with impressive clarity about the incredibly complex origins of the information age. By focusing on the life insurance industry and by stressing both continuity and change, she provides a key to understanding the crucial relationship between technology vendors and users."--Thomas P. Hughes, author of Human-Built World

Structuring the Information Age provides insight into the largely unexplored evolution of information processing in the commercial sector and the underrated influence of corporate users in shaping the history of modern technology.

JoAnne Yates examines how life insurance firms -- where good record-keeping and repeated use of massive amounts of data were crucial -- adopted and shaped information processing technology through most of the twentieth century. The book analyzes this process beginning with tabulating technology, the most immediate predecessor of the computer, and continuing through the 1970s with early computers. Yates elaborates two major themes: the reciprocal influence of information technology and its use, and the influence of past practices on the adoption and use of new technologies. In the 1950s, insurance industry leaders recognized that computers would enable them to integrate processes previously handled separately, but they also understood that they would have to change their ways of working profoundly to achieve this integration. When it came to choosing equipment and applications, most companies ultimately preferred a gradual, incremental migration to an immediate and radical transformation.

In tracing this process, Yates shows that IBM's successful transition from tabulators to computers in part reflected that vendor's ability to provide large customers such as insurance companies with the necessary products to allow gradual change. In addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.

Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century

"Starred Review" from Publishers Weekly:
The pace of Walker's narrative replicates the frantic advance of August 1945. BBC filmmaker Walker won an Emmy for his documentary on the bombing of Hiroshima and brings precision jump-cuts to this synesthesic account of the 20th century's defining event. Beginning his story three weeks before August 6 (with the first test of a bomb some of its creators speculated might incinerate the earth's atmosphere), Walker takes readers on a roller-coaster ride through the memories of American servicemen, Japanese soldiers and civilians, and the polyglot team of scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project under Gen. Leslie Groves. He establishes the doubts, fears and hopes of the bomb's designers, most of whom participated from a fear that Nazi Germany would break the nuclear threshold first. He nicely retells the story of Japan's selection months before as a target, reflecting the accelerated progress of the war in Europe, and growing concern among U.S. policymakers at the prospect of unthinkable casualties, Japanese as well as American, should an invasion of Japan's "Home Islands" be necessary. Walker conveys above all the bewilderment of Hiroshima's people, victims of a Japanese government controlled by men determined to continue fighting at all costs.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Those who revere John Hersey's Hiroshima as a classic piece of reporting about an act unprecedented in human history -- the instantaneous annihilation of tens of thousands of civilians by human agency -- may approach a new book on the subject with lowered expectations. But in Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (HarperCollins, $26.95), Stephen Walker has painted on a larger canvas, beginning this tale of both ghastly destruction and a gamble to end a protracted war by visiting the site in the New Mexico desert where the atomic bomb was first tested. From then on, he switches back and forth from the United States to the doomed Japanese city, from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to the so-called "Little White House" near Potsdam, Germany, where President Harry Truman got a briefing on the new weapon's progress in late July 1945.

In Hiroshima, Walker zeroes in on the experience of a soldier named Toshiaki Tanaka. Separated from his wife and child by his military duties when the bomb fell, Tanaka went searching for them the next day but knew there was no hope once he found a neighbor, recognizable only by a telltale belt buckle he had worn. Then Tanaka saw "two figures, like charcoal sticks, fused together on the ground, facing what was once the doorway [to the family-owned liquor store]. One of the figures was much smaller than the other, a tiny, shapeless bundle pressed against the other's back, as if somehow clinging to it. He knew immediately this was his wife and baby daughter.

"He stood perfectly still, staring at them. Despite the terrible burns their bones stood out. They were extraordinarily white. He could not understand how it was possible they were so white. He bent down beside them. Then he picked up the bones, placing them one by one in his handkerchief. . . . He walked out into the street that no longer existed and took the bones of his wife and child all the way back to the barracks in Ujina. There he placed them, still in their handkerchief, on a shelf above his bed in his quarters. It was the only home he had left."

See also: Nuclear weapons, then and now. and A portrait of our scary world, 60 years after Hiroshima.

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima

Mark Kurlansky, the bestselling author of Cod and The Basque History of the World, here turns his attention to a common household item with a long and intriguing history: salt. The only rock we eat, salt has shaped civilization from the very beginning, and its story is a glittering, often surprising part of the history of humankind. A substance so valuable it served as currency, salt has influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions. Populated by colorful characters and filled with an unending series of fascinating details, Kurlansky's kaleidoscopic history is a supremely entertaining, multi-layered masterpiece.

You can read an excerpt:

Once I stood on the bank of a rice paddy in rural Sichuan Province, and a lean and aging Chinese peasant, wearing a faded forty-year-old blue jacket issued by the Mao government in the early years of the Revolution, stood knee deep in water and apropos of absolutely nothing shouted defiantly at me, "We Chinese invented many things!"

Amazon will show you instances of the statistically improbable phrase "solar evaporation" in the book.

Salt: A World History, by Mark Kurlansky

Born Losers is a pioneering work of American cultural history, which connects everyday attitudes and anxieties about failure to lofty ideals of individualism and salesmanship of self. Sandage's storytelling will resonate with all of us as it brings to life forgotten men and women who wrestled with The Loser -- the label and the experience -- in the days when American capitalism was building a nation of winners.

Born Losers: A History of Failure in America

Although she has seen a lot of it, she never liked change much. "The things you see when you don't have a gun" was a favorite expression, delivered on encountering any novelty or irritant.

Long Life, Fleeting History and the Wisdom of Silence

"Endlessly entertaining", "hundreds of fascinating strands", "impressive", "chock full of engaging anecdotes", "eloquent, scintillating."

Liberty and Freedom

What's in a word? Virginia Postrel reviews David Hackett Fischer's new book.

"Most Americans do not think of liberty and freedom as a set of texts, or a sequence of controversies or a system of abstractions, They understand these ideas in another way, as inherited values that they have learned early in life and deeply believe."

"[This book is] iconographic. It uses images, artifacts, and material culture as empirical evidence."

"The original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection."

'Liberty and Freedom': The Eagle Has Landed

Galileo was an astrologer.

Newton was an alchemist.

Now, for the first time, many of the leading hostage-takers speak candidly about their actions -- which a surprising number deeply regret.

Among the Hostage-Takers | Mark Bowden | Atlantic Monthly, December 2004

It's a "Guns, Germs, & Steel"-informed retelling of the Thanksgiving story by the author of a forthcoming book on pre-Columbian America.

In Jennie Augusta Brownscombe's 1914 painting "The First Thanksgiving," as in other depictions of the first Thanksgiving meal, natives and newcomers share their feast on a field of bluegrass, dandelion and clover - three species that did not exist in the Americas before colonization.

Clover and bluegrass, tame as accountants at home, transformed themselves into biological Attilas in the Americas. The peach proliferated in the Southeast with such fervor that farmers feared the Carolinas would become a wilderness of peach trees.

According to the Pilgrims' own accounts, natives outnumbered newcomers at the meal by almost two to one. But soon after Europeans arrived, European diseases killed 90 percent or more of the hemisphere's original inhabitants.

The huge herds and flocks seen by Europeans were evidence not of American bounty but of Indian absence.

Unnatural Abundance