Agent Palmer

“From the emergence of the first browser through the boom of social media, this fascinating history reveals how the internet changed everything we thought we knew about technologies–and ourselves.”

That first sentence from the inside cover flap explains in broad strokes what How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone is. But it is more than that.

Zeppelins, or rigid airships, are now just a distant memory. While there are still blimps occasionally in the sky over our heads, they are in fact similar but not the same. The airships discussed in this book, Airshipwreck, are what was and at one time they were the future.

For author Len Deighton, who wrote this book, “the airship has a magic that the aeroplane cannot replace. The size is awesome, the shape Gothic, a pointed arch twirled into a tracery of aluminum. And the reality is not disappointing.”

In Love and Anger: A View of the Sixties by Andrew Sinclair is not just a memoir and it is not just a history book, but a uniquely written and brilliantly choreographed combination of the two.

It could very well be one of the few de facto personal memoirs that also combines historical facts and lessons either through personal experience or through the much-touted shared experiences of the era that brought about rebellion, social change, challenge and discourse, art, music, love, and anger.

I’ve read First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen, the main source material for First Man the film starring Ryan Gosling. I’ve also recently read books by the two other astronauts of Apollo 11; Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, and I’ve always been fascinated with the history of space flight from every documentary and film I could get my hands on including the seminal The Right Stuff and PBS’s Moonshot.

All of this is a long way to go to explain that my opinion, while not expert within the field of astronautics, is kind of refined when it comes to the history of NASA within both the written word and moving pictures.