While reading The Killer Angels, I found myself in a fit of "gosh, I want to read fiction right now." I had enjoyed reading Dread Nation, and recalled a sequel was coming out. That thought, along with the so f'ing long overdue recognition of racial inequality in this country, meant reading this book next was a no-brainer.

And it is so very much worth reading, recommended with delight.

Yes, there are zombies in it. Yes, there is heartbreak in it. No, there isn't a happy ending. Yes, there are many, many social commentary digs at both being a woman, and being black. And yes, there were black people in the Wild Wild West, which was a comment that Ireland makes in the author note at the end of the book, though you wouldn't know it from most of the other western fiction books out there.

This book follows immediately after Dread Nation, with Jane, Katherine, and a number of other Summerland residents fleeing the zombie hoard that broke out in town. What we learn in this tale, which alternates between Jane's and Katherine's perspectives (a style I enjoyed very much), is that Gideon Carr, the rich white boy from the previous book, has a significant part to play in this tale, and that one needs friendships (a lot).

As learned in The War for Kindness, fiction is a gateway drug into empathy. I feel this book does a gentle introduction into the crap a woman deals with as second class citizens, and barely starts to introduce the worse crap non-white people have dealt with in this country.

While I recommend this book more than I recommended Dread Nation, the first is needed to understand this one. Read them in order, if you decide to read them.

Adventure is only swell so long as a body is enjoying the trip. After that, it becomes an ordeal.
Location: 85

And even if I do not understand the pain she feels right now, it does not mean I cannot support her through it. That is what friends do.
Location: 377

“You can’t help but get involved in things, even when you know better. How can I depend on a woman who finds it appropriate to run off into the fire instead of away from it? It’s who you are, Jane, and I’ve always loved that about you. But while that may be admirable in a Miss Preston’s girl, it ain’t in a wife. I want someone I know is going to be there, day after day, not off running on some adventure.” “Why is that okay for you and not me? Why is it okay for a man to be out running around and not a woman?” Jackson shakes his head. “I ain’t saying it’s fair, but that’s the kind of woman I want.
Location: 545

He shakes his head, and I can’t help but feel that in all our time together I didn’t know him like I thought I did, not really. He doesn’t want a wife. He wants a doormat.
Location: 552

Hope is deadly,
Location: 782

move.” I force myself deep, deep down into the place in my mind where everything is quiet and cold and my heart ain’t breaking. Luckily it ain’t as hard as a body would think. How does one go on when they’ve lost their heart? By being heartless.
Location: 825

He gives me a polite smile, one that I suppose is meant to be reassuring. Men have been giving me that smile my entire life. I do not return it.
Location: 1,604

I take a deep breath and let it out. There is no use in yelling at a grown woman about her life choices, even if they are poor.
Location: 1,795

As Eve got to the part where the ghost led her through the dark woods and west to something like freedom, Aunt Aggie shook her head. “Sometimes, when the world doesn’t make sense, it’s easier to pretend like there are other forces at work. But there ain’t. That’s just life.”
Location: 1,938

“There ain’t any kind of inoculation against fear and false confidence.”
Location: 2,026

lap. I suppose when lines are drawn it is easier to go with what one knows than to forge new paths.
Location: 2,072

I’ve been living so long for the future that I haven’t been focusing on the now. And I ain’t sure I know how to change that.
Location: 2,294

I was scared, so I stayed.” He shakes his head. “I should have run like my friends, but I didn’t.” I nod, because I understand that feeling. Sometimes it can feel like the unknown is worse than the hardships you’re enduring.
Location: 2,320

“Betsy was a hero,” I say. “Exactly,” Redfern says, nodding. “Heroes die. But survivors live to tell the story. When the dead got to be too much for us to handle, most of those fools wanted to keep fighting, because that’s what we’d been taught. I was one of the first to cut and run. I knew what the score was. The things you’re taught are only useful if they keep you alive.”
Location: 2,344

“It’s the American way,” she would say, watching from the porch as another family took up residence at Rose Hill. “You help as much as you can—but no more. You don’t think those founding fathers wrote all those pretty words about independence just to help the poor, do you? The books are right there in the library, Jane. They did it because they didn’t want to pay taxes, to have some king tell them the price of tea. And for that, they went to war, and hundreds of people died.
Location: 2,353

In a world that is morally gray, I somehow still believe in right and wrong.
Location: 3,079

I laugh, because that is what you do when a man says something ridiculous.
Location: 3,090

An ache blossoms in my chest, and I pick up my untouched glass of whiskey and drain it. The liquid tastes as smoky as my memories and burns all the way down. It feels like penance. That is the real reason I do not drink too often: I am afraid that if I find my way to the bottle I will be lost forever.
Location: 3,101

I smile tightly, but say nothing. He is trying to protect me, in the simple way men are always trying to protect women: by stealing away their freedom.
Location: 3,125

Don’t let San Francisco fool you. It might seem pretty, but it’s been built on the same volatile mixture of greed and exclusion as the rest of this country.
Location: 3,411

But more important, it makes me wonder: How can we make the world a better place if we are always at odds with one another for every single kind of reason under the sun?
Location: 3,436

Unlike so much else in our lives, it felt . . . easy. I guess falling for someone always is. It’s the staying in love that’s hard.
Location: 3,599

I cannot help but remember the way she had never hesitated to call out some random bit of unfairness or chicanery. (As long as it was not her own, of course.) There is something admirable about being willing to stand up against injustice and name the devil true.
Location: 3,756

I consider telling them about the feelings between me and Callie, how close we’d grown over the past year, but I decide not to. Some things just ain’t for the telling, and even though Callie is gone, I want to keep the memory of our time together for myself.
Location: 4,528

face. I know this is a sin, but there are few things I enjoy more than being right.
Location: 5,274

And that is that. Sometimes the people we love fiercest leave the world like a whisper.
Location: 5,957

This book was a micro.blog book-recommendation-week recommendation. Many of the recommended books were "hey look, my god is better than your god" books, which are less than remotely interesting to me, and I would say actively off-putting. This one was recommended by a reader who reads a lot and has thoughtful reviews (unlike my reviews here which more more "how I came upon this book and did I like it"), so I picked it up.

The blurb on the back of the book is pretty accurate. Roy Valois is an accomplished artist, finds out he has maybe four months to live, and seeks a peek at his obituary. Apparently obituaries are pre-written for sufficiently famous people (which lends momentum to the idea that maybe everyone should write their own obituaries, see how that works out), and, according to this (fiction) book, the New York Times is sufficiently easy enough to hack into that you can read them.

What follows is the death of a couple people, followed by the not-so-great investigating of said deaths, followed by twists and turns and a very strange ending (that fits, is just ... odd).

I can't tell if this book is an early book by Abrahams (there are three Peter Abrahams authors at quick count, pick one), but I'm not a fan. I didn't like the writing style. Didn't click. I was mostly annoyed at Roy's actions, like he was a little dumb and emotionally stunted. I don't know, maybe it was something else.

If you're trying to read all of Abrahams' works, sure, read this one. Maaaaybe it is desert island material, but not really. Skip it.

Instead he dragged the shiny cone to the center of the floor, not far from Delia, and just looked at it for a while. Sometimes he got ideas that way. Not now. The blurry image of a delicate, attenuated silence that had been in his mind refused to grow clearer. He pulled up a stool, got out his sketch pad and a soft pencil. Nothing happened at first. Roy was used to that, had learned patience in his work. No hurry: that was what he always told himself.
Page: 53

People died on the highway every day, passing from normal life, through terror, to nothing.
Page: 122

He’d always liked shoveling snow—the full-body rhythm, the squeak the blade sometimes made digging in, the shovel loads holding their shapes for brief moments in the air. Some guys did a sloppy job of it, moving just enough snow to free their cars, but not Roy—he always made sure there was no loose snow, left the ground hardpacked, the banks squared at their bases, all angles right angles.
Page: 125

This reminds me of Jonathan.

"And remember Picasso’s warning.”

“What warning was that?”

“Don’t become your own connoisseur.” Wisdom, the kind that actually shifted the mind around at one stroke, revealed what needed revealing: you didn’t come across it.
Page: 157

"You’re thinking Washington and Lincoln,” he said.

“Pretty clear that those days are long gone. We’re in a late Roman phase, just scratching and clawing to hold on.”

“Hold on to what?” Roy said.

“Why, global power, naturally,” said Truesdale. “And the wealth and influence that comes from it.”
Page: 185

At that moment, Roy stopped being afraid of what might happen next. It took no effort at all, simply happened, a sudden ascent into courage, or at least total fearlessness, probably not the same thing.
Page: 265

Roy closed his eyes. Turned out that death didn’t simplify your life. How many people had been in a position to learn that one?
Page: 312

He turned and nodded.

“Hey,” said Freddy.

“This could work.”

“Why not?” Turk said, his eyes full of moonlight. “It’s a classic.”

“How’s that?” said Freddy.

“From Homer,” Turk said.

Freddy shrugged. “Don’t have time for TV.”

Life could be sweet.
Page: 314

I laughed at this. They were going in Trojan Horse, and the not-so-clued-in one thought Homer meant Simpson.

I've had this book on my reading list for a couple months now, checking it out of the library and returning it unread. Finally read it, and am glad I did. If I were in a position of power and influence at a company that has research and product development departments / organizations, I would insist that everyone in those groups also read it.

Okay, so, according to Bahcall (who, let's admit, has more experience than I, and likely you, do), product (anything you do, whether sell a physical object or provide a service, but mostly sell an object) development falls into two categories: incremental improvements on an existing product or an implementation of a revolutionary new idea. How a product makes it to the end user varies. While a revolutionary product can kickstart an organization, you need the improvements people to sustain it. Artists to create and soldiers to sustain.

I loved how various physics models came into play in the telling of different companies' histories. Hello, phase transitions. Hello, emergence.

The book provides a number of growing company pitfalls, and, delightfully, ways to avoid them. How awesome is that?

The appendices of the book are excellent summaries of the book, which, quite honestly, I'm going to be reviewing frequently. If nothing else, reminding myself of the five laws of loonshots from Bahcall's own site. I strongly recommend this book for anyone working to create something new, and state the book is worth reading for everyone.

So many things have broken down inside a cancer cell by the time it starts proliferating that there’s no easy fix.
Page 5

My resistance to after-the-fact analyses of culture comes from being trained as a physicist.
Page 9

To liberate those buried drugs and other valuable products and technologies, we need to begin by understanding why good teams, with the best intentions and excellent people, kill great ideas.
Page 9

There’s no way to analyze just one molecule of water, or one electron in a metal, and explain any of these collective behaviors. The behaviors are something new: phases of matter.
Page 12

When people organize into a team, a company, or any kind of group with a mission they also create two competing forces—two forms of incentives. We can think of the two competing incentives, loosely, as stake and rank.
Page 12

When groups are small, for example, everyone’s stake in the outcome of the group project is high.
Page 13

The perks of rank—job titles or the increase in salary from being promoted—are small compared to those high stakes.
Page 13

As teams and companies grow larger, the stakes in outcome decrease while the perks of rank increase. When the two cross, the system snaps.
Page 13

In the high-stakes competition between weapons and counterweapons, the weak link was not the supply of new ideas. It was the transfer of those ideas to the field. Transfer requires trust and respect on both sides. But officers “made it utterly clear that scientists or engineers employed in these laboratories were of a lower caste of society,”
Page 21

Bush and a handful of other scientific leaders—including James Conant, a chemist and the president of Harvard University—believed war was coming and the US was dangerously unprepared. Both had witnessed the tendency of generals to fight a war with the weapons and tactics of the preceding war.
Page 21

One molecule can’t transform solid ice into liquid water by yelling at its neighbors to loosen up a little.
Page 22

The ship’s carpenter, 58 years old, decided he had no chance. “He called out to one of the ship’s officers, ‘Goodbye, Sir. It was a good life while it lasted,’ waved and then calmly ‘walked right into the path of a wave pounding across the afterdeck. It was like a minnow being swallowed by a whale.’”
Page 29

Rather than champion any individual loonshot, they create an outstanding structure for nurturing many loonshots.
Page 38

1. SEPARATE THE PHASES:

Separate your artists and soldiers .

People responsible for developing high-risk, early-stage ideas (call them “artists”) need to be sheltered from the “soldiers” responsible for the already-successful, steady-growth part of an organization.
Page 38

Tailor the tools to the phase.

Efficiency systems such as Six Sigma or Total Quality Management might help franchise projects, but they will suffocate artists.
Page 39

2. DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM

Love your artists and soldiers equally Maintaining balance so that neither phase overwhelms the other requires something that sounds soft and fuzzy but is very real and often overlooked.
Page 40

A flawed transfer from inventors to the field is not the only danger. Transfer in the other direction is equally important. No product works perfectly the first time. If feedback from the field is ignored by inventors, initial enthusiasm can rapidly fade, and a promising program will be dropped.
Page 42

Key to that dynamic equilibrium—and Bush’s ability to speak freely to generals—was support from the top.
Page 43

In the real world, ideas are ridiculed, experiments fail, budgets are cut, and good people are fired for stupid reasons.
Page 46

Companies fall apart and their best projects remain buried, sometimes forever.
Page 46

Victors don’t just write history; they rewrite history.
Page 56

Later, Folkman would say, “You can tell a leader by counting the number of arrows in his ass.”
Page 59

The negative result in the rat experiment was a False Fail—a result mistakenly attributed to the loonshot but actually a flaw in the test.
Page 59

People may think of Endo and Folkman as great inventors, but arguably their greatest skill was investigating failure. They learned to separate False Fails from true fails.
Page 60

Skill in investigating failure not only separates good scientists from great scientists but also good businessmen from great businessmen.
Page 60

He prodded and poked until the sleeping bear woke.
Page 62

Listening to the Suck with Curiosity (LSC)—overcoming the urge to defend and dismiss when attacked and instead investigating failure with an open mind.*
Page 62

It’s hard to hear that no one likes your baby. It’s even harder to keep asking why.
Page 64

I find it’s when I question the least that I need to worry the most.
Page 64

Let’s call a surprising breakthrough in product—a technology that was widely dismissed before ultimately triumphing—a P-type loonshot.
Page 66

Let’s call a surprising breakthrough in strategy—a new way of doing business, or a new application of an existing product, which involves no new technologies—an S-type loonshot.
Page 66

Years later, Land became known for a saying: “Do not undertake a program unless the goal is manifestly important and its achievement nearly impossible.”
Page 96

The graveyard of unexplained experiments, as Land would soon show, is a great place to find a False Fail.
Page 96

The Austro-Germanic school of fatalism (Spengler, Schumpeter) says that decline is inevitable. Empires will always ossify, a David will always rise to slay Goliath, and so it goes.
Page 119

As eccentric millionaires with one success are inclined to do, Schure concluded he was an expert, a proven filmmaker.
Page 130

After a bad move costs him a game, however, Kasparov analyzes not just why the move was bad, but how he should change the decision process behind the move.
Page 140

Analyzing the decision process behind a move I’ll call level 2 strategy, or system mindset.
Page 141

The weakest teams don’t analyze failures at all. They just keep going. That’s zero strategy.

Teams with an outcome mindset, level 1, analyze why a project or strategy failed.
Page 142

Teams with a system mindset, level 2, probe the decision-making process behind a failure. How did we arrive at that decision? Should a different mix of people be involved, or involved in a different way? Should we change how we analyze opportunities before making similar decisions in the future? How do the incentives we have in place affect our decision-making? Should those be changed?
Page 142

System mindset means carefully examining the quality of decisions, not just the quality of outcomes. A failed outcome, for example, does not necessarily mean the decision or decision process behind it was bad. There are good decisions with bad outcomes. Those are intelligent risks, well taken, that didn’t play out.
Page 142

The stories in part one illustrate the first three Bush-Vail rules:

1. Separate the phases • Separate your artists and soldiers • Tailor the tools to the phase • Watch your blind side: nurture both types of loonshots (product and strategy)

2. Create dynamic equilibrium • Love your artists and soldiers equally • Manage the transfer, not the technology: be a gardener, not a Moses • Appoint, and train, project champions to bridge the divide

3. Spread a system mindset • Keep asking why the organization made the choices that it did • Keep asking how the decision-making process can be improved • Identify teams with outcome mindsets, and help them adopt system mindsets
Page 149

The practice helped Kraft Foods develop melt-resistant chocolate. Parents can thank open innovation for summers free of sticky chocolate goo.
Page 214

Leaders well coached on group dynamics are likely to spend more time with their teams. It’s fun working with high-performing teams who appreciate you. It’s less fun to spend time with dysfunctional teams who hate your guts.
Page 217

Luck and timing always play a role in creativity and invention—the essence of a first-appearance story.
Page 254