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The Pentagon's Brain

An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-secret Military Research Agency
May 10, 2017Kendiana_Jones rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
This is primarily the story of ARPA/DARPA. The author frequently goes off on related historical narratives, but then returns to the story. In a written book, you could skip ahead if you chose to, but I was listening to this book on CD, as read by the author, Annie Jacobsen. I have listened to literally hundreds of books on CD, and never have I encountered one with as many mispronunciations. In the chapter about the Vietnam war, Ms. Jacobsen kept pronouncing the ‘h’ in herbicide, the British pronunciation. And yet she spoke with no discernable accent. (She is an American and is American-educated.) I dismissed it as perhaps a regional (New England) thing. But then things got stranger. I spent my career in the Defense industry, and know people who worked at NORAD and Mitre Corporation. Half way through the book on CD, I got tired of hearing them pronounced NO-RAD and “Meter”, and I decided to write down some of these gaffes. Here are some of the worst ones: ensign -- N-zyne lanyard -- lan-YARD chromatograph -- chrome-a-TOE-graph Lake Pend Oreille -- Pand-or-eye myelitis -- my-a-LEET-us etc. -- ec cetera automaton -- AUTO-muh-tawn Lastly, there was one major error which made me question whether the author knew what she was talking about. In Chapter 14, when referring to Moore’s Law, she says: “Doubling is a powerful concept: 10 x 10 = 100; 100 x 100 = 10,000; 10,000 x 10,000 = 100 million.” The problem with this of course, is that these are examples of squaring, not doubling! I still liked the work enough to give it three stars if it were in book form, but the frequent mispronunciations were extremely distracting, and just plain inexcusable, in an audio book. The author should have set aside her ago and let someone else record her book. I cannot recommend this audio book, or by extension, any audio book read by Annie Jacobsen.