Books read in 2021: Part 4

In Part IV, two more industry figures pick their reads.

Michael Hochberg, a silicon photonics expert and currently at a start-up in stealth mode, discusses classical Greek history, while Professor Laura Lechuga, a biosensor luminary highlights Michael Lewis's excellent book about the pandemic, among others. 

Leonidas, King of Sparta 

Michael Hochberg, President of a stealth-mode start-up

One of the primary ways that I mis-spent my youth was by crawling through my father's library of social science and history books.  This activity generally occurred when I was supposed to be asleep, resting up for a full day of stark and abject boredom in school. This resulted in some perverse outcomes, like my tendency to fall asleep in class at an unusually young age.

It's accepted practice for college students; certainly, many of the students in my classes during my time as an academic got in some excellent naps.  I was always sad to see them leave the comfort of their warm beds to nap in a hard, wooden chair while I lectured; I feel like they would have slept better at home. 

Of course, the true masters of napping were the faculty, for whom it was a key technique in committee meetings.  But this sort of advanced napping is considerably less common in elementary and middle school, and I suspect that some of my teachers took it personally.  

Perhaps the most compelling thing I read during those years was Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. It's the history (arguably the first historical volume ever written) of the great conflict between Athens and Sparta. If you've never read Pericles’ Funeral Oration, I highly recommend it for anyone who has an interest in leadership; it's quite possibly the greatest political speech ever given. And there's a new-ish edition that includes necessary maps, references and explanations, which makes reading and understanding the context dramatically easier.  This material makes the text accessible to people who aren't experts and aren't reading it as part of a course. It's even out in paperback!

It's a volume that I've returned to twice, because one of the things that amazes me every time I look at it is how little things have changed in the last 2,500 years. I found myself re-reading it this year and thinking about how much more I got out of it than I did ten years ago; the benefit of experience.

The motivations, actions, and behaviors of the people in Thucydides are instantly and intensely familiar. Given all the changes to technology, government, religion, our knowledge of the universe, access to information, communications, our ideas about ourselves, the triumphs of empiricism and the scientific method, et cetera, it's amazing to see that the bones of how people behave, both as individuals and as groups, really haven't changed.

People are still motivated by their desire for security, their interests, and their values (including that sometimes-forgotten motive: honour.) Despite the panoply of innovations, we seem to be basically the same. As a technologist, it's a thought that gives me both pause and comfort.

Thucydides' History is told primarily from an Athenian perspective. As I dug deeper, I encountered several books over the years that were truly fascinating, and that gave great insight into the leadership and motivations of the Athenians; I've developed a keen interest, starting with this reading, in the circumstances under which democratic regimes can emerge and thrive, both historically and in the present day.

Here are a couple of my favorite further readings on the history of Athens: 

• Donald Kagan's biography of Pericles (Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy); Kagan's other works are also fascinating reading, as are his lectures from his Yale University history course on the history of Ancient Greece, which are on the web.

• John Hale's biography of Themistocles and his history of the Athenian navy, The Lords of the Sea.  

Because this history of Athens is the story of the rise and fall of a great maritime power, it provides only a limited treatment of Sparta, the foremost territorial power of Ancient Greece.

So, what of the Spartans? The world remembers Leonidas and the 300 at Thermopylae. Students of history remember Plataea, and the later alliance between the Spartans and the Persian Empire directed against Athens. But the Spartans, as a people, remained enigmatic after reading Thucydides, at least to me. What motivated them to create their peculiar society? What were the pressures that shaped their thinking? How did they come to be what they were? Why did they make the decisions that they did?

As Thucydides observed: The Athenians built and left behind immense public works. Temples that still stand today. An extensive literature: comedies, tragedies, and philosophies. Art and sculpture. All the trappings of a commercial, vibrant, creative society. They get to explain themselves to us in their own words. But what of the Spartans, who left behind almost nothing of the sort? We remember their military achievements. But they left behind very little that would allow us to understand them. 

To quote Thucydides directly, courtesy of Lapham’s Quarterly (possibly my favourite periodical):

“Suppose that the city of Sparta were to become deserted and that only the temples and foundations of buildings remained: I think that future generations would, as time passed, find it very difficult to believe that the place had really been as powerful as it was represented to be. Yet the Spartans occupy two-fifths of the Peloponnese and stand at the head not only of the whole Peloponnese itself but also of numerous allies beyond its frontiers. Since, however, the city is not regularly planned and contains no temples or monuments of great magnificence, but is simply a collection of villages, in the ancient Hellenic way, its appearance would not come up to expectation. If, on the other hand, the same thing were to happen to Athens, one would conjecture from what met the eye that the city had been twice as powerful as in fact it is.

To address the mystery of the Spartans, Paul Rahe, of Hillsdale College, has written four volumes (thus far) on the history of Spartan strategic thought, and the fifth one will go to press soon. 

• The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta
• The Spartan Regime
• Sparta's First Attic War
• Sparta's Second Attic War

These volumes are among the finest books I've read. They make the strategic dilemmas and choices of the Spartans as clear as the historical record seems to allow, and where the record is silent, Rahe fills in the blanks with speculation informed by a nuanced understanding of the politics and practices of the day. Rahe has filled in the blank spaces in a way that is remarkable. These books are also utterly readable even to someone like me, who is most decidedly a non-expert in the field.

One of my key takeaways from reading Rahe’s work was the importance of understanding, in detail, the capabilities, motivations, aspirations, and commitments of adversaries, and of having a grand strategy that is simple to articulate, understand and implement.  

Only then can a wide range of individuals and organizations coordinate their actions in service of such a grand strategy, which is generally what is required for success, in both business and warfare.  The conflict between Athens and Sparta was between a maritime society and a territorial power, and this finds echoes in the current conflicts between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.  

In that vein, I've been reading Elbridge Colby's fascinating book (I'm about a third through) on the Strategy of Denial, which I recommend as a thought-provoking work to anyone with an interest in US-China relations. My next reading in this area is Thucydides on Strategy: Grand Strategies in the Peloponnesian War and their Relevance Today.

In recent years, with the revolution in machine learning, we've started to develop tools that can do super-human things in areas where humans previously had an absolute monopoly. These tools will allow us to do amazing things that we can barely imagine today, and they will have world-changing economic, military, and social impacts. It's an incredibly exciting time to be a technologist and to have a chance to participate in this revolution.

Many people believe that these tools will produce fundamental changes in how individual humans behave, in how we organise ourselves into polities, and in how we strategise to enhance our security. Perhaps they're right. But I don't think so. The community of technologists have believed that our innovations will change human nature before, and we've been wrong before.

I believe that the same motivations that Thucydides articulated so well - Fear, Honor, and Interest - will continue to dominate the landscape. I expect that reading Thucydides will still give deep insight into human nature 500 years from now (assuming of course that anyone is still around to read his work). And 2,500 years of western history seem to suggest, at least to me, that new technology doesn't fundamentally change human nature, and that to think otherwise is arrogance.

Professor Laura Lechuga, Group Leader NanoBiosensors and Bioanalytical Applications Group, Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), CSIC, BIST and CIBER-BBN.

I used to read a lot but with our frantic way of living before the pandemic - travelling and working, it was hard to find the time. The pandemic has given me back this habit and I am enjoying it very much.  

Here are my best readings of 2021:

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis is an excellent description of the chaotic US public health system and how fighting for political power have corrupted the organisations that should help society in any emergency. The result: the United States has had been one of the countries in pandemic management. A must-read book.

Reina Roja, by Juan Gómez-Jurado, a renowned Spanish author. This is a thriller about the world's smartest woman on the hunt for a serial killer. I especially like how the protagonist interprets, with a female scientific mind, the actions of the murderer and the staging of the crimes. The book grabs your attention from the first page and continues with a frenetic pace that ends up taking your breath away. I´m not going to disclose the identity of the serial killer ...

Acoso by Angela Bernardo is the first book that reveals sexual harassment in Spanish science. The book includes testimonies, interviews with specialists in sexual harassment and compiles the scarce data available in Spain regarding this problem. 

The author unravels how the structure of Spanish universities and research centres make its very difficult for female scientists to report and find support when they are victims of sexual harassment or harassment due to gender discrimination.

The Man Who Counted: A Collection of Mathematical Adventures, by Melba Tahan (a pen name), is a well known and classic book in maths by Brazilian writer, Júlio César de Mello e Souz. The book describes curious word problems, mathematics puzzles and curiosities. The protagonist is a thirteenth-century Persian scholar of the Islamic Empire. A must-read book!

My last recommendation is Nosotros, los actogésimos (una novela de mundoochenta), by Jesús Zamora Bonilla. This is a Spanish science fiction book describing “Mundochenta”, a planet 140,000 light years from Earth and its inhabitants, the "eightieths".

A police and scientific thriller, the book takes place in a very distant future but in a society not yet as technologically advanced as ours. “Mundoachenta” is dominated by the Empire and the Church, which face the challenge of assimilating the increasing scientific advances. 

The book is a parody of how power and religion have always tried to stop scientific advances to maintain its dominance.