A Twin Peaks book, with the full title of: The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. It tells Agent Cooper’s backstory, starting as a young boy, through transcriptions of his quirky habit of recording notes in a personal tape recorder, usually addressed to a mysterious “Diane.”
What our hardware is made of, how it’s made, where it comes from, and where it goes when it’s discarded are subjects I never gave much though to until I read High Tech Trash. The answers turned out to be quite important, especially for a self-described technophile, who has gone through more than his fair share of tech toys, and consequently produced an inordinate amount of “e-waste” when those toys lost their utility or cutting-edge appeal.
Synopsis
Biography of Charles Schulz, the cartoonist behind Peanuts, who wrote and drew every strip over several decades, all by himself.
Glut is a solid historical overview of “information management” and the varied solutions to ever-present problem of “too much information” — particularly acute today because of the Internet. But while the book’s historical documentation is solid, I thought it would present more analysis, prognostication, and solutions. Therefore, I was somewhat disappointed by its end.
At first I wasn’t too into this book, but ultimately I was sort of glad I persevered. It attempts to document the entirety of history — all the way back to the Big Bang — in a mere 248 pages. Naturally, a heck of a lot has been omitted, so on one level it’s merely a “greatest hits” compendium. But several chapters were new information to me, and the unusual nature of our current, technology infused century becomes starkly clear in the context of large swaths of history.