Customer Reviews

Rescuing Prometheus

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Rescuing Prometheus provides eyewitness detail into the people, thought processes, decision highlights of 4 large, monumental projects in system engineering. Along the way, as a side-effect, these events created the world of software programming. When reading this book in combination with other books such as "Digital Apollo" and the "History of the MIT Flight Computer", one gains a deep understanding of what is and why it is.

If you need this grounding, this is an excellent book. I think it's rating depends on what you want from the book. For example, I have read hundreds of books on the begining of the Arpanet. This book goes 10 years earlier and tells the story that is never told. Is that helpful? Of course it is.

Hughes has picked out an interesting subject to write a book about--namely the rise of large scale technological projects in the post WWII world. Unfortuantely, I don't think he's enough of a writer to bring it off.

The best popular science/history hybrids bring you a sense of the excitement of the technological advance, a new knowledge of the problems faced and solutions found, and an insight into the characters and personalities behind the science. Hughes doesn't really do any of this. The book is extremely dry and reads like a laundry list of facts rather than a compelling narrative. None of the characters ever come alive. And for the most part, I didn't feel he did a very good job presenting the technological challenges faced. I think he perhaps tried to do too much with the book, telling four stories instead of one or two in the depth required to really draw the reader in.

I really wanted to like this book, especially as a former worker in operations research/systems analysis. But unfortunately, Hughes doesn't deliver on the promise that the subject has.