Volume 2, Issue 1
September—October 2013
McGrath Library
Newsletter
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Director’s Choice:
1-2
Book Reviews:
2-4
Library News:
4
DIRECTOR’S CHOICE
The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and
America’s Entry into World War I by Thomas Boghardt
If you are a historian
and are going to criticize two time Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman (The
Guns of August,
1963 and Stillwell
and the American
Experience in China:
1911-1945,
1972), you better ensure that the thesis
you are presenting is
sound and that you
have the material to back it up. Thomas Boghardt,
a senior historian at the U.S. Army Center for Military History in Washington D.C., does just that in
The Zimmermanm Telegram: Intelligence,
Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into
World War I, Naval Institute Press, 2012,
(D619.3 B64 2012).
Relying on a great deal of material released since
Tuchman’s book on the Zimmermann Telegram
was published in 1958, Boghardt refines
Tuchman’s premise that the telegram was relayed through three different routes, instead
contending, using material from the recently
released memoirs, dispatches, memos, diaries,
etc. that British intelligence’s cryptanalysts section (NID Room 40) had been intercepting US
cable transmissions almost since the war in Europe began. The US, neutral at the time, allowed encrypted German diplomatic messages
to be sent from Berlin to the German embassy
in Washington over its transatlantic cable. The
German cable had been cut by the British at the
start of the war. One of the intercepted messages was the Zimmermann Telegram. Not wanting the US to realize they were intercepting US
cable transmissions, the British confounded the
method of intercept by implying the cable may
have been stolen, given away, bought, or intercepted from the “Swedish Roundabout.”
Boghardt’s inclusion of material garnered from
William Reginald “Blinker” Hall, Room 40’s director, is especially enlightening since his memoirs and papers were withheld for many years.
Likewise, many of the code breakers’ memoirs,
September—October 2013
The only criticism might be the absence of a
Dramatis Personae. In a number of incidents
individuals introduced early in the work show
up again later and it is necessary to hunt back
to recognize their role.
diaries, and papers have also only recently
been released.
The book is very readable and Boghardt provides an extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary sources for further inquiry
and a well-organized index. In addition he
includes a chronology of the events leading up
to and resulting from the Zimmermann Telegram. However, it is his extensive end notes/
citations that are impressive indicative of extensive and thorough research.
In all, however, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and
America’s Entry into World War I receives a high recommendation.
Reviewed by Director Wil Prout
D619.3 .B64 2012
BOOK REVIEWS
I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did by Lori Andrews
Unnerving
narrative
about the misuse of personal online information—without our
knowledge—to track,
judge and harm us in
innumerable aspects of
our lives.
ing collected about them: “People have a misplaced trust that what they post is private.” The
results can be devastating: A Georgia teacher
posted a photo showing her drinking a glass of
Guinness at an Irish brewery, and she was forced
to resign after the photo was e-mailed anonymously to her school superintendent. After seeing a mother’s MySpace page showing her posing provocatively in lingerie, a judge awarded
custody of her young children to her husband.
“Virtually every interaction a person has in the
offline world can be tainted by social network
information,” writes the author, who proposes
creating a “Social Network Constitution” to govern our lives online. Her governing principles
would protect against police searches of social
networks without probable cause, require social
networks to post conspicuous Miranda-like privacy warnings and set rules for the use or collecting of user information.
Social-network executives often dismiss
online privacy concerns:
“You have zero privacy
anyway. Get over it,”
said Sun Microsystems’
Scott McNealy. But the constitutional freedoms
of millions of people posting personal data on
Facebook and other networks are violated routinely, and the law has not kept up with the new
technology, writes lawyer Andrews (Institute for
Science, Law and Technology/Illinois Institute
of Technology; Immunity, 2008, etc.). Noting
that social networks make their profits on users’
data, she describes the multibillion-dollar industry of data aggregators who mine online data
for the advertising industry, often “weblining”
people, denying them certain opportunities due
to observations about their digital selves. Most
users have no idea how much information is be-
Authoritative, important reading for policymakers and an unnerving reminder that anything
you post can and will be used against you.
Kirkus Reviews
January 10, 2012
HM742 .A53 2012
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September—October 2013
The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli
problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if
you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving
on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli
mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g.,
shaping the details of history “into a consistent
story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these
things cannot be understood in the traditional
sense. We simply build the meaning into them
afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of
stories, what are we to make of his many telling
anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a
particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To
rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini
-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains
are to those”?
A waggish, cautionary
compilation of pitfalls
associated with systematic cognitive errors,
from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err,
routinely and with bias.
We exercise deviation
from logic, writes the
author, as much as, and
possibly more than, we
display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring
awareness to this sorry
state of affairs, he has gathered here—in threepage, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100
examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring
familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are
not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g.,
herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of
probability or statistical reality. Others, if not
new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing,
the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying
on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy).
Most of his points stick home: the deformation
of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain
said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of
irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
Kirkus Reviews
March 6, 2013
BF442 .D63 2013
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
From one of the great
masters of modern speculative fiction: Gaiman’s
first novel for adults
since Anansi Boys
(2005).
drawn without knowing why. Memories begin
to flow. The Hempstocks were an odd family,
with 11-year-old Lettie’s claim that their duck
pond was an ocean, her mother’s miraculous
cooking and her grandmother’s reminiscences
of the Big Bang; all three seemed much older
than their apparent ages. Forty years ago, the
family lodger, a South African opal miner, gambled his fortune away, then committed suicide
in the Hempstock farmyard. Something dark,
deadly and far distant heard his dying lament
and swooped closer. As the past becomes the
present, Lettie takes the boy’s hand and confidently sets off through unearthly landscapes to
An unnamed protagonist and narrator returns to his Sussex roots
to attend a funeral. Although his boyhood
dwelling no longer
stands, at the end of the
road lies the Hempstock farm, to which he’s
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September—October 2013
Poignant and heartbreaking, eloquent and
frightening, impeccably rendered, it’s a fable that reminds us how our lives are
shaped by childhood experiences, what we
gain from them and the price we pay.
deal with the menace; but he’s only 7 years
old, and he makes a mistake. Instead of
banishing the predator, he brings it back
into the familiar world, where it reappears
as his family’s new housekeeper, the demonic Ursula Monkton. Terrified, he tries
to flee back to the Hempstocks, but Ursula
easily keeps him confined as she cruelly
manipulates and torments his parents and
sister. Despite his determination and welldeveloped sense of right and wrong, he’s
also a scared little boy drawn into adventures beyond his understanding, forced into
terrible mistakes through innocence. Yet,
guided by a female wisdom beyond his ability to comprehend, he may one day find redemption.
Kirkus Reviews
March 14, 2013
Leisure Gaiman
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