BKGRTMSA.RVW   990318

"Great Misadventures", Peggy Saari, 1999, 0-7876-2798-4, U$99.00
%A   Peggy Saari
%C   27500 Drake Road, Farmington Hills, MI   48331-3535
%D   1999
%G   0-7876-2798-4
%G   (0-7876-2799-2 0-7876-2800-X 0-7876-2801-8 0-7876-2802-6)
%I   The Gale Group/Gale Research Inc.
%O   U$99.00 248-699-4253 fax: 800-414-5043
%P   ~800 p.
%T   "Great Misadventures: Bad Ideas That Led to Big Disasters"

Let us start with some cliches.  Life is a hard teacher: she gives the
test first, and the lesson afterwards.  Good judgement comes from
experience: experience comes from bad judgement.  Those who do not
learn from history (or History 205) are doomed to repeat it.  We learn
far more from failure than we do from success.  And, finally, learn
from the mistakes of others: you will never live long enough to make
them all yourself.

If there was ever a book concept made for the RISKS-FORUM Digest
library (aside from Peter's own) it is this: great boneheaded ideas
from the past.  In this junior edition, four volumes divide that topic
into exploration, science and technology, military, and society.

Unfortunately, while the essays provide decent canned histories of the
events, they make lousy lessons.  All of the material is presented at
the same level of very rough detail, rather than sketching in a
background and then concentrating on a specific mistake.  A number of
decisions in any chapter may be identified as errors, but there is
little commentary on why the action was wrong and contributed to the
disaster in question.  Why did this endeavour, intended to promote
safety, ultimately spell catastrophe?  If this person or institution
was motivated by greed or ambition, at what point did the driving
force behind development become a destructive power?  While there is a
lack of analysis overall, a particular failing is the lack of
examination of options that might have changed the outcome for the
better.

In the Reader's Guide starting each volume, the point is made that a
calamity had some positive result, usually in terms of a reform or
improvement.  Relatively few of the stories, however, tell of any such
correction.  In both the Apollo 13 and Bre-X articles, in fact, the
text has to admit that we do not know for sure what the causes of the
problems were, and therefore no lesson can be drawn from them at all.

Of greatest interest to the largest number of readers of this series
will be the article on the Year 2000 problem, otherwise known as the
millennium bug or Y2K.  Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said
about this essay is that it will become academic in less than a year. 
The situation is blamed on an "error" (with no mention of the widely
used standard), although the next paragraph states that it should not
be called a "bug."  Although Peter de Jager has worked tirelessly to
bring the issue to the attention of the public, it is not true that
nobody knew about it before his 1993 article.  I have never seen any
microwave oven that cared what the date was, and it is rather beyond
the bounds of probability that an aircraft would shut down in flight
because it felt miffed at being too long without a checkup.  An entire
section of the article confuses the predicament with the unrelated
issue of maintaining archival records as generations of storage
hardware and media pass by.  The entire disaster is ultimately laid to
the blame of "negligent" computer developers.

There are a number of sidebars, generally giving a biography of
involved characters, and illustrations.  The biographies sometimes
seem at odds with either the essays of which they form a part, or
oddly placed in proximity to more detailed accounts, and the figures,
where placed in a piece, provide little explanatory support.  The
military section, for example, has numerous battle maps where the
order of a campaign is extremely difficult to follow.  (Yes, I know:
war is messy.)  Some of the diagrams, as originally produced, were
probably supposed to be in colour, since the keys cannot, in the black
and white version, distinguish between items of opposed significance. 
Much material is duplicated between pieces, but even that can be
confusing at times.  Many terms are explained in article after
article, and the explanations are not always consistent.  A musket
will be defined as a "shoulder gun" in one essay, a "rifle" in
another, and a "gun like a rifle" in a third.  Not a great difference,
but confusing.  (The index does not assist in clarifying matters:
there are lots of entries for people, but almost none for things.)

The cachet of disaster might make this an inviting set for promoting
study of history in a rather "dates of the kings of England" manner. 
The events are isolated, the details are scanty, and the analysis
almost doesn't exist.  I doubt that students would learn much of
either history or judgement from these books.

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999   BKGRTMSA.RVW   990318