Books I Read in 2022

Here are short summaries of the books I read in 2022.   No particular order, except that I put the books I liked most toward the beginning of each section.  All are recommended, unless otherwise noted.

STEM Stuff

Peter Robison, Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing (2022). Robison makes the case that McDonnell Douglas (MDC) management carried Jack Welch’s philosophy of cutting costs and maximizing shareholder value to Boeing, and the result was the destruction of a great engineering company.  Should be required reading for all technical managers and systems engineers.  As a former (46-year) employee of MDC and Boeing, I had quite a bit to say about this one.   Highly recommended.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 2^nd Edition, 1970).  Kuhn’s ground-breaking work brought a “paradigm shift” to the philosophy of science.  I was pleasantly surprised that it was a whole lot more accessible and engaging than I expected.  It’s too bad that all the climate (and other) science deniers haven’t read this clear explanation of how science works.  

Lori Garver, Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age (2022).  Garver, long-time space activist and Associate Administrator of NASA in the Obama administration, details her long struggle to move NASA away from government-managed top-down systems development to buying services from commercial firms.  A deeply entrenched combination of government bureaucracy, traditional aerospace firms, and their Congressional allies fight against reform every step of the way.  Livened up with stories from her personal biography and some devastating pen portraits.

Amy Shira Teitel, Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight (2020).  Dual biography of Jackie Cochran and Jerrie Cobb.  Both were accomplished pilots.  Cochran is best known for creating and managing the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in World War II, but she also held several women’s speed and distance records.  Cobb was a private pilot who was one of the “Mercury 13,” women who passed the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts.  The book covers their lives in detail, but concentrates mostly on the early 60s fight to get NASA to start a “woman in space” program.  Exhaustively researched and well written; Teitel accomplished the difficult task of keeping it interesting, even though the reader knows the effort is doomed.  This is a good companion to Stephanie Nolen’s Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race (2002), which takes a less critical view of Cobb.

Nathalia Holt, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars (2016).  Holt gives us a West Coast version of Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures.  Rise of the Rocket Girls follows the careers of women who started as human computers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1940s, and their successors.  It pays particular attention to Macie Roberts and Helen Ling, who deliberately established an “old girls network” that hired women, brought them back after they had kids (!), and established career paths for them.  Largely as a result of their work, JPL has a higher percentage of women professionals than any other NASA center.  A drawback of the book is a large number of irritating technical errors and unclear explanations of technical subjects.  Holt does not do as good a job as Shetterly in weaving the women’s stories into aerospace history.  Worth reading nevertheless.

Col. Eileen M. Collins and Jonathan H. Ward, Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars: The Story of the First American Woman to Command a Space Mission (2021).  Story of Collins’ rise from a dysfunctional family occasionally on public assistance to one of only three women ever to command space shuttle missions, including the “return to flight” mission after the Columbia accident.  Lots of good inside info on the space shuttle program.  Prose is straightforward and the tone is cheerful and optimistic; there is very little about the obstacles Collins must have faced as a pioneering woman in both the Air Force and NASA.

History & Biography

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2017).  Wonderfully written, thoroughly researched biography of the beloved children’s book author and of her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. The two constructed a semi-fictionalized, very idealized version of Wilder’s life.  Fraser painstakingly separates fact from fiction, gives us the historical context of their lives, and the back story of the Little House books.  Fraser is unsparing in her criticism of Lane, who is portrayed as unethical and opportunistic.  Highly recommended, especially for anyone who’s read the Little House books. See my longer write-up here.

Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts (2016).  From the 12^th -16^th centuries, Timbuktu was a major center of culture and scholarship.  The dry desert air preserved hundreds of thousands of Arabic manuscripts in a range of fields: religion, ethics, mathematics, science.  Over the centuries, many were hidden away by their owners for safekeeping from invaders and white colonists.  Abdel Kader Haidara has devoted his life to finding and preserving these manuscripts.  Thanks to him and others, 377,000 of them were collected and stored in forty-five archival storage facilities in Timbuktu.  When Al Qaeda swept into town in 2012, he realized they could all be destroyed for not conforming to their narrow interpretation of Islam, so he organized an operation to smuggle them to safety.  Hammer tells that story and puts it all in context.  Well told, the book at times reads like a thriller.

Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman, editors, Fight of the Century: Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases (2020).  This collection of essays structures its celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the American Civil Liberties Union around its most significant cases.  Some of the cases are now obscure (Stromberg v. California), some very well known (Brown v. Board).  Each essay is introduced by a brief legal description.  The essays, by an all-star literary cast that includes the likes of Ann Patchett and Salman Rushdie, sometimes describe the story of the case, but more often are reflections or personal memoirs somehow related to the issue.  The essays range from amusing (United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses”) to heart-wrenching (the Scottboro Boys cases) to, in the case of Scott Turow’s takedown of the ACLU’s stand on campaign finance, outraged.

James F. Simon, What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States (2002).  In one of his last acts as President, John Adams nominated John Marshall to be chief justice of the Supreme Court.  In more than 30 years on the court, Marshall established that the Court was the arbiter of the Constitution, took an expansive view of what the constitution allowed (e.g., chartering a national bank), and repeatedly ruled in favor of federal power over the states, all of which drove Jefferson up the wall.  Covers the ideological conflict between the two men and extensively explains the major rulings of the Marshall court and their continuing significance.

James F. Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle Over the New Deal (2012).  Fairly complete biography of the two men up to the time Hughes rejoined the Supreme Court (1931) and FDR became president (1933).  After that it mostly concentrates on the court cases.  Simon paints Hughes as a progressive Republican in the Teddy Roosevelt mold who shouldn’t bear nearly as much blame as he has been given for striking down early New Deal legislation.  Hughes was a swing vote and, after Owen Roberts’s “switch in time that saved nine,” generally voted to uphold New Deal legislation, including Social Security, business regulation, and labor laws, “ushering in the modern constitutional era.”

Michael Beschloss, Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times (2018).  Noted presidential historian Beschloss covers wars and near-wars, starting with Thomas Jefferson and the Chesapeake incident, and ends with Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.  Along the way, he covers the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish War, both World Wars, and Korea.  Throughout he stresses the importance of being honest about war aims and being open with Congress and the people about the difficulties of the war.  The only two presidents who come out looking good are Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. The other presidents chose to obfuscate, minimize difficulties, or outright lie about war aims; Beschloss details the continuing pernicious effects of this behavior. 

Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany (2002).  Primarily concerned with how Roosevelt and Truman planned what to do with Germany after World War II.  It starts with the Allied discovery of concentration camps in 1942-3, and Roosevelt’s puzzling decision not to bomb them.  Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, a secular Jew, really wasn’t supposed to be involved in foreign policy, but out of frustration at the lack of action on the camps, started pushing a plan to severely punish Germany after the war.  Ultimately the Morgenthau Plan was quashed, in part through enlightened policy to not embitter the Germans, and in part to build up West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.  Concludes with a very brief synopsis of what happened in the 3-4 years after the war.  Extremely well researched, makes extensive use of Soviet archives opened in the 1990s, as well as Western material declassified in the 80s and 90s.

Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins – Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage (2009).  Perkins is known primarily as the answer to a trivia question: “Who was the first woman in the US cabinet?”  This is a great injustice.  As Downey summarizes in this excellent biography, “Factory and office occupancy codes, fire escapes and other fire-prevention mechanisms are her legacy.  About 44 million people collect Social Security checks each month; millions receive unemployment and worker’s compensation or the minimum wage; others get to go home after an eight-hour day because of the Fair Labor Standards Act.  Very few know the name of the woman responsible for their benefits.”  Downey goes a long way toward rectifying that ignorance.

Amy Butler Greenfield, The Woman All Spies Fear: Code breaker Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her hidden life (2021).  Elizebeth Friedman and her husband were both accomplished cryptanalysts, William working mostly for the Navy and Elizebeth for a variety of agencies.  Always having to work against the sexism of the time, she cracked messages for the military in World War I, then cracked mobster’s codes during Prohibition for the Treasury and the Coast Guard, then tracked Nazi spy rings in South America during World War II.  In the paranoia of the Cold War, the Friedmans were not well treated, perhaps because he was Jewish; she spent much of her later life ensuring their legacy.  Greenfield makes use of previous biographies, extensive personal papers, and government records to put together Elizebeth’s story.  Well told and easy to follow, though the prose is a bit pedestrian.

Kate Anderson Brower, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House (2015).  Based on interviews with White House staff and members of first families who have lived there, starting with the Kennedys.  You won’t find salacious material here, but lots about how dedicated the professional staff is and some insights into the personalities of the first families.  A perfect follow-up to Lillian Rogers Parks’s My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House: this book picks up exactly where Parks left off.

Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz, Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up & Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House (2020).  Story of the scandal that drove Spiro Agnew to resign from the Vice Presidency, told in cheeky, conversational style.  Based on Yarvitz’s podcast of the same name.

Ron Miller and Frederick C. Durant III, The Art of Chesley Bonestell (2001).  Beautifully illustrated, large-format biography of the noted space illustrator, followed by a 140-page gallery.  Bonestell (1888-1986) regarded himself as an illustrator.  He worked variously as an architectural draftsman, Hollywood matte painter, advertising illustrator, and space illustrator.  His space illustrations of the late ‘40s through the ‘50s were hugely popular and may have had a significant influence on public support for the early space program.

President Kennedy

Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (2013).  This almost day-by-day account starts with the death of day-old Patrick, born prematurely.  The loss devastated the President; if Clarke is to be believed, Kennedy stopped fooling around with other women, leading Jackie to feel like she finally had a marriage.  The book also covers the signing and ratification of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and Kennedy’s realization that “peace” would be a potent issue to run on in 1964; Vietnam, including the coup that killed the Diem brothers and Kennedy’s stated intention to withdraw after he won re-election; the first signs of backlash on civil rights; and Kennedy’s glee at the prospect of running against Barry Goldwater.  As the title indicates, Clarke clearly admires Kennedy.

Last year I read The Death of a President, and William Manchester's warm portrait made me miss John Kennedy terribly.  Then this year I took Buck Benedict's “Great Speeches of the 1960s,” which also took a favorable view of Kennedy.  That plus Clarke’s book left me feeling the need to “balance the books,” as it were, so I read a couple of negative works.

Seymour M. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997).  It’s all here: the women, the links to the mob, the allegations of a stolen election, campaign dirty tricks, the plots to assassinate Castro, the secret quid pro quo that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Includes background chapters on dirty dealing and low tricks by his maternal grandfather, "Honey Fitz," and his father, Joe Kennedy.  If Hersh is to be believed, John and Robert Kennedy never stood for anything; they just took or stole what they wanted, by any means necessary.  Hersh seems not to understand that sometimes the right thing to do is also politically advantageous.  Bruce Barker also wrote about this book.

Mimi Alford, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath (2012).  In the summer of 1962, Alford was a nineteen-year-old college intern.  On her fourth day on the job, the President relieved her of her maidenhead.  A decade after presidential biographer Robert Dallek inadvertently outed Alford, she published this intensely personal and sometimes explicit memoir of her affair, how it damaged her self-esteem, and ultimately destroyed her first marriage.

Memoir

Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy (2017).  Lockwood’s father is a married Catholic priest.  (Yes, it’s possible.)  At the age of 30, she and her husband have to move back in with her parents for nine months.  Lockwood weaves in her account of returning home with memories of her childhood bouncing around the Midwest, including St. Louis.  Lockwood is a published poet, and her writing shows it.  This book was controversial at our house: Friend Wife sees Lockwood as a spoiled brat; I see her as perceptive, sometimes hilarious, sometimes reflective, occasionally angry, as she comes to terms with her family.  You’ll just have to get the book and decide for yourself.

Nicole d’Entremont, City of Belief (2009).  On November 9, 1965, in New York City, Roger La Porte doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire to protest the Vietnam War.  D’Entremont, friend, fellow antiwar activist and Catholic Worker, was one of the last people to speak to him.  In this novelization (names are changed), she recreates the world of idealistic young activists and La Porte’s last days.  The (mostly) straightforward prose and quotidian details gradually draw the reader in and deepen the impact.

Monica Dickens, One Pair of Hands (1939).  Dickens, bored with her middle class life, went into service as a cook-general.  The result is a fairly light-hearted look at the foibles of people both above and below stairs, but also realistic about working conditions and how hard the life of a maid could be.  I read this on Henry Oliver’s recommendation.   

Crash Barry, Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine (2011).  Starting in 1991, Crash Barry, fresh out of the Coast Guard, spend two years on Matinicus Island.  This book, essentially a collection of short stories, relates his experiences on the island.  Matinicus is a speck of land 20 miles off the coast with a year-round population of about 50, all of whom but the schoolteacher make their living from the sea.  It’s so isolated that a ferry runs but once a month, 9 months of the year.  It’s a literally lawless place (one of the stories is how they ran a deputy off the island), with feuding, fighting, heavy drinking, and drug use.  Barry fit right in.  

Eva Murray, Well Out to Sea: Year-Round on Matinicus Island (2010).  Another, considerably gentler view of life on Matinicus, this one from the schoolteacher.  In 1987 Eva Murray moved to Matinicus Island to teach at the one-room schoolhouse, and ended up getting married and staying.  The book is a collection of short essays, most previously published as newspaper and magazine columns.  Since she has to live with her subjects, she self-censors.  Still, a fun insight into the culture of and the difficulties of living on an isolated island.

Lauren Graham, Have I Told You This Already?  Stories I Don’t Want to Forget to Remember (2022).  Graham, best known to my family as Lorelai in Gilmore Girls, gives us a collection of essays.  Mostly light and entertaining, she strays into serious territory in “Boobs of the ‘90s,” which addresses sexism and body image in Hollywood.

Racism and Sexism

Helen Lewis, Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020).  British writer Lewis covers struggles for Divorce, Suffrage, Sex, Play (women in sports), Work, Safety (domestic violence shelters), Love, Education, Time (unpaid labor), and Abortion.  She tells her stories through the lenses of women who have largely been erased from history because they were “difficult”: not “nice,” or working class, or held views that later became controversial.  In a final chapter, she argues for the right to be difficult.

Politics and Government

Zach Norris, Defund Fear (2020).  “Defund the Police” may be really dumb as a political slogan, but there is some serious thinking behind it.  Zach Norris explains how we got to where we are, then lays out the possibilities for a more just “justice” system in this comprehensive and readable text.  The key is to replace the framework of fear with a culture of caring.  This was the Unitarian Universalist Association’s 2022 common read.

Rutger Bregman, Humankind (2019).  Translated from the Dutch by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore (2020).  Bregman argues that we are not Hobbesian brutes with a thin veneer of civilization.  Rather, we are hardwired to be cooperative and social – Homo Puppy – but things started to go wrong when we settled down and started having to defend property.  Bregman backs his thesis up by debunking several myths and with many examples, well told.  Bregman does qualitatively what Steven Pinker argues quantitatively.  Highly quotable and a pleasure to read.

Literary Fiction

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (2017).  The novel follows three generations of a Korean family in Japan, where they are an oppressed minority, over half a century.  Powerful portrait of how oppression affects the oppressed and their various coping mechanisms (or lack thereof).  Prose is deceptively simple and straightforward but ultimately moving.  Highly recommended.

Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (2022).  Elizabeth Zott is a female version of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, dropped into 1950’s America. After having her work stolen and being fired when she protests, she takes the only job available: hostess of a local cooking show.  Zott embeds chemistry lessons in each show and develops a devoted following of women who love being taken seriously.  This engaging debut novel will have you laughing, and then make you angry about the sexism she has to deal with.  Funny, perceptive, and moving.  Highly recommended.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012).  The first two volumes of Mantel’s trilogy set in the time of Henry VIII, as seen through the eyes of influential courtier Thomas Cromwell.  Engaging and wonderfully written, I came to like Cromwell.  I didn’t read the third volume because I really don’t want to read about Cromwell’s fall from grace.

A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches (2021).  Set during the witch-hunting craze of the English Civil War, in which 100-300 witches were executed in 1644-46.  This fictionalized account, based on records of the Essex witch trials, is a grim but ultimately uplifting record of survival.  Blakemore notes in an afterword that the only record we have of women’s voices in this era is the records of the witch trials.  “I hope I have done justice to their character, humour and pride, which radiates from the records of their lives and deaths even after four hundred years.”  She has.

James A. Michener, Caravans (1963).  Set in Afghanistan, 1946. Mark Miller, stationed at the American embassy in Kabul, is detailed to look for a missing American woman who had married an Afghan nomad.  He ends up traveling with the nomads through Afghanistan, observing the various cultures and how they are changing as the West encroaches on the country.  Good adventure story, with more than a whiff of male sex fantasy thrown in.  It took a while to draw me in, but capture me it did.

Susan Conley, Landslide (2021).  Jill’s family is struggling to get by in a small Maine seacoast town on her husband’s fishing and grants for her documentary films.  When her husband is seriously injured and hospitalized hours away in Nova Scotia, it looks as if they could lose the boat, she discovers that her husband may be cheating on her with a woman in Halifax, and her teenage boys are exasperating as only teenage boys can be. The descriptions of the family’s interactions – particularly dealing with teenage boys – are quite good.  A well-told story of a family and community, told with quiet humor and grace. 

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952).  In the mid-19^th century, there was Ahab and Moby Dick.  In the mid-20^th century there was Santiago and an 18-foot Marlin.  Both are tales of obsession.  Hemingway’s book, and the philosophical digressions within it, are shortened to fit modern attention spans.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer (1977).  A comet’s nucleus splits and the pieces bombard the earth. The resulting volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis destroy major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice age because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.  A nuclear exchange between China and the Soviet Union makes things worse.  The action focuses mostly on Southern California.  One group forms a community in the Sierra foothills using 19^th century technology.  Others form marauding bands of bandits or retreat into anti-technological religious fundamentalism.  Ultimately takes a hopeful view that mutually supportive communities will win out.  From today’s perspective, perhaps the most amazing thing about this book is that it was published years before the Alverezes 1980 “dinosaur killing asteroid” paper and the 1980s “nuclear winter” studies.  A well-written thriller.

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion (2001) and Paladin of Souls (2003).  Political fantasy fiction set in a medieval world where gods and magic are real.  Bujold is excellent at creating a detailed world and characters you care about.  Well told with insight and humor.

Political Fiction, Thrillers, Romance Novels

Jodi Picoult, Second Glance (2003).  A combination ghost story, mystery, and love story.  In 2001, the ghost of a woman who died in 1932 starts causing considerable trouble in the tiny town of Comtosook, Vermont, apparently triggered by an attempt to sell the land on which she died to a developer.  This leads to a chain of events in which her death, reported a suicide, and that of her newborn, reported a stillbirth, are reinvestigated as possible murders.  The motive: the eugenic beliefs of the woman’s husband.  A long flashback to 1932 quotes from the 1927 Eugenical Survey of Vermont and the 1931 Vermont Sterilization Law.  Starts slow and whimsical, turns compelling as Picoult draws you into the story.

Andrew Rosenheim, The Accidental Agent (2016).  James Nessheim has resigned from the FBI and has started law school at the University of Chicago, when his old boss asks him to take on a special project: looking for a spy in Enrico Fermi’s group, which is working on the first atomic reactor for the Manhattan Project.  To add to the intrigue, the job is to be “off the books;” Director Hoover is not to know about it.  The plot thickens when an ex-girlfriend with a “vermillion” past shows up.

Emily Henry, Book Lovers (2022).  High-powered New York literary agent and high-powered New York editor spend a month in his small North Carolina home town desperately trying not to fall in love.  It’s not hard to guess what will happen.  Extremely funny, especially early on, before it gets to the desperate longing and passionate groping phase.  Its weakness is that it tries to be both a romance novel and a satire of romance novels.

Lyssa Kay Adams, The Bromance Book Club (2019).  A romance novel in which Nashville’s alpha males use romance novels to improve their relationships.  In some ways a Regency romance transposed to the 21^st century (made obvious by the parallel Regency novel within the novel).  Hilarious at times.  Like Book Lovers, it suffers from trying to be both a romance novel and a satire of romance novels.

Jeremy Robert Johnson, The Loop (2020).  It seems clear that Johnson wrote this book hoping it would be turned into a big-budget Hollywood action film.  It’s too bad.  If the book had been about the corporate and government malfeasance that led to a biological warfare disaster instead of the unfolding disaster itself, it would have been a lot more interesting.  Don’t bother, unless you like action films on paper.

Other

John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (2008).  In the fifth and sixth centuries the Saxons came across the North Sea and pushed aside the indigenous peoples of England; then in the ninth century the Danes took over large parts of it.  The conventional wisdom is that neither the indigenous people’s Old Celtic nor the Danes’ Old Norse had much effect on English, because of the lack of loan words from those languages.  McWhorter argues that we should look at grammar instead of vocabulary; he traces some peculiarities of English grammar to both the Celts and the Norse.  In an additional chapter, McWhorter takes down the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that grammar channels thought.

Lyell D. Henry, Jr., The Jefferson Highway: Blazing the Way From Winnipeg to New Orleans (2016).  In the days before the numbered Federal highway system, “good roads” associations would come together to encourage the creation of named routes across the country.  By far the most famous of these was the Lincoln Highway.  But there were many others: at least 443 named highways were launched by 1926.  This book covers the creation and early history of the Jefferson Highway, and includes detailed driving instructions for the Iowa section of the road.  Lots of good information, written in straightforward journalistic style.  I picked this book up because the Jefferson passed through my home town.  Recommended if you’re from Central Iowa or if interested in this sort of thing.  [If you only read one highway book, I recommend Drake Hokanson’s Lincoln Highway (1999).  It’s a beautiful coffee table book with great photos and evocative text.]

Admiral James Stavridis, To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision (2022).  Examines decision-making under stress, using nine case studies from US Navy history.  Some decisions were good, others not so good, and some had no possible good outcomes.  A conclusion helpfully summarizes the components of good decision-making.  A short and pleasant read, even though the target audience appears to be management wannabes.

 

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