Publisher's Weekly Review
Weinberger (Imaginary Weapons), national security editor at the Intercept, scours reams of archival material and interviews former officials of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, revealing a highly secretive organization with a fittingly mixed legacy. Following Annie Jacobsen's 2015 book on DARPA, The Pentagon's Brain, Weinberger's complementary take is a deep organizational history rather than a technological chronicle. The now "$3-billion-a-year research agency" was founded in 1958 as the Advanced Research Projects Agency, with a post-Sputnik mission "to get America into space." That quickly shifted into finding a science-based "solution to counterinsurgency." DARPA's real purpose has been to tackle critical national security problems while freed of bureaucratic oversight and scientific peer review. Agency scientists developed the Saturn rocket, the technologies that led to GPS, and evidence supporting the then-controversial theory of plate tectonics. Perhaps most famously, they "laid the foundations for computer networking." DARPA has engaged in regular turf battles with competing agencies or branches of the armed forces, and some of its big risks have resulted in disastrous consequences; DARPA spent much of the early 21st century embroiled in debates over data-mining, privacy, and surveillance. Weinberger's fascinating, if occasionally dry, account abounds with examples of technocratic arrogance in thrall to the "allure of science fiction." Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
From Bond-worthy cigarette lighters-cum-spy cameras to sleek, radar-defying military aircraft, the inventions produced by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have, in many ways, impacted nearly every facet of contemporary life. The history of this relatively unknown Pentagon agency traces its origins to the 1950s U.S.-Russia space race, and its applications have been tested on battlefields from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Not merely the stuff of spy craft or warfare, DARPA's scientific and technological innovations may have had national defense and security inspiration, but their influence reaches far beyond the battlefield. Case in point: ARPANET, the cumbersome acronym for the military's linked computer network, which became the foundation for today's Internet. But for every stellar success, there were abject failures, such as the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange, used in the Vietnam War. Exploring silly schemes as well as sensible ideas, distinguished military science and technology expert Weinberger profiles the crusaders who thought outside the box in service to their country and their own limitless creativity. A fascinating and defining behind-the-scenes look at the confluence of defense politics and technological prowess.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE IMAGINEERS OF WAR: The Untold Story of Darpa, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, by Sharon Weinberger. (Vintage, $17.) Few know much about Darpa - populated by a "procession of nuts, opportunists and salesmen," Weinberger tells us - but the group helped shape modern life and modern warfare. Some notable inventions: stealth aircraft, armed drones, Agent Orange and even the internet. EXIT WEST, by Mohsin Hamid. (Riverhead, $16.) In this elegant meditation on refuge, exile and home, a couple flee their unnamed country riven by civil war. Hamid weaves the surreal into his tale: Magic doors separate the dangers of home from the perils of a new life. The novel, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2017, is this month's pick for the PBS NewsHourNew York Times Book Club. STEVEN SPIELBERG: A Life in Films, by Molly Haskell. (Yale, $15.) A feminist critic's take on the filmmaker focuses on his Jewish identity. Praising the match between biographer and subject, our reviewer, Lisa Schwarzbaum, wrote, "The exploration here is lively, the critic is deeply informed and she approaches her mandate with a calmness of inquiry that is a gift often bestowed on the outsider anthropologist impervious to tribal influences." UNIVERSAL HARVESTER, by John Darnielle. (Picador, $16.) At the local Video Hut where Jeremy works as a clerk, someone begins splicing violent, vaguely malevolent scenes into the tapes, and his Idaho town is shaken. As his friends and family are consumed by the phenomenon, Jeremy pursues the mystery, culminating in a final reckoning at the remote farm where the scenes were filmed. Darnielle, the lead singer for the band the Mountain Goats, counteracts the sinister with acute sensitivity in this story, his second novel. WHY TIME FLIES: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, by Alan Burdick. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) Burdick, a New Yorker staff writer, investigates how we experience the passage of time: varying perceptions of duration; how humans agreed on the common measure of an hour. His account doesn't satisfy every question, but it opens up new lines of inquiry into the subtle and profound ways humans process time. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US, by Stephanie Powell Watts. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) A riff on "The Great Gatsby," this debut novel centers on the fates and fortunes of AfricanAmerican families in modern-day North Carolina As our reviewer, Jade Chang, put it, "Watts is interested in what black people are allowed to want - and allow themselves to want - in 21st-century America."
Choice Review
Google Tacit Blue, and images of a strange-looking reconnaissance aircraft appear. Using Google to locate information on Tacit Blue involves the internet, a creation that transmitted its first message in October 1969. High flying aircraft and internet search engines, as well as a plethora of other technologies (including rockets, satellites, and electronic communications), are tied to an organization named the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which began in 1958, soon after Russia's Sputnik launch. Weinberger's book on DARPA is more than a history of technology, scientific innovation, and problem solving--it is also a history of the US. DARPA's original mission was to develop technologies that would ensure "swift victory" when the US went to war; but in light of the reality of ongoing "long wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems that technology has instead provided the US with the ability and inclination to be in a "forever war." The work provides a focused view of how society reacts to threats and challenges and how society chooses to solve perceived threats. A history class could effectively use this book as a text for studying modern American society. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Michael W. Carr, US Army Watercraft & Riverine Operations, US Coast Guard and US Navy Diving
Kirkus Review
A journey through "the agency responsible for some of the most important military and civil technologies of the past hundred years."Intercept security editor Weinberger (Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld, 2006, etc.) again sets her sights on the Department of Defense, combining historical context with a focus on waste, fraud, and abuse in one realm of the gigantic government agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, often referred to by its acronym DARPA. Cobbled together in 1958 in the aftermath of Cold War panic that the Soviet Union had launched the Sputnik satellite, the original DARPA personnel felt uncertain about their mission. The already established military services of the Army, Navy, and Air Force seemed to overlap with DARPA's amorphous mandate. Should a military agency control the government's rush to match or surpass the Sputnik launch? (At that time, NASA had not yet been created.) Weinberger traces how the pieces fell into place, focusing first on a detailed history of William Godel, a former military member who remained in government as a negotiator with foreign leaders. Godel's previously low profile receives a boost from Weinberger, a tireless researcher. The ascension of Godel leads to the crispest narrative in the book; after he exits, the story loses steam due to his many successors and the many disparate projects that ended up in DARPA's jurisdiction. Some of those projects led, at least indirectly, to the valuable creation of the nonmilitary internet plus brilliant devices that could detect tests of nuclear weapons by foreign nations. But when DARPA personnel became deeply involved in strategies to fight insurgent wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the agency waded into controversial waters that caused damage to its standing within the Pentagon. Given the complications of writing a comprehensive book about an octopuslike agency, Weinberger handles the material well. At times, though, the reading feels like parsing a government agency annual report. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.