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History & Society

The Soul of a New Machine

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Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine follows a team of Data General engineers as they race to design and debug a new 32-bit minicomputer under intense competitive and organizational pressure. Rather than treating computer development as an abstract sequence of inventions, Kidder presents it as collective human labor shaped by ambition, rivalry, improvisation, exhaustion, management decisions, and technical judgment. The resulting work is both a history of the Eclipse MV/8000 and an enduring study of how demanding technological projects acquire momentum—and what they ask of the people who complete them.

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History & Society

Being Mortal

Medicine and What Matters in the End

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In Being Mortal, surgeon and writer Atul Gawande examines how modern medicine responds when cure, recovery, or indefinite independence is no longer possible. Moving between medical history, reported case studies, conversations with patients and families, and the illness of his own father, Gawande argues that care should be organized around the life a person still wishes to live—not only around safety, treatment, or survival. The book explores aging, frailty, nursing homes, assisted living, serious-illness conversations, palliative care, and hospice while asking how autonomy, purpose, dignity, and human connection can be preserved near the end of life.

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History & Society

The Vaster Wilds

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The Vaster Wilds is a historical survival novel centered on a young English servant who escapes a devastated colonial settlement during the winter of 1609–1610. Although the settlement is not immediately named, the historical circumstances identify it with Jamestown during the catastrophic period remembered as the Starving Time. The girl’s flight into the forests of Virginia supplies the book’s forward momentum: she must find food, water, warmth, shelter, and a route toward a place she imagines may offer safety. Memories gradually disclose the conditions that formed her, the household she served, the Atlantic crossing, the colony’s breakdown, and her reason for fleeing. The novel consequently operates on several levels at once—as a physically exacting survival narrative, a psychological portrait of a socially powerless person, a critique of colonial assumptions, and a spiritual inquiry into humanity’s place within nature. Rather than treating the landscape as an empty stage awaiting E…

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