Booknotes 5.25

Dead Wake, by Erik Larson, published 2015, history, 440 pages. Really good, though my interest in ever going on a cruise may have plummeted. The conjecture toward the end about a possible and kind of horrifying reason why England didn’t send an escort for the Lusitania (and didn’t have the ship go around the north of Ireland, etc.) was fascinating. Recommended. In our current age of AI psychosis smothering the software development industry, this part also hit home for me and lined up nicely with how I feel: In this she was very much in step with the Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution. Also found this of note: Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon…