On My Radar:

Walking with Ghosts: A Memoir
by Gabriel Byrne
Grove Atlantic
Hardcover


From the publisher's website:

As a young boy growing up in the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working class parents and the eldest of six children, he harbored a childhood desire to become a priest. When he was eleven years old, Byrne found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled and he quickly returned to his native city. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory laborer to get by. In his spare time, he visited the cinema where he could be alone and yet part of a crowd. It was here that he could begin to imagine a life beyond the grey world of 60s Ireland.

He reveled in the theatre and poetry of Dublin’s streets, populated by characters as eccentric and remarkable as any in fiction, those who spin a yarn with acuity and wit. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary forty-year career in film and theatre. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and Broadway, Byrne also courageously recounts his battle with addiction and the ambivalence of fame.

Walking with Ghosts is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking as well as a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies.

On My Radar:

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
Phil Lapsley
Grove Atlantic
Trade Paperback


From the publisher's website:

Before smartphones and iPads, before the Internet or the personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. By the middle of the twentieth century the telephone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. 

Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of phone phreaks who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, and the counterculture movement that argued you should rip off the phone company to fight against the war in Vietnam. 

AT&T responded with “Greenstar,” an unprecedented project that would ultimately tap some thirty-three million telephone calls and record 1.5 million of them. The FBI fought back, too, especially when a phone phreak showed a confidential informant how he could remotely eavesdrop on FBI calls. Phone phreaking exploded into the popular culture, with famous actors, musicians, and investors caught with “blue boxes,” many of them built by two young phone phreaks named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Soon, the phone phreaks, the feds, and the phone company were at war. 

Based on original interviews and declassified documents, Exploding the Phone is a captivating, ground-breaking work about an important part of our cultural and technological history. 

“If we hadn’t built blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.” —Steve Jobs 

“The definitive account of the first generation of network hackers… at turns a technological love story, a counter cultural history and a generation-spanning epic.” —Kevin Poulsen, news editor of Wired.com and author of Kingpin

On My Radar: Monday Edition

Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter
by Frank DeFord

Grove / Atlantic
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

“Frank Deford is not just an immensely talented sportswriter, he’s an immensely talented American writer.” —David Halberstam
Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter is as unconventional and wide-ranging as Frank Deford’s remarkable career, in which he has chronicled the heroes and the characters of just about every sport in nearly every medium. Deford joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, fresh out of Princeton. They called him “the Kid,” and he made his reputation with dumb luck discovering fellow Princetonian Bill Bradley and a Canadian teenager named Bobby Orr. These were the Mad Men–like 1960s, and Deford recounts not just the expense-account shenanigans and the antiquated racial and sexual mores, but the professional camaraderie and the friendships with athletes and coaches during the “bush” years of the early NBA and the twilight of “shamateur tennis.”

In 1990, Deford was editor in chief of The National Sports Daily, one of the most ambitious projects in the history of American print journalism. Backed by eccentric Mexican billionaire Emilio “El Tigre” Azcarraga, The National made history and lost $150 million in less than two years. Yet Deford endured: writing ten novels, winning a Peabody, an Emmy (not to mention his stint as a fabled Lite Beer All-Star), and recently he read his fifteenth-hundred commentary on NPR’s Morning Edition, which reaches millions of listeners.

Over Time is packed with people and stories, from the insightful and hilarious to the poignant and moving, especially the chapters on Deford’s visit to apartheid South Africa with Arthur Ashe, and his friend’s brave and tragic death. Interwoven through his personal history, Deford lovingly traces the entire arc of American sportswriting, from the lurid early days of the Police Gazette, through sportswriters Grantland Rice and Red Smith, and on up to ESPN. This is a wonderful, inspired book—equal parts funny and touching— a treasure for sports fans.

On My Radar (Tuesday Edition)

Holidays in Heck
by P.J. O'Rourke

Atlantic Monthly Press
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

P.J. O’Rourke is one of today’s most celebrated political humorists, and he has been hailed as “the funniest writer in America” by both Time and The Wall Street Journal. Two decades ago he published the classic travelogue Holidays in Hell, in which he traversed the globe on a fun-finding mission to what were then some of the most desperate places on the planet, including Warsaw, Managua, and Belfast.

Holidays in Heck begins after the Iraq War, when P.J. retired from being a war correspondent because he was “too old to keep being scared stiff and too stiff to keep sleeping on the ground.” Instead, he embarked on supposedly more comfortable and allegedly less dangerous travels—often with family in tow—which mostly left him wishing he were under artillery fire again.

The essays take O’Rourke on a whirlwind of adventures, beginning at the National Mall in Washington, which he describes as having been designed with the same amazing “greatest generation” aesthetic sensibility that informed his parents’ living room. We follow him as he takes his family on a ski vacation (to the Aspen of the Midwest—Ohio—where the highest point of elevation in the state is the six-foot ski instructor that his wife thinks is cute). And later he experiences a harrowing horseback ride across the mountains of Kyrgyzstan—no towns, no roads, no people, and, whoops, no P.J. in the saddle.

The result is a hilarious and often moving portrait of life in the fast lane—only this time as a husband and father.

New Release: WORM: The First Digital World War

WORM: The First Digital World War
by Mark Bowden
Grove/Atlantic
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

“Bowden provides lucid explanations of computer-related concepts while narrating an edge-of-the-seat account . . . A nerve-wracking but first-rate inside peek into the world of cybercrime and its vigilant adversaries.” —Booklist
Mark Bowden’s Worm: The Story of the First Digital World War is about the next frontier in terrorism. Bowden, the best-selling author of Black Hawk Down, has delivered a dramatic cybercrime story that explores the Conficker computer worm, a potentially devastating computer virus that has baffled experts and infected as many as twelve million computers to date.

When the Conficker computer worm was unleashed on the world in November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it. The worm, exploiting the security flaws in Microsoft Windows, grew at an astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the world within weeks. Once the worm infiltrated one system it was able to link that system with others to form a single network under illicit outside control—a situation known as a “botnet.” This botnet was soon capable of overpowering any of the vital computer networks that today control banking, telephone service, energy flow, air traffic, health-care information—even the Internet itself. Was it a platform for criminal profit, or a weapon? Security experts do not know for sure what Conficker’s purpose is, or even where it came from.

Bowden’s book reports this new frontier on terror in a way that has never been done. He skillfully explores the dazzling battle of wits between expert programmers over the future of the Internet—a battle that has pitted those determined to exploit the Internet against those committed to protect it, and awakened the U.S. government for the first time to the urgent nature of the threat. In Worm: The Story of the First Digital World War, Mark Bowden delivers an accessible and fascinating look at the ongoing and largely unreported war taking place literally beneath our fingertips.