Josh Young

Well, I'm not terribly well-versed on paleo-anthropology, but I followed the science of this just by reading attentively - it was that clearly written.

I found both the Young chapters (more about Ida and her scientists, roughly) and the Tudge chapters (more about the big picture of how primate evolution is being worked out, roughly) fascinating.

I loved the close-up pictures of Ida and other fossils, and the explanations of how scientists can tell so much about a critter from a fragments of show more a jaw (and why it's so often only the jaw that is found). I loved the description of the Eocene world and of the significance of the Messel pit.

If you're looking for an adventure of how some cool dudes found the earliest ancestor of people, don't read this. If you want to learn about primate evolution, do. show less

You may notice that the title is a bit over the top. So is the subject.

Fred Levin grew up a Jewish kid in Pensacola, Florida at a time when Jews were still routinely and openly discriminated against. He worked hard to be one of the most popular kids in high school anyway, did just well enough that he got into the University of Florida--and discovered that he like college life well enough that he didn't want to leave it after just four years. He spent his last year of college getting his GPA show more up to the crucial 2.0 that would enable him to enroll in UF's law school.

And there, after some initial fooling around, he discovered he actually loved the law. Thus began what was in some respects an unexpected and often startling legal career.

There's no question that Levin is and always has been an enthusiastic self-promoter. He's very full of himself. Yet he also has some sense of identity with "the little guy," and his career in personal injury law has had over the years a significant element of supporting the average person against big corporations that didn't have any need, absent the personal injury lawyer, any need to care about any injuries done by the products they sold. Make no mistake; this was very, very profitable for Levin. He also got substantial compensation for his clients, and some of those cases, along with what the rest of the personal injury bar was doing, had real impact on how corporations operated.

Among his more significant exploits is one referred to in the title. He got interested in the tobacco litigation, still largely futile, and got Florida's Medicaid law changed in a small but significant way to make it possible for the state of Florida to recover damages from the tobacco companies. That was the crucial event that made the huge tobacco settlement possible.

Levin is a colorful character, and not even remotely a saint. Stories of him lying and cheating are cheerfully told in his own words. He was a terrible family man, neglectful in every sense except providing well financially. He really did have a couple of brushes with murder prosecutions, and did become a Chief of Ghana--as a result, oddly, of his time as a boxing manager. He was part of a wave of change in how personal injury law was practiced, at the start of his career, and again late in his career, with the shift from individual clients to mass tort actions.

Young clearly likes his subject, a great deal more than I suspect I would, but this isn't an uncritical book. It's all here, warts and all. This is a fun book, but it has some of the quality of watching a train wreck: you just can't look away.

Recommended with reservations.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. show less

The exploits of investor and explorer Victor Vescovo who formed the endeavor of assembling a team and equipment to become the first person to explore the five deepest oceans. The title I found appealing the story not quite as much. The idea was rather intriguing, and not to short shrift the feat but the nuts and bolts of putting the project together was not nearly so engrossing.

Vescovo had aside from the adventurous spirit and drive to take on this challenge but the deep pockets that would show more finance it, very deep pockets. The amount of money was truly staggering and outside of the fame and getting ones name in the record books it is head scratching to contemplate the motivations behind that financial commitment.

Much of the books dwells on the technological setbacks which were innumerable. Also the squabbles that surfaced from many of the technical, scientific and film production people. This bogged down much of the story and the actual dives and time spent in covering them were quite diminished in comparison. This made for a not so entertaining book as I had hoped for. show less

Not terrible, but extremely drawn out. I should have read Ben Taub's New Yorker article instead. Young doesn't dig deep into Vescovo's character and comes across as fawning. In any conflict, Vescovo was right, and Vescovo always has the last word. Was that a condition for getting this access? If so, then it unfortunately has an effect opposite to what was intended. Vescovo comes across more as a rich, superficial dilettante, nothing like the explorers he admires, like Shackleton, or show more entrepreneurs, like Musk. He's a tourist with far too much money, buying his achievements. A little skepticism, of Vescovo and of the expeditions' "science" program, would have made the book much stronger. (No, a slightly more precise depth reading for the Marianas Trench is not going to revolutionize ocean science. Vescovo pretends to care about science and exploration, but he admits at the very beginning that he would be happy to descend in a blank steel ball with no windows or sensors whatsoever.)

I did like getting some of the details of designing and operating the submersible. From briefer press reports, you might get the impression that this is a turnkey operation, and it definitely isn't.

> Vescovo wanted to dive solo to the bottom of the deeps, and he wasn't convinced that having viewports was worth the expense or the risk.

> The centerpiece of the sub, a titanium hull, would be negatively buoyant, as opposed to the acrylic-hulled subs that Ramsay had usually designed for Triton, which were positively buoyant. This meant that the sub would have to be much taller to accommodate enough syntactic foam for buoyancy, as the hull would weigh several tons. However, the drawback of a tall sub was it would rock on the surface

> Export controls were placed on any vehicle above 1,500 mm, classifying them as military grade, meaning that a hull above that size would not be able to freely move from country to country. This meant that the two seats and all the necessary electronics and controls would need to fit inside a sphere less than five feet wide.

> "When you are up on Everest and it's storming, you are saying to yourself, ‘I'm glad I bought the best money could buy and I'm with the best team. When I'm down there at 16,000 PSI, I'll say I'm glad I spent the money I spent and have the best team."

> the leaking in the pressure hull was the result of the opposing halves of the main pressure hull sliding, ever so slightly relative to each other against the equatorial ring plate around them, whenever the sub was lifted by crane. This was being caused by movement in the frame attached to the hull that held the syntactic foam. His solution, which he cleared with certifier DNV-GL, was to install what he called a Circumferential Preload System. This basically entailed placing a tight metal band around the hull at an angle to prevent the two halves from shifting

> "We just lost the arm," Vescovo said. Lahey's eyes widened. "No …" Without saying a word, Vescovo pointed for him to look outside his portal and see the detached arm. "Oh my God …" Lahey lamented. Vescovo stowed the arm's control lever and leaned back in his seat, utterly deflated. "I don't know where we go from here, Patrick." Without the significant weight of the manipulator arm, the sub began an unplanned ascent.

> The great irony was that losing the manipulator arm had made the dive successful. The conductors freed up by not having an arm ended up providing Blades a method to fix all of the other electrical faults by rewiring the sub.

> He thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and that everyone else was being unreasonable and completely ungrateful given the massive resources he had personally deployed to make this opportunity happen for all of them. And he had a point.

> Jamieson had spent eighty-eight days on the ship since the beginning of the FDE and felt he had little to show for it. His position was that the science had been getting short shrift from day one. His week in the Puerto Rico Trench for science was killed. The loss of the manipulator arm handcuffed the gathering of sediment samples in the Puerto Rico Trench or in the Southern Ocean. Even the big victories weren't scientifically relevant.

> putting them closer to the center of the Earth than any human had gone. (The actual closest point, according to geologist Heather Stewart, is in the Gakkel Ridge in the Arctic Ocean under the ice cap, where, of course no one has ever been.) show less