Steven S. Skiena's 3 favorite reads in 2023

I love a good history book, and I love well-written books. How to Hide an Empire is a fun and informative history of all the territories the United States has controlled over the years: how we got ‘em, and how we integrated them or gave them up.

Much of this was new and surprising to me. I liked the story of the U.S. Guano islands in the days when bird poop was a highly valued commodity for fertilizer. The history of why the United States gave up its colonies right after WWII was very insightful: a function of plastics, military bases, and industrial standardization. He connects Osama bin Laden, the Beatles, and Sony’s founder Akio Morita as direct consequences of the system.

I strongly recommend this book.

Some books you love because of where you were when you read them. During my recent sabbatical in Vienna, I was determined to read a book by Stephan Zweig, perhaps the most popular writer in the world during the 1920s, yet one whose works had fallen into relative obscurity over time. A big reason is that he was a Jewish writer in German just before the Nazis purged bookstores and libraries of all such “degenerate” works. 

This book is a memoir of life buffeted by the events of the 20th century. Zweig lived a rich intellectual life in the stability of Vienna toward the end of the Hapsburg empire in Austria. He watched that life shatter during WWI and the coming of the Nazis before fleeing into exile, ultimately in South America. This is a book documenting the collapse of civilization, written in the darkest days of the Second World War.

And man, this guy could write! Even in translation, you hear his voice: sensible, refined, warm, and funny. I learned so much about the times and places of his life and found him fascinating.

The story of this book is ultimately a tragedy. The day after he put the manuscript in the mail to his publisher, he and his wife killed themselves, unwilling to live longer in those days of darkness. But he left us the book about the world of yesterday, a world well worth knowing and recalling.

Knuth is perhaps the true founder of Computer Science, who set out in the late 1960s to produce a seven-volume series of books containing all the foundations of the discipline.

Three volumes appeared by 1973, after which he got distracted by many other things, and the promised volumes seemed destined never to emerge. But Knuth finished Volume 4A in 2011, after a lapse of 35 years. And then, in the Fall of 2022, at the age of 84, he published the 712-page Volume 4B: Combinatorial Algorithms Part II!

There is nothing in the world like a Knuth book. He has a unique way of looking at the world and an unrivaled sense of detail and humor. He goes deeper down rabbit holes than any man alive, and you come out smarter and with a sense of wonder that such books really exist.

Volume 4B is dedicated to combinatorial search algorithms, like backtracking, with applications to Satisfiability, famous as the first and most fundamental NP-complete (computationally hard) problem. But he shows how these hard problems still can be practically solved through doses of beautify theory.

Any computer scientist or programmer is not a real computer scientist until you read a Knuth book.   Why not start with his latest and then work back?