Book details of 'Great Misadventures: Bad Ideas That Led to Big Disasters'

Title	Great Misadventures: Bad Ideas That Led to Big Disasters
Author(s)	Peggy Saari, Betz Des Chenes
ISBN	0787627984
Language	English
Published	October 1998
Publisher	Gale Group

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'Great Misadventures: Bad Ideas That Led to Big Disasters':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Let us start with some cliches. Life is a hard teacher: she gives the test first, and the lesson afterwards. Good judgement comes from experience: experience comes from bad judgement. Those who do not learn from history (or History 205) are doomed to repeat it. We learn far more from failure than we do from success. And, finally, learn from the mistakes of others: you will never live long enough to make them all yourself. If there was ever a book concept made for the RISKS-FORUM Digest library (aside from Peter's own) it is this: great boneheaded ideas from the past. In this junior edition, four volumes divide that topic into exploration, science and technology, military, and society. Unfortunately, while the essays provide decent canned histories of the events, they make lousy lessons. All of the material is presented at the same level of very rough detail, rather than sketching in a background and then concentrating on a specific mistake. A number of decisions in any chapter may be identified as errors, but there is little commentary on why the action was wrong and contributed to the disaster in question. Why did this endeavour, intended to promote safety, ultimately spell catastrophe? If this person or institution was motivated by greed or ambition, at what point did the driving force behind development become a destructive power? While there is a lack of analysis overall, a particular failing is the lack of examination of options that might have changed the outcome for the better. In the Reader's Guide starting each volume, the point is made that a calamity had some positive result, usually in terms of a reform or improvement. Relatively few of the stories, however, tell of any such correction. In both the Apollo 13 and Bre-X articles, in fact, the text has to admit that we do not know for sure what the causes of the problems were, and therefore no lesson can be drawn from them at all. Of greatest interest to the largest number of readers of this series will be the article on the Year 2000 problem, otherwise known as the millennium bug or Y2K. Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about this essay is that it will become academic in less than a year. The situation is blamed on an "error" (with no mention of the widely used standard), although the next paragraph states that it should not be called a "bug." Although Peter de Jager has worked tirelessly to bring the issue to the attention of the public, it is not true that nobody knew about it before his 1993 article. I have never seen any microwave oven that cared what the date was, and it is rather beyond the bounds of probability that an aircraft would shut down in flight because it felt miffed at being too long without a checkup. An entire section of the article confuses the predicament with the unrelated issue of maintaining archival records as generations of storage hardware and media pass by. The entire disaster is ultimately laid to the blame of "negligent" computer developers. There are a number of sidebars, generally giving a biography of involved characters, and illustrations. The biographies sometimes seem at odds with either the essays of which they form a part, or oddly placed in proximity to more detailed accounts, and the figures, where placed in a piece, provide little explanatory support. The military section, for example, has numerous battle maps where the order of a campaign is extremely difficult to follow. (Yes, I know: war is messy.) Some of the diagrams, as originally produced, were probably supposed to be in colour, since the keys cannot, in the black and white version, distinguish between items of opposed significance. Much material is duplicated between pieces, but even that can be confusing at times. Many terms are explained in article after article, and the explanations are not always consistent. A musket will be defined as a "shoulder gun" in one essay, a "rifle" in another, and a "gun like a rifle" in a third. Not a great difference, but confusing. (The index does not assist in clarifying matters: there are lots of entries for people, but almost none for things.) The cachet of disaster might make this an inviting set for promoting study of history in a rather "dates of the kings of England" manner. The events are isolated, the details are scanty, and the analysis almost doesn't exist. I doubt that students would learn much of either history or judgement from these books. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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