This is a very well written and entertaining book about a scientific administrator who played a major effort in organizing the technical responses required to anticipate and successfully meet the challenges of WWII. His skillful analysis, technical comprehension and political astuteness not only provided outstanding leadership at the time but shaped the intractions of goverment, industry and the academic community in such a fashion as to remain intact to this time. One comes awawy with an enormous respect for Dr. Bush. He must have been one tough character and difficult to deal with but he got the jobs done. It is a pity that his battles with Admiral Ernest King have, to my knowledge, never been documented. The issues they disagreed about were not trivial and their interactions must have been awesome. I read this book shortly after completing Tycho's Island and the similarity between the two men and the administrative issues they dealt with is both striking and illuminating.

Good men are hard to find and good books about them deserve our attention.

A very interesting and thorough biography of Vannevar Bush, who more than any other individual is responsible (for good or for ill) for the shape of today's scientific establishment. Well-written and engaging, with lots of interesting historical tidbits and good insight on the personalities involved. Excellent!

Fans of multimedia computing will want to read the chapter titled "As We May Think", in which Bush, President Roosevelt's science adviser, speculates in 1944 on the future management of information. His "memex" is an uncanny harbinger of hypertext. The book is must reading for technology history buffs! - Richard Devir (gsft99a@prodigy.com

Vannevar Bush was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In the July 1945 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, he published a popular science article entitled "As We May Think." Bush discusses a device called a "memex", a sort of workstation with vast optical storage and mechanical information retrieval using associative indexing and "trails". The article is of interest today not only because he happened to get pretty close to how the future finally turned out, but also for the fresh perspective from a time before interactivity itself had been invented. It is also curious to see what he got wrong. Unlike our present day Visionaries, he completely failed to anticipate the introduction of Microsoft Windows on the PC.

Despite being published in 1949 this book seems very current. Were Vannevar Bush transported from 1949 to the present I suspect he could be up to speed on military matters in a couple of months.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this book are Bush's insights into the process of innovation.