Month: December 2025

Rounding out the year, for our final book club session we read Apple in China. This book landed with unusual force for me, in part because it intersects so directly with my professional and personal life. I’ve spent my entire career in or adjacent to the semiconductor industry—in hardware design and development, electronic design automation, Infrastructure—where outsourcing, yield, and supply-chain orchestration are not abstract concepts but daily operational realities. My children are in a Mandarin Immersion school, a decision we made in part because of the years I spent watching how essential language and cultural fluency are to doing business across Taiwan and mainland China. With that backdrop this book became less a historical account than a parallel journey through an ecosystem I know well. Reading it now when I travel to China far less, but amid tariffs, export controls, and a rapidly shifting geopolitical climate, I found myself looking at the obvious choices made then through an evolving and more judgmental lens—especially as AI accelerates the stakes of global technological interdependence.

In the book Patrick McGee examines how Apple, once a quintessentially U.S.-based, design-driven company, came to rely almost entirely on China for manufacturing its most important products, particularly the iPhone. This evolution was not a simple story of cost-cutting or opportunistic outsourcing. Over decades, Apple invested hundreds of billions of dollars into Chinese manufacturing infrastructure, embedding itself so deeply that its operational success became inseparable from China’s industrial ecosystem. McGee argues persuasively that this investment didn’t just make Apple extraordinarily wealthy—it played a meaningful role in helping China build one of the most advanced manufacturing and technology systems in the world.

What gives the book its authority is the depth of reporting behind it. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with former Apple executives, engineers, manufacturing design specialists, and supply-chain insiders, McGee reconstructs the behind-the-scenes decisions that shaped Apple’s China strategy. What emerges is not a single dramatic turning point, but a series of rational, incremental choices—each defensible on their own—that collectively created profound long-term consequences for global technology, corporate risk, and geopolitics.

At the core of the narrative is what McGee frames as a Faustian bargain: speed and scale in exchange for dependency. Apple chose China because, at the time, only China could deliver the combination of labor availability, cost structure, responsiveness, and sheer manufacturing scale required to produce iPhones by the tens of millions. Over time, this led Apple to shutter or neglect much of its manufacturing footprint elsewhere. What began as a mutually beneficial partnership evolved into something far more entangled. Apple didn’t just manufacture in China; it became structurally dependent on Chinese suppliers, logistics networks, and political realities, which then meaningfully changed both at home and abroad.

Crucially, the book emphasizes that Apple didn’t merely outsource production—it transferred know-how. Apple engineers worked shoulder to shoulder with Chinese factory teams, co-inventing manufacturing processes, refining yields, and solving problems at breathtaking speed. In doing so, Apple helped cultivate not just factories, but skills, systems, and human capital. McGee makes the case that this transfer of tacit knowledge—far more than patents or blueprints—laid the groundwork for Chinese firms to climb the value chain and eventually compete globally. From that perspective, Apple’s supply chain becomes not just an operational asset, but a training ground.

The geopolitical implications of this evolution are where the book feels most urgent. McGee argues that by rooting its manufacturing and much of its business in an authoritarian state with rising global ambitions, Apple introduced systemic risks—not only to itself, but to global supply chains and U.S. technological leadership more broadly. In this telling, Apple’s rise is inseparable from China’s emergence as a global tech power. The book reframes Apple’s China strategy not just as a corporate success story, but as a geopolitical event with nation-scale ripple effects.

At the same time, Apple in China does not go unchallenged. Some critics view its framing as alarmist, arguing that it overstates the extent to which Apple “trained” China or underplays China’s own domestic policies, state planning, and broader economic forces. Others note that while Apple accelerated China’s rise, it was hardly the sole driver. McGee also touches on labor conditions and ethical compromises, revealing how profit motives sometimes eclipsed responsibility—adding another layer of moral complexity to decisions often justified as operational necessities.

For me, the book’s greatest strength lies in how it complicates the narrative of globalization. Outsourcing and global supply chains brought Apple extraordinary efficiency and profit—but they also diffused control, leverage, and long-term strategic autonomy. Decisions made in the name of convenience and cost optimization ended up shaping global politics, technology competition, and national security debates. Supply chains, the book makes clear, are not neutral. They are strategy.

Reading this now, with AI reshaping both demand and dependency across hardware, infrastructure, and energy, the lessons feel especially salient. As AI systems grow more resource-intensive and geopolitically sensitive, the risks McGee outlines—concentrated capability, opaque dependencies, and misaligned incentives—are no longer theoretical. They are actively unfolding.

Apple in China ultimately asks readers to confront uncomfortable truths: that corporate decisions can alter global power balances; that efficiency can mask fragility; and that ignoring geopolitics is itself a political choice. For anyone working in technology—or raising the next generation who will inherit its consequences—this book is less a warning siren than a long, steady alarm. It doesn’t offer easy solutions, but it makes one thing unmistakably clear: the systems we build to move faster and cheaper can also lock us into futures we never fully intended to choose, so buyer beware.

For October’s book club session we read Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty. Honestly, this book was not great, which is a rare takeaway for me (reading is one of my favorite pastimes and I cannot think of a time I didn’t finish a book I started or find something genuinely enjoyable about it). True to form, I will start with what I loved: the author’s imagination. The world-building in this novel is inventive, playful, and frequently smart in quiet, understated ways. The central premise—a sentient space station serving as a diplomatic and social hub for dozens of alien species—is fresh and full of promise. Each species is given its own logic, culture, communication style, and relationship to humanity, and the book shines most brightly when it allows those differences to collide.

Some of the most engaging moments come from seeing humanity reflected through alien eyes. Humans are perceived as emotional, volatile, and strangely self-destructive—qualities that both fascinate and alarm the station’s nonhuman residents. These observations feel sharp and thoughtful rather than judgmental, and they offer a compelling lens on first contact, cultural misunderstanding, and the uneasy power dynamics that emerge when humans are no longer the dominant or even the most rational species in the room. I also appreciated the glimpses of Earth-side politics: the factions, opportunists, and shadowy interests eager to control or manipulate humanity’s role in this new interstellar ecosystem. Those threads hinted at a much larger, more complex story unfolding just beyond the page.

Another standout element is the station itself. Station Eternity isn’t merely a setting—it’s a character. Its sentience, emotional responses, and symbiotic relationships with its inhabitants add a layer of intimacy and strangeness that sets the book apart. The idea of a living structure that cares, reacts, and occasionally misjudges its residents is one of the novel’s most compelling achievements, and I found myself wishing the story had lingered there longer.

Where the book faltered for me was in its central murder mystery. Rather than feeling integral to the story, the mystery felt like an imposed framework—one that went through the expected motions of bodies, suspects, and reveals without the investigative rigor or narrative momentum that makes a mystery satisfying. The clues didn’t accumulate in a way that invited real engagement, and the eventual solution didn’t feel earned so much as delivered. For a novel so rich in speculative ideas and alien psychology, the mystery itself felt oddly flat and underdeveloped, as though it had been bolted onto a much more interesting science fiction novel rather than arising organically from the world.

To be fair, I’m not a devoted murder-mystery reader, and it’s entirely possible I wasn’t the ideal audience for that aspect of the book. But even accounting for that bias, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Station Eternity would have been far stronger if it had trusted its own strengths more fully. The politics of alien coexistence, the emotional isolation of being human in a mostly non-human society, the station’s evolving consciousness—those elements felt alive, layered, and full of unrealized potential. Instead of elevating them, the mystery often seemed to weigh them down.

In the end, Station Eternity struck me as a fascinating world trapped inside a less-than-fascinating plot. I didn’t dislike it because it failed to imagine boldly—it absolutely did—but because it seemed to pull its punches on the very ideas that made it unique. I came away wishing Lafferty had written a different book set in the same universe: one more focused on the strange, political, emotional, and philosophical implications of shared space, rather than a mystery that never quite justified its place at the center of the story.

For September’s book club session we read Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides. This book is both an epic of endurance and a quiet indictment of war itself. In recounting the January 1945 raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines, Sides tells a story that feels almost mythic in its bravery while remaining grounded in the brutal physical and psychological realities faced by those who lived it. This tale is not clean in the recounting of heroism or triumphant in its declaration of victory. It is a story of bodies pushed beyond reason, of men surviving on will alone, and of courage that emerges not in spite of horror, but directly because of it.

At the heart of the book are the prisoners of war held at Cabanatuan—American and Allied soldiers who had already survived the Bataan Death March, an ordeal so punishing it stripped thousands of their lives and nearly all of their dignity. By the time the narrative reaches the camp, these men are no longer soldiers in any conventional sense. They are emaciated, diseased, and traumatized, surviving on starvation rations and living with the daily expectation of death. What Sides captures with devastating clarity is not only their physical decline, but the fragile psychological scaffolding that keeps them alive: routines, friendships, shared memories, and the stubborn refusal to surrender hope, even when hope feels irrational.

Interwoven with this narrative of slow annihilation is the story of the rescuers—U.S. Army Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and Filipino guerrillas—moving through enemy-held territory with the knowledge that time is running out. As General MacArthur’s forces advance across the Philippines, intelligence suggests that the Japanese may execute their remaining prisoners before retreating. The rescue mission is conceived not as a strategic necessity, but as a moral one: a declaration that these men, long written off as lost, still matter.

The planning and execution of the raid reads like a war thriller, but one weighted with consequence. The Rangers crawl for hours through open grasslands, exposed and silent, knowing that a single mistake could doom not only themselves but the prisoners they are trying to save. Filipino resistance fighters—too often sidelined in World War II narratives—play a critical role, guiding the Americans, securing escape routes, and risking reprisals against their own communities. The raid itself is swift, violent, and terrifying. It succeeds not because of overwhelming force, but because of discipline, coordination, and an almost unbearable willingness to accept personal risk.

The most haunting moments come after the gunfire fades. The prisoners are too weak to flee. Many must be carried on improvised stretchers or supported as they stagger through the darkness. The rescuers, already exhausted, refuse to leave anyone behind. In these scenes, Sides reveals the profound moral weight that underpins the entire mission: the belief that abandonment is a greater failure than death itself.

Ghost Soldiers ultimately becomes a meditation on endurance—on how much suffering the human body and spirit can absorb, and on the bonds that form under extreme pressure. Yet it never romanticizes war. The bravery on display exists alongside unspeakable cruelty; the rescue shines all the brighter because it emerges from such darkness. What makes the book linger is this tension: awe at human resilience, paired with horror at the systems and decisions that made such suffering inevitable.

Like Unbroken and other narratives of survival under unimaginable strain, Ghost Soldiers is a tribute—to those who endured captivity, to those who risked everything to bring them home, and to the power of remembrance itself. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, books like this and Man’s Search for Meaning remind me of how small any trial I endure is by comparison. We can be stronger than we know—ultimately how you endure is your choice. I highly recommend this book—it rescues not only men from a prison camp, but a chapter of history that deserves to be held, examined, and never forgotten.

I’m woefully behind on posting because life has been busy to an extent that I find hard to capture in words. I’m sitting here on New Year’s Eve, at a coffee shop, delightfully unencumbered by…anything, and finally taking my many notes and thoughts about books I’ve read this year and writing them up.

For August, our Book Club read the terribly popular Project Hail Mary. This book is, at heart, a celebration of the belief that science—applied rigorously, creatively, and with a sense of humor—can solve almost any problem. It is also a quintessential example of Andy Weir’s particular brand of hard science fiction: meticulous technical speculation, nerdy joy in discovery, and a tone that invites the reader to marvel alongside the protagonist. For those of us who grew up as space-admiring/aspiring nerds in the 1980s (myself very much included), the novel is a deeply lovable romp through physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering—even if its emotional and psychological dimensions sometimes feel underdeveloped. As with The Martian and Artemis, Weir’s emphasis on scientific accuracy and problem-solving captures hearts and minds, even when the characters themselves can feel more functional than fully realized.

The story takes place in a near future—close enough that all of the science feels contemporary—where junior high school science teacher Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on the interstellar spacecraft Hail Mary with total amnesia. He soon learns that he is the sole survivor of a three-person crew sent twelve light-years from Earth to the Tau Ceti system on a one-way mission to save humanity. Earth’s sun has been infected with Astrophage, a microbial life form that feeds on stellar energy and migrates between stars via infrared emissions known as the Petrova Line. As Astrophage dims the Sun, humanity has only a few decades before agricultural collapse, mass famine, and eventual extinction.

Grace’s task is brutally simple in concept and terrifying in execution: determine why Tau Ceti is unaffected by Astrophage and send that information back to Earth via unmanned probes. The Hail Mary itself is a sacrifice ship—there is not enough fuel for a return journey—and the novel alternates between Grace’s present-day struggle to survive and his gradually returning memories of how he became involved in the mission at all.

Those memories introduce Eva Stratt, arguably one of the most interesting characters in the book. As the UN-appointed director of Project Hail Mary, Stratt is granted total authority and legal immunity, and she uses it without hesitation. Her moral calculus is chilling but compelling: conscription of unwilling experts, international coercion, and even the nuclear bombing of Antarctic ice shelves are all justified if they buy humanity more time. Stratt is not portrayed as cruel, but as ruthlessly pragmatic—someone who accepts the moral cost of survival without flinching. In contrast, Grace’s role in these flashbacks highlights one of his central flaws: his passivity. He enables Stratt’s choices through cooperation and intellectual brilliance, while systematically turning a blind eye to his personal responsibility for their ethical consequences.

At Tau Ceti, the novel truly comes alive when Grace encounters an alien spacecraft—the Blip-A—and its sole surviving pilot, a spider-like Eridian engineer Grace names Rocky. Rocky is easily the most interesting character in the book. Sightless, reliant on sonar, encased in mineral armor, and breathing an ammonia-rich atmosphere, Rocky is both profoundly alien and instantly relatable. His intelligence, perfect memory, extraordinary engineering skill, and deeply ingrained sense of cooperation make him a natural counterpart to Grace. Where Grace improvises and theorizes, Rocky builds. Where Grace jokes to deflect anxiety, Rocky responds with earnest curiosity. Their growing friendship—built through painstaking communication, shared scientific puzzles, and genuine affection—is the emotional core of the novel.

Rocky is on a parallel mission: Astrophage threatens his home system, 40 Eridani, just as it threatens Earth. Together, Grace and Rocky investigate Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line and the planet Adrian, narrowly surviving catastrophic accidents and even exposing themselves to each other’s lethal atmospheres in acts of mutual sacrifice. These scenes underscore one of the book’s strongest themes: cooperation across difference as a survival strategy, not just for individuals, but for entire species.

Grace’s recovered memories reveal the final, damning truth about his own character. After the original crew members—Martin DuBois and Annie Shapiro—are killed in an accident, Stratt forces Grace onto the mission against his will. When he refuses to volunteer, she drugs him with an amnesia-inducing agent and has him loaded onto the ship unconscious. Grace’s shame over this cowardice haunts him in the present timeline, particularly as his actions in space repeatedly demonstrate extraordinary courage, ingenuity, and self-sacrifice.

The ultimate scientific breakthrough—the discovery of Astrophage’s natural predator, Taumoeba, and the engineering of a nitrogen-resistant strain capable of saving both human and Eridian stars—perfectly encapsulates Weir’s thesis: complex, existential problems can be solved through persistence, experimentation, and collaboration. Yet the emotional resolution is more ambiguous. When Grace realizes that his solution may have stranded Rocky, he chooses to abandon his own chance at survival to save his friend. It is the bravest decision he makes in the entire novel—and one that finally feels unambiguous, indicating he has grown through the harrowing experience and friendship he built.

The novel ends with Grace living on Erid, teaching science to young Eridians—a full-circle return to the role that once gave him joy. Earth, we learn, has been saved; the Sun has recovered. But the state of humanity itself remains unresolved. The mission took nearly the entire window before agricultural collapse, and Grace’s choice not to return conveniently spares him from confronting both his earlier cowardice and his complicity in Stratt’s morally catastrophic decisions. In that sense, the ending feels emotionally evasive, even as it is narratively satisfying.

Ultimately, I loved Project Hail Mary. As hard science fiction, it is enormously fun, generous to its readers, and infused with genuine wonder. But I also wished for more: more confrontation, more internal reckoning, and a deeper evolution of Grace as a character. He begins and ends the story in essentially the same emotional place—defined by teaching, avoidance, and intellectual problem-solving—while the most compelling moral and emotional arcs belong to Rocky and Stratt. It’s an incredibly fun book, but one that hints at richer counter-narratives it never fully explores.