30
of magnetic key cards. Morse relies on
unusual suppositions, bizarre possibilities,
and hypothetical situations for humor.
At the end, Moody intrudes with an
in-depth afterward, showing his intense
interest in his character. This postscript
answers questions and raises possibilities
about both Moody and Morse. At times I
wonder if (or when) Moody is pulling my
leg, but he leaves connecting the dots up
to the reader.
We follow glimpses of his personal life
– his family, the divorce from his wife, the
alienation of his daughter, and his new love.
The Pentagon’s
Brain
by Annie Jacobsen ’85
Little, Brown and Co.,
552 pages, $30
Reviewed by
Michael Matros
The flying toy you may have been given
for Christmas will take some amazing
neighborhood videos for you. The Penta-
gon, though, has a better one: “The Mach
20 drone will be able to strike any target,
anywhere in the world, in less than an
hour,” writes Annie Jacobsen in her
intricately researched new book,
The
Pentagon’s Brain
.
A more personal bit of high technology
from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a
flying robot that can be “shown a photo-
graph of a person and told to return when
the target has been killed.”
Jacobsen, whose investigations of Amer-
ica’s covert weapons research has yielded
the bestsellers
Area 51
and
Operation
Paperclip
, charts the history of the U.S.
agency whose mission “is to create revolu-
tions in military science and to maintain
technological dominance over the rest of
the world.” As a military science agency,
Jacobsen writes, DARPA is “one of the
most secretive and, until this book, the
least investigated” in the world.
Killer flying robots and virtual-reality
battlegrounds are by now old news for
Pentagon scientists; the public likely
won’t know what newer technologies are
REVIEWS
Hotels of North
America
by Rick Moody ’79
Little, Brown and Co.,
208 pages, $25
Reviewed by
George Carlisle,
faculty emeritus
In the latest novel from Rick Moody ’79,
the reader follows Reginald Edward
Morse as he stays in 27 hotels in the
course of 30 years. Morse’s entries are
observations into his psychological world,
in addition to the humor we have come to
expect from Moody.
Morse writes as a reviewer for Rate-
YourLodging.com, but he is also a moti-
vational speaker who has worked
in investments and day trading. His
observations would be of little assistance
when planning a journey – at times, he
barely mentions the hotel itself, but instead
tells the reader what enters his mind.
For example, once he asks, “Have you
ever awakened in the middle of the night
in a hotel without a clock and felt the
isolation of timelessness, of living outside
time, of the purgatorial station outside of
time?” At another hotel “the easy laughter
of romance” occupies his mind when he
is thinking of the relationship between
Dante and Beatrice. At the Hyatt Regency
Cleveland, his subject is the depressing
disintegration of the city, while at The
Equinox, in Manchester, Vt., the topic is
illicit liaisons.
Morse often shares wisdom from his
inner heart. And why not? He writes at
the Tall Corn Motel in Des Moines, Iowa.
“You should speak from the desire to heal
the most broken part of yourself.” The
hotels themselves are far less important
than Morse’s personal life, his family, his
divorce, or his alienation from his daugh-
ter and his new lover.
Quite often, Morse is simply (I think)
having fun. At one motel, he describes
vividly what lurks in a particular carpet.
At another, he imagines what the term
“artisan-crafted guest suites” means. He
describes with equal detail a personal gas-
trointestinal crisis and the various design
of keys and locks, including the horrors
now on DARPA workbenches until they
appear years later in public offshoots.
Think GPS and the Internet.
In one of Jacobsen’s more optimistic
interpretations of the agency’s work, she
writes, “DARPA makes the future happen.
Industry, public health, society, and cul-
ture all transform because of technology
that DARPA pioneers.”
The agency, though, was created with
less benign priorities – as a combatant in
the Cold War arms race. Jacobsen begins
with a detailed account of the Castle
Bravo nuclear test on the Bikini Atoll in
1954. The H-bomb ignited not only Soviet
and U.S. research into more cataclysmic
killing machines but also efforts to inter-
cept them. Authorized in 1958 by President
Eisenhower, ARPA (the “D” came later) took
on its first major assignment, Defender,
which would (but didn’t) create a virtually
impenetrable, space-based, antiballistic
missile shield, the antecedent of President
Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.
In her fast-paced narrative, Jacobsen
then recounts DARPA projects in the years
since, with a fascinating examination of
initiatives during the Vietnam War. One
DARPA concept during Vietnam envisioned
the use of small, precisely targeted nuclear
weapons, an idea that lives today in the
agency’s playbook.
As war and peace alternated in succeed-
ing years, DARPA remained constantly
creative. Jacobsen writes about the mis-
sion of Michael Goldblatt, who came to
DARPA in 1999 from his post as chief
scientist for McDonald’s. One of his first
endeavors was to develop a pain vaccine.
The idea, he explained to Jacobsen in 2014,
was to allow “the warfighter to keep fight-
ing so long as bleeding could be stopped.”
In succeeding years, Jacobsen writes,
public scientists on the Defense Science
Board, which oversees military research,
have become replaced in large part by
representatives of what Eisenhower termed
the “military-industrial complex.”
It is the rigorous objectivity of Jacob-
sen’s research throughout
The Pentagon’s
Brain
that gives credence to her more
disquieting concerns. “The world becomes
the future because of DARPA,” she writes.
“Is it wise to let DARPA determine what
lies ahead?”
