Started reading this in April and finished it in June.
It really took me a long time to read this book. I checked the e-book out of the public library and had it for 14 day periods. I was reading other books at the same time and there were some admittedly slow parts in the early chapters so it took me several check-outs to finish the book. Then after the somewhat slow start, although still very interesting, the book really took off for me as the story moved into the mid 1960's and from that point on I couldn't put the book down.
I have read a couple of other Jill Lepore books and have loved them. By the end of this book I was loving it too.
The book is basically about an obscure short lived data computation company called Simulmatics Corporation that started in 1959 by some of the country's leading social scientist and was bankrupt by 1970. As the story of the company unfolded I got more into the book. There were so many interesting concepts explored that had a significant impact on America and provided an underlying foundation for much of the history and political landscape of our country in the 1960's. It is also the birth of public relations and the social media data mining world we live in today.
I talked with Todd about this book given his data background and he had heard about but hadn't read it yet. I highly recommended it to him.
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