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To: nopardons
Oh, no wonder I missed knowing about this book, it came out in 1973; the year I was preggers, had my kiddo, and moved 1/2 way across the country. I was still reading, but didn't have all that much free time to really do my usual thorough looking through bookstores. LOL Many thanks for the title, author and history of this book. Now, I want to read it!

It's funny how memory plays tricks on you- I'd swear I read it as a teenager, but the date clearly places it right before my first marriage, when I was older.

I remember buying it specifically because some reviewer I liked recommended it as a "disturbing read."

It seems like I read it about the same time as Roberto Vacca's "The Coming Dark Age"-- a book whose premise didn't pan out, but which was interesting reading anyway- not so much from the contents of the book ( which I've forgotten ), but from the preface.

Vacca was a computer systems analyst who helped businesses upgrade from manual book-keeping to computerized systems, and he mentioned in the preface that the actual improvement in business operations came not from adding a computer, but from going over their operations and streamlining the process so the computer could understand it.

In other words, as a business grew, its record-keeping and book-keeping operations got overloaded with useless features, redundancies, pointless entries, and when he went over it and tossed all that stuff out, it streamlined the process more than adding the number-cruncher.

That parallels my own experience running businesses-- you accumulate a lot of tophamper and baggage as you go along that really isn't necessary, and sometimes it takes an outsider to look at things and see just how much you can safely jettison.

95 posted on 11/08/2005 2:31:55 AM PST by backhoe (-30-)
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To: backhoe
There have been many fiction books, some of which have purported that while this was just "fiction:", it really was going to happen. The vast majority of such books are mere ravings. Yet, it would seem that "THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS" was grounded in reality and that the author could and did smell the coffee/see the writing on the wall.
147 posted on 11/08/2005 6:26:15 PM PST by nopardons
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