2019, book 7: Skunk Works, Ben R. Rich & Leo Janos

Graham was listening to this, and it'd been sitting on my shelf.

It's written extremely simplistically. Both the language and the thoughts are third rate. Most of the anecdotes are "look at us hard-working brilliant engineers defeating the idiot bureaucrats and also blowing shit up". It's like two jocks sat down and really, really tried to do well on their freshman history paper. Even many of the technical details are wrong—just simple numbers that don't add up, or are blown up to make things sound more impressive. Very disappointing for such a "brilliant engineer".

Absolutely devoid of any form of self-criticism past "I am awesome, and Kelly was even more awesome". Zero understanding that perhaps building weapons isn't the most noble thing to do with one's life.

(Oh: they built some planes. And rolled a ball bearing across a table to demonstrate how small the radar cross section of the F-117 was going to be. That's half the book right there: that particular anecdote is milked nearly half a dozen times.)