Katabasis

A Novel

Edition
560 pages
Published in 2025 by HarperCollins Publishers

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek. The story of a hero's descent to the underworld.

Grad student Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become the brightest mind in the field of analytic magick. But the only person who can make her dream come true is dead and – inconveniently – in Hell. And Alice, along with her biggest rival Peter Murdoch, is going after him.

But Hell is not as the philosophers claim, its rules are upside-down, and if she’s going to get out of there alive, she and Peter will have to work together.

That’s if they can agree on anything.

Will they triumph, or kill each other trying?

IBM and the Holocaust

The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation

Edition
528 pages
Published in 2001 by Crown

"IBM and the Holocaust is the story of IBM's strategic alliance with Nazi Germany - beginning in 1933 in the first weeks that Hitler came to power and continuing well into World War II. As the Third Reich embarked upon its plan of conquest and genocide, IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enabling technologies, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.".

"Only after Jews were identified - a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately - could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s, no computer existed.".

"But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. Aided by the company's custom-designed and constantly updated Hollerith systems, Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews. Historians have always been amazed at the speed and accuracy with which the Nazis were able to identify and locate European Jewry. Until now, the pieces of this puzzle have never been fully assembled.

The fact is, IBM technology was used to organize nearly everything in Germany and then Nazi Europe, from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.".

"IBM and the Holocaust takes you through the carefully crafted corporate collusion with the Third Reich, as well as the structured deniability of oral agreements, undated letters, and the Geneva intermediaries - all undertaken as the newspapers blazed with accounts of persecution and destruction."--BOOK JACKET.

TLS Mastery

Beastie Edition

Paperback Edition
237 pages
Published in 2021 by Tilted Windmill Press

Transport Layer Security, or TLS, makes ecommerce and online banking possible. It protects your passwords and your privacy. Let's Encrypt transformed TLS from an expensive tool to a free one. TLS understanding and debugging is an essential sysadmin skill...

The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything

Edition
400 pages

Carbon dioxide. This seemingly simple and ubiquitous substance is fundamental to how our planet works. All life is made from CO2 and its behavior on this planet has kept it bizarrely habitable for hundreds of millions of years. In its workings lie both the splendor of our world—and the potential for life’s destruction. In short, it is the most important substance in Earth’s history. But why is CO2 as essential to life on Earth as it is capable of destroying it? In THE STORY OF CO2 IS THE STORY OF EVERYTHING, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen reveals carbon dioxide’s fundamental role in the operation and maintenance of Planet Earth. Starting at the beginning of time and working all the way up to our present reality, he illuminates how CO2 has been responsible for the planet’s many deaths and rebirths, for the evolution of life, and for the development of modern human society. Carbon dioxide’s movement through the rocks, the air, the oceans, and life has kept our planet’s climate livable, its air breathable, and its oceans hospitable to complex life for more than 500 million years. And only by understanding CO2 in the context of deep Earth history can we see how it gave rise to today’s industrial economy – and more clearly recognize what it means to be churning through hundreds of millions of years of old life in the form of fossil fuels and converting it all to carbon dioxide. With groundbreaking research and a clear-eyed perspective, Brannen shows how a deep exploration into the mechanics of the carbon cycle and the history of our planet can provide hope for averting environmental catastrophe in the future. It all starts with a richer understanding of the essential role of one substance.

White Skin, Black Fuel

On the Danger of Fossil Fascism

Paperback Edition
576 pages
Published in 2021 by Verso

Rising temperatures and the rise of the far right. What disasters happen when they meet?

In recent years, the far right has done everything in its power to accelerate the heating: an American president who believes it is a hoax has removed limits on fossil fuel production. The Brazilian president has opened the Amazon and watched it burn. In Europe, parties denying the crisis and insisting on maximum combustion have stormed into office, from Sweden to Spain. On the brink of breakdown, the forces most aggressively promoting business-as-usual have surged - always in defense of white privilege, against supposed threats from non-white others. Where have they come from?

The first study of the far right in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, and reveals its deep historical roots. Fossil-fueled technologies were born steeped in racism. None loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. As such forces rise to the surface, some profess to have the solution - closing borders to save the climate. Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.