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“Masters of Doom”

2013-04-18T00:00:00+05:30

I must confess that having spent a significant portion of my youth playing First-Person Shooter (FPS) computer games, particularly those developed by id Software, I was predisposed to read “Masters of Doom” by David Kushner with the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. I was also a budding games-programmer with a strong interest in PC-based 3D graphics, so John Carmack was (and still is) a natural hero for me. After all, he created several pioneering FPS games at id Software, including Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake and is very generous about making their source-code available. I was obviously excited to read about his life and how he got together with John Romero to create id Software and its ground-breaking games. This book didn't disappoint me.

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The book tells the story of the “Two Johns” - as John Carmack and John Romero were called - the former being a self-taught genius of a computer programmer with an incredible ability to focus on his work for several hours, the latter a Jack of all trades who was good at computer programming, art and level-design. It traces their troubled childhood, their unwavering passion for programming computer games and their getting together while working for Softdisk. They hit it off very well with each other and moved on to start their own company. Eventually though they had a massive clash of egos and went their separate ways. While they were together they created the aforementioned superhit games (and many others), defining a genre of computer games and expanding the industry.

If you have ever played Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, etc., this book will tell you how they were created, including the missteps, the struggles and the fights behind the scenes. If you are a game-programmer or a graphics-programmer though, the book is very light on the technical details, so don't go looking for them here. Several predecessors of our protagonists in the games-industry (e.g. Richard Garriott or “Lord British” of Ultima fame, Ken and Roberta Williams of Sierra On-Line, etc.), as well as their contemporaries (e.g. Tim Sweeny of Unreal Engine fame) make an appearance here, but some notably don't (e.g. Ken Silverman of Build Engine fame). If you are a gamer from that period, you'll surely recognize the names of several people and the titles of several games.

If you are looking forward to becoming a game-programmer though, this book should give you a pause and tell you just how unhealthy things regularly get at such companies - developers and designers spending almost all the time in “crunch mode” with 80-hour work-weeks and very little time for sleep; several days spent surviving on just pizzas and Diet Coke, people constantly cursing each other, etc. - a recent Penny Arcade article shows that things still don't seem to have improved much in this industry.

The book tells the story till around the time Doom 3 was in early development. Considering that the protagonists are still very much active, a book such as this is bound to be incomplete. For the timeline that it does cover though, it does an excellent job of documenting it - the specific story of the origins and early success of id Software as well as the general story of the maturing of the computer-games industry. From the times when a high-school kid could design and implement an entire game on their home-computer, send a demo-disk to a publisher and actually had a chance of being published, to the current era of multi-million dollar, multi-man-year games, this industry has sure come a long way.

I wish there were something like this book chronicling the evolution of games, but with much more technical details. Until such a time, your best bet is to read the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia, the Graphics Programming Black Book, Fabien Sanglard's game-engine code-reviews, etc.

“Behind The Beautiful Forevers”

2013-04-02T00:00:00+05:30

Most of us living in the fast-growing Indian cities tend to ignore the slums that dot these cities and the slum-dwellers who live within - just as we tend to ignore the garbage strewn all around us. Katherine Boo with her book “Behind The Beautiful Forevers” manages to make us pause and think about these less-privileged folks who have been dealt a rough hand in life as well as our garbage that provides livelihood to many such folks. It is beautifully-written, especially for a first book, and is a must-read.

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The book is based on the lives of some residents of the Annawadi slum near the Mumbai airport, which happens to be surrounded by posh five-star hotels presenting a stark contrast to the abject conditions of its residents. (The slum lay behind a big billboard near the airport advertising bathroom-tiles and proclaiming “BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER”; hence the title of the book.)

There is Abdul, a quiet trader and sorter of garbage brought to him by many of the other residents of the slum, mostly children. There is Asha, ostensibly a teacher and a social-worker, who is determined to improve her lot in life using politics, sex and corruption. Then there is Manju, the college-going idealistic daughter of Asha, who is also determined to improve her lot in life, but through a path of virtue. There are a few “road-boys”, petty teenaged thieves getting high on eraser-fluid used for typewritten-documents, and some rag-pickers, who also feature in this book.

Abdul's life is turned upside down when he is falsely-implicated in the suicide of his one-legged nymphomaniac neighbor Fatima. He faces deplorable brutalities from the corrupt police officers who arrest hime, indifference from the judiciary from whom he seeks justice and a complete loss of livelihood. His family loses all its savings and their house. All their efforts this far to improve their condition in life comes to a naught in the face of this tragedy. The book goes on to tell us how they struggle to put their life back together.

Though the book is based on real people and real events, it reads like a page-turner of a novel. I had assumed that the book is a dramatized account of the original story to make it more appealing to readers, but reading the very interesting “Author's Note” section at the end of the book revealed how hard the author worked to piece together the events and the thoughts of the featured characters using disparate, often contradictory, accounts of numerous individuals (at least 168 people). This is a very well-researched book put together by a very patient and doggedly-persevering author and still the writing is far, far from stilted.

Going by the praise for the book upon its release and several notable mentions in the mainstream media, I was quite skeptical when I began reading the book, wondering whether the hype was justified or whether it was the outcome of very effective public-relations. I am happy to report that I was wrong - the public-relations efforts of the publisher notwithstanding, all the accolades heaped upon this book and its author are well-deserved.

“Bring Up The Bodies”

2013-01-09T00:00:00+05:30

“More of the same” would be an apt description for “Bring Up The Bodies” by Hilary Mantel, when I compare it to its predecessor “Wolf Hall”, and I mean this in a very good way. The author once again delivers a deliciously-written novel on the life of Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister of king Henry VIII of England, while remaining true to the historical record. The second in a planned trilogy of novels on his life, this book covers the dramatic period of about one year (1535-1536) leading to the execution of Anne Boleyn, the queen. Like the first book, this book has also managed to win the author a Man Booker Prize and the prize feels justly-deserved.

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While the first book covered the rise of Cromwell and the rise of Anne to replace the king's first wife Katherine, the second book covers the fall and eventual execution of Anne. She falls out of favor with the king as she fails to deliver him a male heir and as he yearns for Jane Seymour. Cromwell had facilitated the annulment of the king's first marriage so that he could marry Anne and now the king once again asks him to find a way to remove Anne so that he can marry Jane.

Cromwell does this in a way that the “collateral damage” allows him to exact revenge upon the people who had participated in the fall and post-death mockery of his beloved mentor Thomas Wolsey. There is a dialogue in the novel that expresses this perfectly:

Mr Wriothesley looks at him speculatively. ‘I see. It is not so much, who is guilty, as whose guilt is of service to you.’
[…]
He says, ‘It may be that any of these gentlemen who are named could disarm suspicion. Or if suspicion remained, they could by some appeal stay the king's hand. [Wriothesley], we are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use.’

Apart from the queen, Cromwell ensnares five men (including the queen's brother) on trumped-up charges of adultery with the queen, incest and high-treason and eventually gets them executed. On the other hand, even though there are suspicions against Thomas Wyatt, Cromwell lets him go since he can be of service to Cromwell later. There is a beautiful sequence of scenes in the novel where Cromwell interrogates and extracts the confessions (such as they are) of each of the four courtiers who had mocked and dragged the corpse of Cardinal Wolsey, in a masque enacted after his death, by holding on to each of his limbs - Cromwell marks each such victory by noting the respective limb (e.g. “left forepaw”) held by the courtier in that masque.

The execution of the queen is described in much more detail than is usual for a novel. It is particularly poignant how she remains obsessed with little things about her appearance as she is about to be executed, while retaining hope till the very end that somehow the king will pardon her and rescue her from the execution. Of course, that never happens.

Soon after the execution, the king marries Jane and some time thereafter promotes Cromwell. At the end of the book, Cromwell reflects on his success while remaining somewhat apprehensive about whether it will really last.

As in the first book, the characters are relatable and speak a language that is easily understood by the modern reader. Even though you know the overall arc of the story-line, you still find yourself gripped by curiosity to see how it unravels and how the author builds up the situations leading the characters to act the way they do. One of my (minor) complaints about the previous book has been addressed by the author here - pronouns are better disambiguated when they might cause confusion (e.g. “he, Cromwell” instead of just “he”).

A complaint (again, minor) that I have about this book is that there are no examples of Wyatt's supposedly clever poems that hinted at his love for the queen yet remained ambiguous in their meaning. For that you will have to read the Wikipedia article about him, where you learn that in his poems he calls his mistress “Anna” and writes verses like:

And now I follow the coals that be quent, From Dover to Calais against my mind

that could imply that he followed Anne into France even as she was about to be married to the king. He had passed some of these poems to a few courtiers and they implicated him in a possible affair with the queen.

(By the way, you can see many of his poems in their original form in The Devonshire Manuscript, including the acrostic Suffryng in sorrow in hope to attayn, which spells “SHELTVN” - a reference to Mary Shelton, one of the characters in this novel - who has scribbled a snub at the bottom of the page. Fascinating.)

While I managed to read this volume in the trilogy fairly soon after having finished reading the first volume, I must now face the prospect of having to wait for at least two to three years before I can lay my hands on the third volume. Sweet frustration.

“In The Plex”

2012-10-18T00:00:00+05:30

“In The Plex” is a book by Steven Levy on Google that attempts to explain the factors behind its rapid growth and spectacular success and what makes it really different from other companies. It differs from the other such books on the company in that the author was granted unprecedented access by the normally-secretive company. This makes the contents of the book fairly accurate and turns it into a great book to read if you are curious about the inner workings of this company.

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(Disclosure: I am an employee of Google at the time of this writing, albeit a fairly new one.)

I am still amazed at the extent of the access the author seems to have had in the company over the years that he has been covering it (first for Newsweek, then for Wired and then for this book). He wasn't just able to talk to people at almost all levels and roles in the company, but he was also allowed into the top-level Google Product Strategy (GPS) meetings, internal product-launch and product-review meetings, the weekly “TGIF” all-hands meetings, inside a data-center, an incubation trip for newly-recruited Associate Product Managers (APMs), etc. This is what makes the book so authoritative on the company, though it also calls the objectivity of the author into question. Happily enough the author does not shy from criticizing the company for its missteps and oversights, though the indulgence in a few places is somewhat grating.

Of course, the company has been providing some insights over the years into its workings via research papers, spiel on its web-site, books like The Data Center as a Computer, tech-talks and presentations, etc. Those who have been keenly following the company over the years will therefore find much of the material familiar, though there is surely some new material here especially the behind-the-scenes accounts of crucial periods in the company's history (e.g. the tweaking of search-results to divine user-intent and deliver satisfaction, the creation of the AdWords and AdSense programs, the launch of Google Books and its subsequent tribulations, the launch of the China offices and the pull-out from China later, etc.). The book was therefore particularly interesting and insightful to me, even as an employee working at the company.

Apart from the indulgence towards the company or its founders shown by the author at times, one of the minor irritants in the book for me was his insistence on bringing up the Montessori education of the founders again and again as the reason for their approach to building things and running a company that is so different from their peers elsewhere. There is no concrete evidence provided to make one believe this assertion, so the fixation is a little puzzling for me. As far as I can tell, there is no correlation between Montessori education and audacious creativity of the type shown by the two founders.

The author covers a lot of the important products, but some of the omissions are still a little jarring. For example, News barely merits a brief mention here, while Maps and Orkut are mentioned almost in passing, even though each of them is (or has been) a significant product on its own. News is used by a lot of people to keep up with their world and provides a clutter-free gateway to accessing a lot of newspapers on the Internet. Maps requires a fair amount of manpower and technology to be really useful. Orkut was very popular outside of US, especially in Brazil and India. (Plus was apparently being launched just as the author was wrapping up writing the book - he mentions the war-like effort to launch it in a very short time to catch up with Facebook, but does not cover its differentiating features or subsequent reception.)

Get this book if you want to know how Google works, what it really believes in and what has made it so successful. To know any more than this, you'll have to take up a job there.

“Buddha”

2012-08-11T00:00:00+05:30

“Buddha” is an eight-volume manga created by Osamu Tezuka, perhaps more famous as the creator of Astro Boy. This magnum opus is a fictional account of the life of Gautama Buddha and has more than 3,000 pages that took over ten years to create. Despite its length and the time it took to create it, the volumes read as a coherent whole, with the stories of several characters interleaving with that of Buddha. It is a joy to read this set of books and one cannot help but marvel at the amount of love, effort and discipline that must have gone into creating something like this.

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When you line up the volumes of the English edition of this book as available in India, the spines combine to show snapshots of Buddha from three different stages of his life. This little touch is what attracted me to the book the first time I spotted it in a bookshop, though the combined price of the volumes (each priced at INR 350) put me off buying them right away. Now that I am a member of a library, I can finally read these books without worrying about their price.

The book is easy to read and the frames are drawn in the characteristic style of manga; every now and then however, a frame depicting a landscape or a forest would dazzle you with its shear beauty and the amount of detail shown by the artist. The language has quite a bit of modern slang and conscious self-references to the artist and the art-form. There are quite a few anachronistic elements (like a watch or a radio or references to modern baseball teams), but somehow it just ends up being fun instead of being irritating. The topless depiction of almost every female might be somewhat shocking if you are prudish.

There are quite a few characters who keep appearing at different points in the story and the author has tried to show what drives them into doing what they do. Some of it might appear a little distracting and a little puzzling. For example, in the very first volume we read about the adventures of Tatta, a pariah boy with the ability to possess animals - it is not very clear in this volume what he has to do with the story of Buddha, who is born only towards the end of the volume. Of course, his effect on the life of Buddha is revealed over the course of the rest of the book as the story unravels.

A few of these characters (e.g. King Bimbisara, Devadatta, Angulimala, etc.) would be familiar to those who have heard the story of Buddha, but not in the way they are depicted here. A few of the other characters (e.g. Tatta the pariah, Naradatta the monk who is condemned to live the life of a beast, etc.) would most likely be completely unfamiliar. In other words, this book is a very different telling of the story of Buddha from what you get to hear in this part of the world.

While the story might be different here, the messages are still the same: the essential similarity and connection between all creatures, the rejection of violence, the rejection of the abhorrent caste-system in Hinduism, the conquering of all desires in order to achieve true happiness, etc. The book therefore is a great introduction to the basic tenets of Buddhism told in a very light manner, likely to appeal to the young folks.

ICFPC 2012

2012-07-27T00:00:00+05:30

I took a stab at completing the task presented in ICFPC 2012 a couple of weeks back. The task was to guide a miner in collecting as many lambdas as possible from an underground mine while avoiding falling rocks and expending the least amount of energy (quite like the old Digger video-game). As usual, this task had to be completed within three days and once again, I was far from done by the time the deadline arrived. It was however a fair amount of fun for me.

Since it was simpler and provided instant-gratification, I spent the first day creating an SDL-based visualizer that allowed you to navigate and solve a given map using the arrow keys. This implied simulating the rules of the game correctly and verifying that the scores I obtained in various scenarios matched those produced by the web-based validator provided by the organizers. The given set of maps revealed some of the complexities of the task at hand, including having to proactively prevent an already-falling rock from blocking the miner's exit from the mine.

On the second day I had a very bad case of “programmer's block” - I just could not come up with an algorithm good enough to properly complete the given task while scoring the maximum. To side-step this issue, I tried to reduce the complexity of the task by implementing a mode where rocks remain pinned instead of falling down and creating problems for the miner. I also created a set of test-cases to verify that the simulator worked correctly under various scenarios as I modified it.

On the third day I implemented a naive approach based on the A-Star algorithm to find and navigate to the nearest lambda and then the exit when all had been collected, but only if all the rocks remained pinned. (I modified it later to find the lambda with the shortest path to it at each step, as the miner had to some times go around walls to reach the nearest lambda.) This is all I had time to implement in the end.

I chose C as the implementation language because I don't get to program in it any more and I wanted to refresh my programming skills in C. This however proved to be a little counter-productive as I spent a few hours debugging subtle errors in my heap-based priority-queue implementation and in my A-Star algorithm implementation that a higher-level language would have exposed much earlier. As usual you can see the source-code for my attempt here.

This was yet another instance of a task in ICFPC requiring an algorithm that could be described as “a heuristic-based path-planning algorithm minimizing costs in a dynamic environment”. Every time I encounter such a task, I resolve to read about possible approaches and implement some of them before the next year and every time I end up not doing it by then. I hope this time I actually keep my resolution. I plan to start with the excellent overview paper A Guide to Heuristic-based Path Planning (PDF).

By the way, as has been the case in recent years the response from contestants once again seemed somewhat muted this year. I am not sure if it was because the task wasn't novel enough, especially after the high-point reached in 2006, which in my opinion was the very best.

If you want to read other write-ups on this year's contest, check out the ICFPC sub-reddit.

“Steve Jobs”

2012-06-03T00:00:00+05:30

Walter Isaacson's “Steve Jobs” is the authorized biography of Steve Jobs, finished just before his death and released shortly afterwards. Steve was the creator of some of the most iconic (and best-selling) products of our times, as well as the person who rescued Apple from near-death upon his return there and built it into the biggest company in the world by market-capitalization. It is natural for us to look for insights from this book on just how he managed such feats. While the book succeeds in showing us his human side, revealing aspects of his personal life that were otherwise well-guarded this far, it does not quite throw much light into his design-sensibilities or business-acumen or how they helped him create such a spectacular turn-around at Apple.

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To put the following review into context, I should note that my interest in reading this book was not as much to learn about the personal life of Steve Jobs as to gain insights into how he was able to achieve what he did (at both Apple and Pixar) despite his well-known failings. This book provides a peek into the real person behind the image of Steve Jobs and a poignant account of his struggle with cancer, but that is not what I am looking for in a biography.

The book tells the story of Steve's life in a more or less chronological order. It assumes that the reader is already familiar with the broad story-line, so it tends to jump back and forth a little bit at times. Even with close to 600 pages though, it skims through most events - this is somewhat understandable as Steve seems to have led an extremely eventful life and created quite a few remarkable products.

There is no doubt that this book is well-researched - it is apparent that the author has interviewed several people, some of them many a time (more than 40 times for Steve himself), and has read extensively about his subject. Apart from being an authorized biographer with access to his subject's family and personal material, the author also seems to have relatively-easy access to the rich and the powerful (some of who figure at crucial points in Steve's life), no doubt helped by his stints at Time, CNN and the Aspen Institute. This placed him well to do a good biography of his subject.

However, the author seems to have over-corrected himself in trying not to appear too enamored by his subject or seem glossing over his faults - Steve comes across throughout the book as tactless, abusive, moody, neglectful, emotional and with nutty ideas of diet and health. At several points in the book, Steve would recall a set of events in one way and the author would gather a different recollection from the other participants and he seems to always side with the latter. This treatment seems quite unfair. According to the author, Steve wanted to get this biography done in order to give a better picture of his life to his children so that they could understand him better as a person. It seems unlikely to me that this book will give them a fair perspective of their father.

There are some jarring omissions. As John Gruber points out, this book seems to miss just what design is all about (not mere appearances, whether external or internal, but how a product affords its functions) and the importance of well-designed software (not just hardware) in making Apple's products popular. The biggest omission for me was any decent mention of Mac OS X, which was largely based on the NeXT OS and which brought a beautiful, robust and well-performing OS to Apple's computers. The same could be said for iOS and Apple's portable devices. The software in Apple's devices is what makes the hardware such a joy to use. Similarly the author keeps telling us about Steve's disdain for presentations based on PowerPoint, but omits to tell us anything about how he created Keynote embodying his ideal for a presentation-software.

At different points in the book, Steve keeps insisting that Apple's mission is to build great products, not to chase profits. The author seems to take this on face-value and does not try to probe why it is then that Apple insists on such high margins on its products or has such a super-secretive company-culture. (As an example of its ability to charge high margins on its products, the author himself notes that Apple got just 7% of the revenue in the PC market in 2010, but captured 35% of the profits. As another example, Apple got just 9% of the mobile handset market in Q1 2012, but captured 73% of the profits.)

There were a few blatant contradictions about Steve's life that the book sadly doesn't provide much insight into: his ascetic life-style and $1 salary versus his haggling over the number of stock-options granted to him and their back-dating, as well as the high-margins on Apple's products; the “inspiration” he took from the then-revolutionary GUI developed by Xerox PARC to create the Macintosh UI versus his early battles against Windows for copying the Macintosh or his later battles against Android for copying iOS.

Why did Steve fail during his first stint at Apple to grow it as a company but succeed (and succeed very well) during his second stint there? What did he learn during the interim period when he was at NeXT and Pixar that made him successful upon his return? Once again, we fail to get such crucial insights about the subject of this book by reading it.

Quite a lot has been written about Steve and will most likely continue to be written about him. Ditto for Apple. Much of the material in this book will therefore not appear to be new for those of us who have been reading about Apple, Steve and the early days of the PC industry. (For example, the book “Insanely Great” by Steven Levy contains more information about the early Apple and the birth of the Macintosh, while the book “Fire In The Valley” by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine tells a better story of the birth of PC industry in Silicon Valley.) This book is for you if you want to know more about Steve Jobs the person or if you only have a superficial familiarity with the remarkable story of Apple and its creator.

Oh and you'll also get to read about the (closed for now) Kona Village resort in Hawaii, which is apparently such a great place that Steve kept going there again and again throughout his life.

Blogspot Blog Imported

2012-03-23T00:00:00+05:30

I have imported into this web-site all the posts from my Blogspot blog (into which I had previously imported the entries from my Advogato diary). I feel it is better to have a single infrequently-updated web-site rather than a couple of such web-sites. It also consolidates into a single web-site most of what I have been polluting the World Wide Web with since the year 2001.

Blogspot allows you to export the entire contents of your blog as a handy XML file. I wrote a small program to transform this XML into appropriately-dated posts in this web-site. The program would have been simple but for the code to handle many of the quirks of the way I used to write the HTML for the Blogspot blog and the Advogato diary, as well as the idiosyncracies of the respective hosting platforms. The end-result should be fairly readable, though possibly not formatted in the most desirable manner.

As an aside, this import from Blogspot into my web-site as well as the previous import from Advogato into Blogspot was fairly straightforward to do using the respective exported dumps and custom programs. It would have been very difficult if these hosting platforms were not liberal enough to make it easy to migrate off them (or if I had not known programming). Kudos to Advogato and Blogspot for being so open.

“Wolf Hall”

2012-03-18T00:00:00+05:30

I felt a strong urge to read “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel when I read her frank article in Intelligent Life on how she perceived awards as an author, in particular the Man Booker Prize that she (deservedly) won for this novel. The book is historical fiction set in the period 1500-1535 and tells the story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII of England. The relentless pursuit of Anne Boleyn by the king and the resultant set of tumultuous events that led to the English Reformation separating the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church forms the backdrop for this novel. This book is very well-written and is well worth the time it takes to read it.

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If you are somewhat familiar with the history of this period, you wouldn't find much in the plot of the novel since it stays very faithful to the historical record. What is brilliant about this novel is the way it manages to show well-rounded portrayals for most of the characters in the book - their human side - rather than the black and white portrayals that one usually gets to see in retellings of history. Another brilliant aspect of this novel is how it manages to recreate life in 16^th century England, especially the hold of religion, class and epidemics on life and that of men on women. These aspects provide the context for the reader to appreciate the behavior of the folks involved as events unfolded around them. It is quite an achievement on the part of the author to present an interesting story while remaining true to the historical record.

The book is one of those rare pieces of good literature that remains quite accessible throughout, without betraying any condescension towards the lay reader. Even though the book is set in 16^th century England, the characters mercifully speak an English that should be readily understood by most modern speakers of the language. There are no irritating tricks of the narrative, deployment of clever metaphors, use of obscure terms, etc. to distract the reader from enjoying the story. Once again, this restraint on the part of the author to refrain from faux sophistication in her writing is quite commendable in my opinion. I really wish more authors would follow her example.

The narration of the book is from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell (in the third person) and the pronouns “he”, “his”, etc. when used in this book usually refer to Thomas Cromwell. This took me a little while to get used to and was somewhat confusing in some places. It also turns out to be a little clumsy as the author has to clarify who is the subject being referred to by such a pronoun at some places in the book (so the whole point of using a pronoun is lost). This is of course a minor quibble against an otherwise excellent book.

While reading the book, I kept wondering why it was titled “Wolf Hall”, the residence of the Seymour family, where hardly any action takes place - the bulk of the action actually takes place at Austin Friars, the residence of Thomas Cromwell. Towards the end of the book, Thomas Cromwell uses the phrase homo homini lupus (“man is a wolf to man”), which captures the essence of the book and in effect reveals a possible explanation for the title.

It seems that a sequel to this book is in the works. I am eagerly waiting to lay my hands on that book.