Flashes of Panic

I recently read Andy Grove’s (yes, that Andy Grove) memoir, Swimming Across. It’s an interesting book, but not necessarily one I would give an unqualified recommendation to.

The “problem” is that what made Grove remarkable was his career at Intel, and this book is about everything but that. There is, of course, plenty that was remarkable about Grove’s life; after all, he was born a Jew in Hungary in 1936. In the span of life covered by this book, Grove and his family were threatened by Hungarians (since the Hungarians avoided German occupation by allying themselves with the Nazis against the Soviet Union, his father was sent to the Russian front as part of a forced-work battalion, and barely survived,) Nazis (who occupied Hungary after all, late in the war,) and Russians (first sweeping out the Nazis, then returning to put down the “Hungarian Revolution” in 1956.)

The two things I found most remarkable were Grove’s taste in literature—he was a great fan of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower series—and his honesty when he finally fled Hungary in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution. Asked repeatedly in Austria and elsewhere if he had participated in the revolution, he said, truthfully, no, I just marched in a few demonstrations. And the questioners were always shocked: all the other Hungarians they had talked to had claimed participation. Grove said nothing at the time, but he vents some anger here: if all those who had claimed to had really fought, he thought, we would have won, and I wouldn’t be here!

Grove notes that one of his motivations for writing the book was to preserve the stories for his grandchildren, and the tone of the book is indeed reminiscent of a tale being told for middle-school students. There’s not a lot of subtlety, and it’s very easy to skim. While that made for fast reading, I also found it made it harder for me to immerse myself in the story.

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