Infinitesimal tells an interesting story about the genesis of the scientific revolution through the rather esoteric creation of the indefinitely small and indivisible. The idea of infinitesimals had been around for ages: Zeno's paradoxes are based on the idea that space can be sliced smaller and smaller. And for us, they're literally high school math. dx/dy and all that. 

In the 16th and 17th century, disorder was at the top of mind for many elites. The Catholic Church had been rocked by the Protestant Reformation, and only belatedly offered theological counters. The elite intellectual shock troops of Catholicism was the new Jesuit order, which combined rigorous philosophical learning with absolute obedience to hierarchy, going up to the Jesuit Governor General and then the Pope.  The Jesuits relied on a strict censorship regime to maintain this order, and sought an intellectual underpinning in Euclid's geometry.  Geometry was both old (and therefore safe) and promised a perfectly rational and ordered system. In England, Thomas Hobbes, a tutor to aristocratic, political philosopher, and amateur mathematician, pursued a similar vision of absolute order in his Leviathan. Hobbes was also fascinated by the promise of geometry to create a perfect order.

Against absolute order, a few mathematicians postulated another way of thinking. Perhaps lines were made up of an infinite series of points. Planes were made of lines next to each other, like a sheet of paper. Solids were like a book of many sheets. The Italian branch of this school included Galileo, Torricelli, and Bonaventura Francesco Cavalieri, a mathematician of the Jesuat (note the "a") order. In England, Hobbes' main opponent was John Wallis, a member of the nascent Royal Society.

As Alexander discusses, the stability of Euclid's geometry was intellectual tied to political and theological stability. In Italy, the Jesuits had enough authority to have Galileo sentenced to house arrest. Torrecelli died before 40 of a fever.  Cavalieri, who wrote the first major book on infinitesimals, was dealt with by having the entire Jesuat order dissolved. 

Events in England followed a very different course. Hobbes was successfully baited by Wallis, as Hobbes erroneous claimed he'd "squared the circle", a problem which was later found to be impossible via Euclidian means. Wallis was a decent mathematician and a consummate political operator, who over decades saw Hobbes sidelined and ridiculed. 

While it may be much to ascribe single causes (and Alexander is careful not to), Italy stagnated under Jesuit intellectual rigidity, becoming a poor backwater. England birthed the scientific and industrial revolutions, developments which would have been impossible without calculus.

Thunder Below is Eugene "Lucky" Fluckey memoir of commanding five patrols in the USS Barb against Japan in 1944 and 45. Four of those patrols earned Fluckey the Navy Cross, the second highest US Navy award for valor. The remain earned him the Medal of Honor. This is truly an astounding military memoir.

Fluckey's basic principal of command was attack, attack, and attack!  The Barb spent as much time on the surface as possible, giving it a 10 mile search radius as opposed to the 5 miles available to a submarine at periscope depth. The extra 5 miles of radius means another 235 square miles of search area at any time, a 300% increased chance to encounter the enemy.

And when Barb encountered the enemy, Fluckey was equally aggressive. One attack had him 'infiltrate' a convoy from the rear, pretending to be an escorting frigate while he moved up the line firing torpedoes at enemy transports. The Medal of Honor action, the attack on Namkwan Harbor, involved a lengthy surface approach to a defended anchorage, and then a long run through poorly charted shoals to reach a depth deep enough to submerge and hide. Fluckey tried to turn down the Medal of Honor, following his belief that only fatal heroism deserved the award, and he'd estimated he had a 50-50 chance of surviving the attack. A coinflip seems like poor odds to me. Off-handed, Fluckey notes that by the start of his fifth patrol, half of his graduating class in submarine school was on endless patrol. This was dangerous work.

The fifth patrol, with almost every ship worth a torpedo already sunk, saw Barb demonstrate two novel forerunners of current submarine technology. Fluckey mounted a rocket launcher (same model as carried on the LST-Rocket) and carried out shore bombardments along the Sea of Okhotsk. He also landed a shore party which mined and blew up a train. These days, ballistic missiles and landing special forces are core submarine missions, but Barb was one of the first, if not the first. She's definitely the only sub that can paint a train on her battle flag.  This last patrol was so successful that Japanese media reported six capital ships of Admiral Halsey's fleet had sailed into Okhotsk.

The tactical descriptions are on the lighter side for a general readership. Fluckey provides ample examples of submarine culture, where six officers and 54-odd enlisted made for a flat and egalitarian command structure, at least by naval culture. The Barb celebrated successful attacks with cakes decorated with sinking ships and two beers per man. 

This is one hell of tale for anyone interested in submarines or WW2.

Endings are hard, and this series wibbles on landing. It's not bad, mostly more of the same. The intermediary Idris locked in a desperate battle against the great forces of unspace; variously merely human characters tossed about by factional politics. There are some decent action set-pieces, but the only moment that really stuck with me was Adjudicator Tact sacrificing herself and stranding a group of renegade Parthenon in unspace to be consumed by the Presence that haunts the hyperlanes.

Berserkers, immense machines that aim to kill space-faring civilizations, are a scifi staple, from Saberhagen's original to Revelation Space and Mass Effect.  The Architects are notable for the style in which they convert inhabited planets to cosmic scale artwork, but otherwise much the same. And the things behind the Architects are an unsatisfying foe, refugees from another universe guiding the collapse of this one so a place more hospitable to them can be found.

The Only War We Had is definitely in the lower tier of Vietnam War memoirs. Lanning was a platoon and later company commander with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, and this book covers his first six months, with 1st Platoon and briefly Recon. Lanning was advised to keep a journal, and this book is resolutely day-by-day. No more than three sentences from the journal, mostly noting the tactical situation (where, who was killed), and then a few pages written in the 1980s giving the fuller context.

Junior officers did not have much time to write or wallow in self-pity. I will say that by this book, Lanning was an excellent officer; aggressive in action and highly concerned for the lives of his men.  The other side is that I know almost nothing about him beyond a series of cliches. His infantry were infantry superior to the hordes of REMFs (Rear Echelon Motherfuckers) who clogged up major bases pushing paper. The Vietnamese are treated profoundly negatively, described with slurs on practically every page. He's an Aggie, deeply loves his pregnant wife, and his parents live so far out in the boonies they had to go 12 miles to a neighbor to receive a phonecall. 

A handful of events stick out. Tactically, Lanning preferred to move with a small unit, because no platoon or company-sized force could ever be quiet enough to surprise the Viet Cong. In one such reconnaissance, his six men ran into a three-sided ambush of substantially more Viet Cong and fired literally every bullet they had before withdrawing under teargas grenades. Heavy fire prevent his reinforcements from coming up. There's a thin line between brave and dead.  In a less salutatory moment, an ARVN officer showed up with a prostitute. Lanning deliberately made himself scarce for two hours and came back to a happier platoon that had all borrowed his air mattress for the festivities. And the endless array of fungal infections, leeches, oozing sores, and "Fever, Unknown Origin" that afflicted Lanning and the men.

War sucks. But this book doesn't have much further insight into that.

The Fortune of War picks up with Aubrey and Maturin in the West Indies, having survived their ordeal on Desolation Island, gone all the way to Australia to find the Bligh situation handled, and are now on their way back with a collection of marsupials for Dr. Maturin's enjoyment.  Jack is finally free of the horrible old Leopard, which has been reduced down to little better than a transport, and merely has to take passage home to England where the finest frigate in the fleet awaits him.  Lucky Jack indeed!

Luck is a double-edged blade, and the messenger ship home burns and sinks off the coast of Brazil. Jack and company survive a dangerous voyage in an open boat to be picked up by the HMS Java, which has the thrilling news that war has been declared. The seas are now full of fat American merchantmen to take as prizes, but the Americans have won two sharp frigate actions, puncturing the Nelsonian invincibility of the Royal Navy.

Java. 1812. War. Oh dear. O'Brien draws hefty inspiration from history, but we are now treading into some key moments of American history.

Java confronts the USS Constitution and is shot to pieces and demasted. Jack, who was assisting by fighting the forward guns, is wounded in the arm and even more deeply in the spirit. He and Maturin are taken as prisoners to Boston, where they fall in again with Louisa Wogan, Michael Herepath, and also Diana Villiers and Harry Johnson. Johnson attempts to turn Maturin as a double agent, and then Maturin's life is threatened by French agents also in Boston. It's up to Jack to help him effect an escape to the blockading HMS Shannon, where we again re-enter history with another famous battle.

That these are famous battles takes away some of the tension. I've visited the USS Constitution multiple times, and it's obvious that our heroes will come off poorly. There are some neat observations about the hospital Jack recovers in in Boston. It's mostly an asylum, and the other inmates conclude that this Jack is about as much a British Post-Captain as they are the Emperor of Mexico. Maturin goes hard in places, killing two French agents, coolly slitting a stunned man's jugular. But the landbound action is nowhere near as well-drawn as the sea. 

The Splendid and the Vile is a biography of Winston Churchill and the people around him in the first year or so Winston's time as Prime Minister, covering the period around the Battle of France through Pearl Harbor.  The theming could mostly be described as 'ordinary people'. While there is political and military history (and how could there not be?), Larson's primary interest is the texture of ordinary life at this time, an interest that he mostly succeeds in.

The basic thrust is that people and people, and people under stress are mostly horny and drunk.  A lot of the book is taken up with the amorous entanglements of the larger Churchill circle, including dissolute son Randolph, daughter-in-law Pamela, younger daughter Mary, and private secretary Matt Colville. It's unclear from this book if Churchill was also sleeping around, but he was definitely drinking heavily. The Prime Ministerial retreat of Chequers was a constant party. On the more adult side, an inner circle of scientific advisor Professor Lindeman, scandal-monger and Minister of Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook, and military assistant General 'Pug' Ismay show different aspects of mobilization.  Goering, Hess, and fighter ace Adolf Galland are corresponding figures on the Nazi side.

I don't begrudge these leaders their good times, because things were general profoundly bad. I was aware of how dismal the early war was for the Allies, but in about a year Britain endured military catastrophes in Norway, France, Greece, and the deserts of Libya, along with mass bombing and deadly U-boat campaign. Churchill was truly the man of the hour, a resolute believer in ultimate victory (as long as isolationist America could be persuaded to step in), with a true talent for delivering bad news in a way that made listeners feel uplifted.

Though surprisingly, for all of his reputation as a stupendous orator, and his successes in that vein, Churchill had some failures. One early speech on France bombed because he insisted on delivering it with a cigar clenched in his mouth. The famous "blood, sweat, and tears" line received little attention at the time. But this is also a depiction of the steadfast 'Blitz spirit', at every level from Churchill, refusing to take shelter during air raids and confronting the Luftwaffe from the roof of 10 Downing, to the poorest of London's poor sheltering in Tube stations.

The Splendid and the Vile lacks the focused brilliance of Isaac's Storm or The Devil in the White City, but it's a solid supplement to other WW2 histories.

And as a personal aside, I have another line of attack against Connie Willis' execrable Blackout/All Clear, where time-travelling Historians go back to understand the Blitz spirit. Not only did many people recognize they were living through historic times and take detailed notes, but an academic project called Mass Observation collected hundreds of journals at regular intervals from a cross-section of the population. There's probably no other event so comprehensively documented as the Blitz!

If I had a nickel for every scifi novel I've read about a civilization of intelligent arachnids, I'd have 10 cents. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it's happened twice (the other book is Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky).

In a classic far-future, arrogant scientist Avrala Kern is about to complete the final steps of an ambitious project to uplift monkeys on a newly terraformed planet orbiting a distant star. Her experiment is sabotaged at the last second by an anti-promethean extremist, one tentacle of a war which devastates human society. There are three groups of survivors.  Kern, or a hybrid of Kern and an AI upload, slowly decaying in the observation pod around the planet. A few people back on Earth, who somehow made it through the civilization shattering war. And newly uplifted spiders on Kern's world.

The more interesting plotline follows the spiders.  Mammals on Kern's world other than monkeys were rendered immune to the uplift virus, but insects and arachnids were overlooked. Portia labiata, a species of jumping spiders, becomes larger, smarter, and more empathetic. Over repeated generations, key Portias, represented by the names Portia, Bianca, Viola, and Fabian, experience rapid technological and social evolution. The spiders are natural biotechnologists who domesticate other insect species to do their brute labor, especially ants, who are also uplifted into non-sentient Turing automata. The spiders make contact with an increasing insane Kern via radio, and work towards the scientific method and social equality, with females being the dominate sex. The spiders are always delightful.

Less delightful are the human survivors of the cold sleep ship Gilgamesh, represented by the classicist Holsten. Classicists are specialists in understanding the technology and culture of the Old Empire, Kern's culture.  Old Empire technology is both immensely more advanced than anything contemporary humans possess, and also frequently fatal.  The lingering side-effects on the biosphere are rendering Earth uninhabitable. The survivors barely have enough technology to launch sleeper ships to nearby stars, but a primitive sleeper ship is a bad lifeboat.  The  Gilgamesh is turned away from the spider's world by Kern, the crew suffer their own splits and mutinies and usual insanity, becoming an impromptu generation ship with slowly aging cold-sleep leaders.  This is a story we've seen before, and done with slightly above average style. Compared to the very alien yet coherent society of the spiders, there's no sense that the humans are much different from say, a 21st century sleeper-ship. It's a missed opportunity, given how much has happened in the interim, at least to gesture at.

The final confrontation, between human and spider, is not to be missed, and is an optimistic take on the better angels of our nature, even if they may have spinnerets rather than wings. (The many eyes and 'Be Not Afraid' are still true.)

Tank is a rather bizarre book, a cultural history of the armored fighting vehicle in the 20th century, rather than a military or political history. It is often interesting and charming, and always scattered.  Wright begins with the iconic image of "tank man" at Tiananmen Square: a single anonymous civilian facing down an armored column representing the full mass and might of an oppressive state.

He then leaps back to the origins of the tank in the First World War as a solution to the attrition of trench warfare. The Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps carried out the first tank attacks in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, and the first successful attacks at Cambrai.  The tank attracted immediate fascinating, being described as a great yet ludicrous beast by war correspondents, and then being used as the focal point of a nationwide war bonds campaign.

The first intellectual of armored warfare was the British officer J. F. C. Fuller, who envisioned a new kind of sweeping maneuver against the "horse-minded" stodges of the cavalry. Fuller was a fascinating figure, an early discipline of Alistair Crowley who in the 1930s became a leading British fascist. Strategic brilliance is not always coupled to good sense. 

World War 2, the Bltizkrieg, and the Battle of Kursk is treated in a cursory and obligatory way, as if Wright is bored with the moment when the tank came of age.  As many words are spent on the ambiguous status of the tank in post-Communist Poland as on the Second World War. A chapter spent with General Israel Tal, Israeli armored leader and designer of the Merkava, is more interesting. Yet for a cultural historian, Wright repeats entirely uncritically the mythos of the Israeli tanker in the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War. The book closes out with a visit to Fort Knox, and the optimistic futurism of the US military in the "end of history" years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the World Trade Center.

It's hard to say exactly what Wright's thesis is, beyond "hey, look at all the diverse meanings that have been attached to tanks". There are lots of interesting pieces here, but the overall effect is less than the sum of its components.

Alan Lochrie had seen a lot of ups and downs in his life. He'd overcome dyslexia and doubting parents to become a commercial artist and then police officer. He'd gotten married, learned to fly, gotten divorced, lost his job, moved back home with his widowed mother, and tried to drink himself to death, all by age 38.

With a life like that, there's only one place to go when you hit rock bottom, and that is the French Foreign Legion. Lochrie didn't speak a single word of French and he was ancient. To his advantage, he was in excellent physical condition and had wells of psychological resilience. He signed up in 1983 and made it through the rigorous selection process. The Legion has far more applicants than slots, and a wash-out rate in excess of 80%. Become a Legionaire requires strength, courage, combat skill, impeccable élan, and an unbending devotion to your new family.

After introducing his dire origins, Lochrie moves through training, including a thrilling escape and survival exercise, and several deployments to Francophone Africa, stabilizing Chad and the Central African Republic (I think, not going to look it up.) The biggest threats were extreme heat in jungle and desert and swarms of scorpions, though Lochrie claims he encountered some skullduggery after a coup in Chad, when the CIA asked the Legion to help evacuate a secret army of Libyan POWs they were training to overthrow Gaddafi and destroy a warehouse full of weapons.

Lochrie served mostly with the elite 2e Régiment étranger de parachutistes, but he turned his artistic skills to military ends. He became a member of a special reconnaissance detachment as a photographer, and won a painting contest across the entire French military. 

The first 75% of the book, including Desert Storm, leads to the capstone of a peacekeeping deployment to Sarajevo.  This was by far the heaviest combat that the Lochrie saw, and by far the most complicated political environment. The Legion held the airport, but rules of engagement prevented any further efforts to protect the civilian population. There were no heroes anywhere. While Serbian militias were clear aggressors, Bosnian factions were not above committing false flag atrocities. Lochrie reserves special contempt for reporters and politicians more interested in their own careers and making money on the black market than peace.

On a tactical level, Lochrie applied police techniques to military intelligence, taking covert photographs of Serbian and Bosnian negotiators to build dossiers. The Legion had trouble responding to sniper fire from ruined buildings because it was impossible to communicate where the fire was coming from, and Lochrie developed a gridded photomosaic from each friend OP, with relevant landmarks mapped, so that a sentry under fire could call out "OP3-B6", and get counter-battery immediately, an innovation which has since become common practice. He also witnessed thousands of Bosnians starving and freezing in a UN "safezone", but his film was confiscated and buried for political reasons.

After Bosnia, Lochrie took an early retirement in 1994 (50 was simply too old to keep up with 18 year-olds), remarried, opened an art gallery, wrote a series of novels, and passed away in 2018. Quite a life!

Lochrie is an engaging writer, and while this book is obviously partial, it has the ring of truth. And in one interesting note, of the 20 recruits who survived the 3 month bootcamp with Lochrie, 10 of them were from either the UK or a Commonwealth. A strength of the Legion is that it has people from almost everywhere, providing ready translators and contacts, but I was surprised to see English represented so heavily.

Desolation Island is my favorite of the series so far, deploying all the elements of the series with care and precision.  At the start of the book, both Maturin and Aubrey are suffering from success on shore. Stephen has become despondent over love, addicted to laudanum, and is in the bad lights of British intelligence.  Jack's family is going well, but he's losing money to card-sharks, con-artists, and horse speculators. The solution is simple, a voyage in the HMS Leopard to Australia to either reinstate or remove Governor Bligh, who's suffered another mutiny, and to transport suspect spy Louisa Wogan to Botany Bay.

The main action of the book takes place in the roaring 40s. The Leopard encounters the implacable and competently handled Dutch ship of the line Waakzaamheid. Jack flees from a battle that would destroy him, a tense chase that tests every ounce of seamanship both captains have, and ends when a lucky shot demasts the Waakzaamheid and causes it to founder with all hands.

The Leopard is little better off, as Jack is wounded, and the ship itself strikes an iceberg and begins to sink. Half the crew take to the boats, and Jack manages to bring the survivors to the extremely isolated Kerguelen Islands.  There Maturin embarks in both naturalism and espionage, and the chance arrival of an American whaler provides a chance to effect needed repairs, and Maturin's schemes, at the cost of Louisa Wogan and a potential diplomatic incident.