The definitive book on the development of drugs for chronic diseases and the creation of the modern pharmaceutical industry. Greene avoids rhetoric and rage to use deep archival researching showing the simultaneous development of new drugs, and new "pre-diseases" defined by numerical risk factors rather than symptoms.

A great little guide for scholars working in discourse analysis. If you're looking for how to figure out what people are *really* saying by doing intensive, word-by-word analysis of their speech patterns, this is the book for you.

PKD is a master of a certain kind of paranoid vision. He was obsessed with the aftermath of World War 3, self-replicating weapons, the reality of a man. All these themes come together in what I believe is his best short story, a taut thriller of soldiers surviving in an atomic wasteland inhabited by autonomous robot Claws. I won't spoil the ending, but it is short, most excellent, and available for free at www.manybooks.net. Why haven't you read it already?

Strategy is not an American strength. Strategic plans are written to serve the interests of political parties and the election cycle, factions within the Pentagon and military industrial complex seeking billions of dollars for next-gen weapons system, or at best a small group of dissident colonels seeking promotion or post-retirement sinecures. Everybody has an agenda, and almost nobody is conducting honest analysis in search of the truth. The authors of Unrestricted Warfare are coming from outside the Beltway; way outside the Beltway, as they're officers in the People Liberation Army. With no DC career to worry about, there's at least the potential of some candid truth about the future of warfare, and besides as a Chinese strategic plan, reading this has the same kind of vicarious thrill as reading Guderian's Achtung-Panzer! in 1938.

The book begins promisingly enough, with chapters like "The War God's Face Has Become Indistinct" and "What Do Americans Gain By Touching the Elephant?". The introduction offers as a sensible reframing of modern warfare as I've ever seen. "We acknowledge that the new principles of war are no longer 'using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one's will,' but rather are 'using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one's interests'"

The authors take as their key examples Operation Desert Storm, the 1997 Southeast Asia Financial Crisis, and the unlimited potential of cyberattacks carried out by hackers. Their analysis of Desert Storm is perhaps the most conventional section, examining in detail the successful organization of the operation under Norman Schwarzkopf, and the use of precision air power as the preeminent arm. Unfortunately, the financial crisis and the role of George Soros fails to illuminate what I can only describe as the 'Soros Conspiracy Twilight Zone.' While several Asian economies suffered massive reverses, and George Soros made a lot of money in the process, the accusation that he was responsible is not sustained (or unsustained for that matter. The issue remains open, as far as I can tell). Given the centrality of financial, economic, and media warfare to the concept of unresistricted warfare, this section deserves better. Finally, cyber attacks are treated mostly anecdotally, without a rigorous idea of the linkages between cyberspace and physical systems, or virtual attacks and real damage.

That said, there are some very clever insights into the strengths and limitations of America's high-tech Battlespace model of combat, where every soldier is networked into a regional grid that can cause any location to precisely explode at short notice (the deadliest environment on Earth, short of a nuclear firestorm) in terms of it's cost and inability to counter low-tech insurgent forces. For a pre-9/11 work, this book is horrifically prescient in linking Al Qaeda and airplanes. Conversely, key topics in strengthening local governance and legitimacy and fostering robust innovative economies not vulnerable to unrestricted warfare are mostly left out.

The original lacks the hyperbolic and inaccurate subtitle 'China's Master Plan to Destroy America' (my copy is from the nice folks at www.c4i.org). The examples are American, because America is the world's premier power, and are fairly critiqued on their strengths and weaknesses. While some parts of China's military are clearly aimed American capabilities, the ideas advanced here are seem to be more about countering and emulating American power, rather than crippling it.

As a guide to the future, Unrestricted Warfare will probably not have the impact of Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, or John Boyd. While it offers a important alternative perspective to the conventional wisdom, it's too foreign, too abstract, too hard to apply. By the standards of this book, the last 10 years of American foreign policy have been an unmitigated disaster, but I don't think the American government could ever act in such an integrated manner without a clear existential threat. I think the most trenchant critique of this book is that more than 10 years later, it's difficult to detect a coherent unrestricted warfare strategy behind China's domestic policies, provocations in the South China Sea, and African development projects. For now, unrestricted warfare is more theory than practice.

"The Unites States fought three wars after 9/11: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the one in the shadows."

So reads the blurb on the back of this book, and it's true, to a degree. In the wake of 9/11, America proved totally unable to pursue Al Qaeda, with a CIA averse to covert operations, and a special forces culture that trained for high-stakes rescue missions. The new war required human intelligence gathering in some of the most hostile corners of the world, and soon developed a system of secret prisons, 'enhanced interrogations', and long-distance drone assassinations. Neither the military nor the CIA was set up to do this, but they soon adapted and evolved.

This book isn't so much about America's shadow wars: the renditions, drone strikes, and secret armies, as it is about who would get to wield the knife. Mazzetti goes into the byzantine conflicts between the Pentagon, the CIA, State, the White House, private military contractors, and the whole weird menagerie of Beltway counter-terrorism experts. The dsyfunctional relationship with Pakistan is a second focus of the book, and the failure of the American relationship with the ISI, culminating in Admiral Mike Mullen's public declaration that the ISI supported terrorist attacks against American troops.

Mazzetti is too much of the professional reporter to make judgement, but he clearly feels that the duplication of effort between the CIA and JSOC has harmed American interests, and that the entire secret war exists on shaky legal and ethical grounds. The pragmatic question: what form should American engagement with this part of the world take? goes unanswered. I've heard it said that journalism is history's first draft, and this topic definitely deserves further study. But in the the here and now, this is the best book about what actually happened after 9/11.

The first story in "Wool" caused such a demand that the rest were published in 6 months. The first story is stark, claustrophobic, alluding to the vast genre of post-apocalyptic fiction without being derivative of it. Unfortunately, the next four volumes don't quite hold up to that level of narrative richness. As the society of the Silo is mapped out, and its secrets revealed, the mystery vanishes and the straight-forward problem-solving that's left is quite enough to compensate for the generic quality of the characters, and the well-trodden 'Vault Revolt' story. A fun read and a good yarn, but one that doesn't quite live up to its initial potential.

I was disappointed that this book wasn't written by Liz Lemon. Yes, I know, stupid and silly. This is an okay book, about perfect to read on an airplane. A little funny, a little insightful, and about Tina Fey (who I love, despite not being Liz Lemon). So yeah, read it if you want a quick distraction and can pick it up on sale.

Where The Innovator's Dilemma was about theory, this is about implementation-a recipe for managers looking to lead successful companies. Christensen admirably tackles the complex problem of guiding a company though times of disruption. There's a lot here, but the essence is that if you want to succeed, start with an idea that is somewhat profitable and go after customers who are under-served, either because no product exists that fits their needs, or they're the least profitable segment of an established market. If you want to make a lot of money, you need to have a product that is "not-yet-good-enough" so that your firm can compete on quality and innovation as opposed to cost.

Christensen advises against purely causal management-picking executive who have succeeded before or following the latest reorganization fad. He is particularly opposed to 'focusing on our core competencies' as the kind of accounting trick that hollows out a company over the long term. The kind of foresight required to move towards where the market is going rather than where's it been isn't easy to acquire, the insight and flexibility needed to switch strategies in midstream is even harder to find, but Christensen makes a compelling argument that good management is possible.

Adriana Petryna investigates the strange world of out-sourced clinical trials, and the effects on medicine when trials are being scheduled beyond most oversight, and advanced medical care is available only by become a guinea pig. Petryna's questions are fascinating, and her research impeccable, but she leaves the most interesting questions. As an anthropologist rather than a journalist, she avoids passing judgement (see "White Coat, Black Hat" for that), and I admire her professional detachment, but I wish there had been more of a conclusion.

Spam is an example of the best of scholarly writing-taking a single under-examined subject and using it to illuminate an entire field of history. In this case, Brunton elegantly theorizes spam, the omnipresent unwanted messages that clog computer networks and consume scarce attention, and its role in the development of various forms of digital governance over 40 years and three major periods. Both brilliant and readable, Spam is a must-read for the 21st century.