War is terrible, but if there is any redeeming quality to war it is its capacity for bringing out the truly exceptional. One of the last Americans left in Vietnam in 1972, USMC Captain John Ripley blocked one of the armored spearheads of the Easter Offensive almost singlehandedly. The bridge at Dong Ha was a massive US-constructed steel and iron span, and under heavy fire Ripley crawled out again and again to wire the bridge for demolition, buying precious days for the collapsing South Vietnamese army to reorganize.

It is almost impossible to state how brave Ripley was, and therin lies the flaw in this book (and why it gets three stars). While Miller paints excellent portraits of Ripley, his Vietnamese comrades, and the chaos of conflict, he doesn't quite manage a coherent picture of what Ripley did. I know that he crawled and swung underneath the bridge under intense fire, dragged heavy crates of TNT hundreds of feet, wired detonators with improvised tools that could've blown his head off, and then went back to rig an secondary electrical detonation, but for all that, I'm fuzzy on the physical details of how Ripley succeeded. A solid book, particularly for the single fragment of the war it presents, but one that doesn't achieve greatness.

One useful trick I did learn was that if you need to severe heavy steal beams with high explosives, place your charges slightly offset on either side like 'crooked earmuffs'. If the charges are directly across one another, the blast will cancel itself out. The more you know!

I really loved The Sparrow, but the sequel left me cold. I'd say the errors were threefold. First were the characters; Emilio Sandoz and the crew of the first expedition were friends and then family; the sense of love that pervaded the whole book made the losses bearable, and amplified the horror of the expedition's failure. The cast of the sequel (Sandoz included) are mostly Righteous Bastards. There's little love and little entertainment. The second failure was in the plotting, which was crystalline but flawed. There was no reason for Sandoz to return to Rahkat, and the ploy used would be acceptable in say, a hard-boiled noir, but in a book that prides itself on decisions and consequences, felt cheap. Finally, on a practical level the twin revolutions on Rahkat just don't make sense. One side are tradition-bound scheming predators dependent on a potentially hostile species for every bit of logistics and technology. The other one has access to satellite reconnaissance and the entire library of human technology. Rahkat's tech level is unstated, but the Jana'ata don't seem to have ranged weapons, so why don't you set up a factory for AK-47s and Katyushas and conquer the planet as fast as your armies can walk? For all the time we spend with the Jana'ata and the Runao, we still don't have a clear picture of their society, technology, or the course of the genocidal war set in motion by Sofia Mendez. (And don't even get me started on Isaac, or anything he does!) The theology is okay, even for a non-believer, but that's about the highpoint.

Not bad on its own, but a disappointing ending to the story.

The basis of this book is that writing should be play-even for professional writers there has to be an element of fun and joy. As long as an author can keep having fun, they can write indefinitely and improve their craft. While I'm no fan of the Iowa Writer's Seminar, (and this book is steeped in that tradition), it has a lot of useful tips and exercises for writing a little every day, and improving your own writing. I could see this useful for teaching a creative writing class, or as a self-guided seminar.

For a fan of literature as opposed to a practitioner, there's also a lot to enjoy here, with a feast of short fiction, essays, poems, and plays used as examples. Sometimes it's a little hard to see the relevance to the theme of chapter, but as someone who mostly stays away from modern fiction this was a lovely sampling.

The Face of Battle is undoubtedly the most influential book of its kind. Keegan takes military history out of the ghetto and into the main stream of 20th century research by asking what it was like to participate in three representative battles: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. Keegan delves into the visual, aural, and olfactory terror of the battlefield, asking what it is that makes soldiers stand and fight, kill other men, and be killed themselves. As a scholarly monograph, it is a delight, dry and witty in a particularly British way. War is terrible, but Keegan loves it and shares his love in this great book.

This book is incendiary, a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the unstill and unorganized masses of Black America, urging them to cast off their chains, regain their bodies, their minds, and burn White American Power to the ground. Written in the early 60s in Folsom Prison, Cleaver makes a moral case for Revolution (with a big R) and a tactical case for hatred, for blood&sex&violence joined together to break down everything stultifying and corrupt. The thesis is one third Marx, one third Freud, and one third rage, blended in what a much more modern and less impressive thinker calls "The Ghetto University."

I haven't quite figured out what this book means, more than 40 years on, and what place Cleaver's ideas should have, but damn is it impressive.

Dark secret: I've somehow made it this far through my life without reading Frankenstein. This is the 1818 text, which reliable sources assure me is far superior to the self-bowdlerized 1835 revision. It's hard to evaluate this book apart from its place as a foundational work of science fiction and gothic horror. While it still has the ability to impress and horrify in places, it's hobbled by a weak central character. Victor Frankenstein is unworthy of the creation of his 'monster', his rejection arbitrary and cowardly. For all its pain and loneliness, the monster is surprisingly aesthetic and moral. Victor, dude, you stitched together an 8 foot tall thing from corpses and shocked it to life. You were surprised when you succeeded?

Autonomous Technology is an important book in the history of STS, synthesizing many school of technological critique from Ellul, to Weber, to Marx, in search of a way to talk about technology that accurately respects its power and its relationship to human society. The problem is that important is not the same as influential, or even particularly good, and I found this book confused on several critical points: what is the nature of autonomy-necessary for authentic human flourishing, or a sign of a system dangerously out of control? Speaking of control, is it a necessary part of governing technology, or a system by which elites can 'rationally program' society from the center?

Winner's original scholarly contributed is mostly rooted in a sense of nostalgia-a nostalgia he writes about in The Whale and the Reactor. It's a longing for a lost boyhood on the California coast, in a small town of orange orchards and sea breezes. That life sounds beautiful, but far to small to encompass human experience-or even the current human population. Winner proposes "epistemological luddism", a stance that people only use tools that they understand fully, with a sense of appropriateness and wisdom. Yet the first part is incompatible with any sort of urban, technological, interdependent life, and 'appropriate' and 'wisdom' are elusive virtues in the simplest of times, let alone gales of a technological revolution.

One of the greatest of the Vietnam War memoirs, Chickenhawk absolutely covers the joy of flight, the terror of combat, and the insanity of Vietnam as a whole. Robert Mason always wanted to fly, and the Army would give him a helicopter in exchange for a little stint in the Air Cav. Of course, nothing is easy, and that tour meant a year of heat, mud, mortars, whorehouses, hot LZ and crazy officers. It's hard to say what I love more: descriptions of the crazy tricks used to push a Huey to its limits and beyond, brief encounters with a Vietnamese way of life as yet unspoiled by war, or Mason's slow descent into a nervous breakdown, brought on by too many 10 hour flying days dodging tracers. In many ways, Vietnam was a helicopter pilots' war, and this is their book.

Shooting at the Moon is an amazing book about the long, secret, topsy-turny war in Laos. While Vietnam was a meatgrinder, feeding a whole generation into the blind rationality of 'search and destroy', Laos was the spook's war, a struggle by a handful of CIA idealists in a forgotten nation. At first it was just Bill Lair, using his Thai PARU special forces to train up a Montagnard army under Meo General Vang Pao, successfully out-guerrillaing the North Vietnamese Army. But as the Ho Chi Minh trail stretched down through Laos, the war grew into a supermarket war, with 440,000 tonnes of bombs per year raining down on Laos more or less at random. Vang Pao's people were ground down to nothing by the weight of the Pathet Lao and their Vietnamese backers, and in the end, the war came to nothing-under the terms of the Geneva accords America had never been in Laos, so it could never leave. Warner is deeply knowledgeable about his topic, combining political and military history with artistic impressions of an exotic time and place, and the recollections of major figures. Simply great!

This is an exceptional collection of military science-fiction, well balanced between action, philosophical meditations on the costs of going to war and coming home, and speculations about developments in weapons and strategy. Philip K Dick's "Second Variety" leads off the collection, in my opinion one of the best and creepiest stories about robotic warfare ever written, but the rest of the book doesn't slack off much. I particularly enjoyed Tony Daniel's "A Dry Quiet War", but all of the stories in this collection are worth your attention.