This book starts with the senseless murder of a young woman and her 15 month-old daughter, and then it gets dark as Krakauer investigates the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. This isn't "Sister Wives on TLC"; this is an unflinching look at teenage girl-kidnapping-raping-brainwashing-daughter-swapping-incestuous-relevating-schismating-and-murdering zealots of the FLDS, and their connection to mainstream Mormonism and American society.

Krakauer is a master of literary non-fiction, specializing in using sensational events as a lens to look at bigger issues. In this case, the uniquely American religion of Mormonism, the limits of religious tolerance, and what it means to be inspired by god. I don't think he quite succeeds in bringing it together, but the parts are strong enough to stand on their own. The modern story is a crime drama straight out of In Cold Blood (but better researched). The history is a solid synthesis, drawing on the classic Nobody Knows my Name, The American Religion, and the more modern scholarship of excommunicated Mormom historian Dr. Michael Quinn.

Journalistic attacks against Mormonism are as old, and possibly older than the religion itself, and Under the Banner of Heaven slots neatly into a genre meant to titillate and incite Gentile readers. I've rarely been inspired to such hatred when reading a book, and I'm not sure how that makes me feel. I want to exterminate the FLDS now. Does that mean I'm no better than they are?

((Yes. Because I haven't raped any teenage girls.))

A densely theorized work of multi-sited ethnography, Sunder Rajan examines genomics in Silicon Valley and India from a Marxist perspective, developing a complex and deeply interwoven account of an implosion of science, truth, value, economics, and national and corporate agendas. I felt that the most interesting parts of the book centered on the role of hype in the biotech industry, and the implosion between statements of scientific fact and public relations untruth. That said, this book might be a little too much-flabby with jargon and too enamored of re-inscribing the exploitation of capitalism in general to reach an insightful point about this particular moment of exuberance and great wealth making implied by genomics, even in the absence of clear improvements in health or even actual products. An important book, to be sure, but one that sits uneasily.

Buchanan intends this book as a philosophical counter to the typical anti-enhancement tomes, Fukuyama's "Our Posthuman Future" and the Leon Kass-chaired President's Council on Bioethics report. He rigorously dismantles the bioconservative arguments, blowing their models of human nature, evolutionary biology, and the motives of potential transhumans apart. This book would make an admirable companion to one of these texts in an upper-level bioethics class on enhancement.

Where this book is less effective is in advancing a positive rational for human enhancement, beyond a vague notion of "correcting nature's error", or noting that human beings, the environment, and technology have been continually interacting and evolving. Indeed, Buchanan sidesteps entirely one of the most critical issues in human enhancement: how enhancement research might be done without violating human subject research codes, including the Helsinki declaration, which explicitly bans non-curative research.

The last chapter, on ameliorating the distributive justice effects innovation through a Global Institute for Justice and Innovation modeled on the World Trade Organization is so detached from the realities of poverty and technological power as to be laughable. The 'bottom billion' isn't poor because of a lack of technology; it's a lack of governance and maintenance of well-understood technologies, and an inability to compete with the first world on a global commodity market, for example in oil. The GIJI is a nice utopian ideal, but has no bearing on how technologies actually embody power: Robert Moses' bridges, or software end-use license agreements, for example.

Laying out and demolishing the anti-enhancement claim from a philosophically rigorous position is a useful good, but this book provides relatively little guidance on what it might be like to be an ethical transhuman, or how we as a civilization might get to that point.

There's a scene towards the end of Terminal World that perfectly encapsulates the book: Our heroes on a desperate rescue mission back to the city that betrayed them, in a Zeppelin losing its high tech defenses bit by bit, being strafed and boarded by suicidal pirates in wingsuits. It's steampunk, pretty cool, and makes no damn sense. Reynolds does his best with Big Ideas, and in this case the Big Idea (some sort of disaster that creates Zones that limit technology, the survivors clustered around some a mysterious mega-structure), just isn't big enough to hold together the rather flat and amoral characters.

Omon Ra is dark. How dark? Think Kafka shooting krokodil in a Siberian prison camp imagined by J.G. Ballard and then Iain Banks devours the whole thing with a black hole. Sub-infra-black doesn't even begin to describe how dark it is. That said, this is the wonderful and magical story of young man who dreams of flight and joins the cosmonaut program, only to learn that the Soviet space program is less than it seems. It's a mediation on the theater of Soviet heroism, Stakhanovite exceptionalism, and the sacrifice of young dreamers on the alter of Party prestige.

The Black recesses of the military industrial complex are full of strange ideas and projects, but few are stranger than the programs in psychic warfare chronicled in The Men Who Stare At Goats. Taking as his starting point a General in Military Intelligence, Ronson follows the trail of the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, a hippy-dippy plan to create an army of "Warrior Monks" and "Jedi Soldiers" with uncanny powers including invisibility, thought projection, and the ability to kill with a thought or touch. Like a bad penny, every time the Army runs into trouble (Vietnam, Iraq...) it goes towards mystical mind control as a solution. Former officers, martial arts gurus, and Coast to Coast AM conspiracy nuts are all part of the picture. A second, less amusing thread, follows the covert history of sonic torture, including subliminal messages and repetitive aggressive noises, as used at GITMO and Abu Ghraib. MK-Ultra enters the picture as the grandaddy of the whole project, with Sidney Gottlieb as the mastermind and Frank Olsen as the first victim, killed because he was going to talk.

I'm deeply conflicted about this book. Ronson believes that he's stumbled onto a big secret, but it's not clear what this secret is. It could be that America has a secret army of psychic spies, or that we have sophisticated psychological torture, or just that the Brass believes in this nonsense. Either way I feel like, 'real' secret programs are better secured or just common knowledge. But what really rubs me the wrong way is that Ronson makes the claim that these programs are deliberately depicted as absurd to hide the unsavory truths about torture and the like. If that's so, why participate in the charade by writing a book as weird and conspiratorial as The Men Who Stare At Goats?

Any scholar in the wide array of disciplines, approaches, and questions which might be encompassed by the term 'critique' has to deal with the legacy of Michel Foucault. In reading Foucault, two questions are always foremost: "How do I explain this to someone else?" And "What the hell is Foucault saying?" Knowledge/Power serves as an adequate aide to answering both these questions, although it does not quite manage to stand on its own.

A collection of interviews and lectures through the mid-1970s, Knowledge/Power shows a more informal Foucault, one working through the contradictions and terminology of his own theories. As such, the various pieces help show 'why' Foucault approached the overarching question of power through strategies, discourses, institutions and the like, as well as some of the methodological 'how' of genealogy and archaeology. The quality of the interviews varies widely. I found 'Two Lectures' and 'Truth and Power' to be the best, with the drunken 'Confessions of the Flesh' a lot of fun as well. Sadly, the book opens with the tedious and annoying 'On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists.'

On the whole, this book is probably best read as a companion to Foucualt's longer histories. The jargon is dense and could use some more clarification. But for all that, I think this collection makes a decent antidote to the unthinking and cult-like academic copying of Foucault's style without his insight.

Dworkin aims at a grandly ambitious apologia for moral liberalism in this book, trying to defend an enlightenment philosophy of human rights and common welfare against attack from the Left and Right. Towards the Left, Dworkin argues against legal positivism, which says that laws are essentially arbitrary and political in nature, a matter of interest groups and power rather than justice. Towards the Right, Dworkin makes a case for judicial discretion and the use of law to advance equality even at the cost of liberty. Written through the mid 70s, these books deal with issues that are still salient today-civil disobediance, affirmative action, the balance between public and private interest, and the legal philosophy of Strict Constructionism.

Jeremy Bentham called human rights 'nonsense on stilts'. How then should a philosopher who considers himself a utilitarian include human rights in their system of justice? Dworkin sets up a three tiered system: at the bottom is policy-the enacted and enumerated laws and legal precedents that describe how disputes are to be resolved and the public good obtained. Policy should be describable by legal principles, the foremost being consistency--that the same principles describe all similar cases. Above principles is morality, and the idea that rights serve as a kind of override on the utilitarian calculus of politics. Drawing from Rawl's veil of ignorance, Dworkin develops fundamental rights of liberty and equality of respect (not outcomes, or even opportunity). From a utilitarian perspective, personal preferences (those affecting only yourself) are legitimate, while external preferences (those affect others) are not. Dworkin's judges are active, intelligent, moral agents, responsible for seeking balance between competing principles and interests according to their own interior sense of rightness. Ordinary citizens act as judges as well, whether in matters of conscience like avoiding the draft in an unjust war, or in selecting their representatives.

Dworkin's thinking is dense and subtle, and there's a lot for ideologues of any stripe to dislike and misinterpret in this book. From my own perspective, I'm concerned about the prescriptive vs descriptive elements of this book. Judges should be moral adjudicators balancing competing rights in a society that protects both liberty and the common good. However, after Foucault and Jasanoff, judges are agents which create knowledge and exercise power. What purpose do rights serve in a more descriptive account of the law?

War is awesome and terrible, and so is We Were Soldier's Once... and Young. One of the blurbs calls this book a monument to the men of the 1/7th Cavalry, and I can think of no better way to describe this book. Opening with a sepia toned reminiscence of the development of Air Mobile tactics and helicopter warfare, the story moves soon enough to Vietnam, where the proud soldiers of the air cavalry would face their greatest test.

Intelligence suggested Viet Cong forces in the Ia Drang valley, but nothing could have prepared the 1/7 for landing almost on top of an North Vietnamese Army base area and 2000 soldiers. For a fraught 24 hours, Colonel Moore brought in more troops, called down a withering cordon of fire support, staved off a crushing dawn offensive, and rescued the 'lost platoon' which had become separated in the opening moments of the battle. The second half focuses on the battle of LZ Albany, and the terrible mauling that the 2/7 Cav took leaving the area the following day.

Colonel Moore is a born leader, and this book provides a close up portrait of the kind of selfless dedication and love that men in combat deserve. But while Moore's voice is dominant, he is not alone. Oral histories from hundreds of Ia Drang veterans, including the Vietnamese commanders, rounds out the story of this desperate combat.

I've often said that Vietnam was fractally fucked up, and Ia Drang is a perfect example of that. In the 34 day campaign the Cavalry inflicted a 10:1 kill ratio on the NVA. However, Ia Drang remained Indian Country and the most of the NVA units involved in the battle survived to escape into Cambodia. A well-led American unit with sufficient fire support was essentially invincible in defense, but even a momentary lapse in focus could prove fatal, such as what happened to the 2/7 at Albany. While both sides had the capacity to regenerate their units, in many ways the finely-tuned high morale 7th Cavalry that went into Vietnam could not be sustained by draftees from an increasingly anti-War America. In a microcosm of the whole disaster, hundreds of death notifications were delivered by taxi drivers and Western Union messengers because the Army hadn't realized that families would find the experience traumatic.

This book begins with a list of every American killed during the battle, and that is the ultimate tragedy of war, one repeated throughout the book. [Name] from [Home town] died [in some terrible way]. To compress a life into that brief sentence; to compress hundreds and thousands of lives into that sentence.

Never start a war.

Ernie Pyle is the doyen of war correspondents, the poet of the infantry, a delightful and engaging friend. Everybody read Ernie's columns during the war, as he provided an honest on-the-ground look at the men who made up America's army. Ernie shared their dangers and hardships, sleeping rough, dodging bullets and shells while being drawn inexorably towards the front. This quest for the truest, closest picture of the war is what makes Pyle great, and also what got him killed in the invasion of Okinawa. This book is like having a incredibly observant and empathetic friend writing letters home, and should be required reading for student of WW2.

Let me close with a few quotes that sum up Pyle's work.

"Tunisia - April 22, 1943.
When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front, I wondered if I would sense any change in them.
The most vivid change is the casual and workshop manner in which they talk about killing. They have made the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking a human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft. In fact it is an admirable thing.
As a noncombatant, my own life is in danger only by occasional chance or circumstance. Consequently I need not think of killing in personal terms, and killing to me is still murder."

[a draft of his last column, found on his body]
"On Victory in Europe - 1945
Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.
But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world...
Dead men by mass production.
Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come to hate them.
These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference..."

What a writer. What a human being.