I love heists. I've got Leverage on more or less infinite repeat, I'll watch any heist movie on TV, and "pull off an excellent heist" is on my bucket list. That said, The Hot Rock is a genre classic, but I thought it was only an okay book. If I had a physical copy, I'd probably leave it on the plane or in the beachside cabana because re-shelving it would just be more effort than its worth.

Master theif Dortmunder has just gotten out of Sing Sing when he gets hired to steal a priceless emerald for a small African nation. He assembles a perfect team (drive, locksmith, hitter...), a perfect plan, and of course everything goes to pieces and Dortmunder has to keep stealing the gem from ever escalating situations. There's a lot of fun to be had, but the writing isn't quite hardboiled enough to be hardboiled, pulpy enough to be pulp, or heart-pounding enough to be a thriller.

After the great prison break in Borders of Infinity, the Dendarii Mercenaries are due a little R&R on Earth, along with 18 million credits in backpay. When that pay doesn't arrive, Miles is thrown into a whirlwind of intrigue, treachery, and old grudges. A passing lie-that Miles Vorkosigan and Miles Naismith are clones, turns out to be more true than anybody might expect. This might be my favorite Vorkosigan book so far, with a practically perfect biotech plot and incredibly compelling characters. If it only had a starship battle, I'd give it six stars.

Heists are not something that RPGs do well. There's too much dungeon crawling and caution in our bloodstream, too much of an urge to master the rules and build an unstoppable juggernaut of a character. Leverage RPG is an exception-combining an elegantly light system in Cortex Plus with very solid gaming advice to help GMs and players come up with session long capers in classic Leverage style. There a natural affinity between episodic TV shows and episodic RPG sessions, and this games uses that brilliantly.

The book itself is a decent 200 pages, with your usual chapters on character creation, the rules, and creating an adventure. The adventure format is simple and elegant: Introduce a Mark who's screwed over a client somehow. The Mark has some obvious strengths and some hidden weaknesses. Figure out how to negate the Mark's strengths and bring pressure on the problem, and what's stopping the players from doing that right then and there. Rolling a one adds a Complication and gives the players a Plot Point, which are then used to make sure scenes go the players' way, particularly the vital ending scene.

The book itself is very nicely designed, with a breezy conversational tone. Lots of stills from the Leverage show provide some visual jazz. Summaries of Season 1 & 2 episodes described in the same adventure format help make it clear how the adventure design process works. My only quibbles is that there isn't a glossary (although the well laid out index could substitute), and that while the Cortex system is very simple, there are enough nooks and crannies that I really wanted a one page flowchart summarizing *everything* that could happen when the dice are down.

Nobody would ever accuse Harry Turtledove of originality. For a man who specializes in alternate history, his stories usually take a pretty blunt point of departure: time travelling South Africans give the Confederacy AK-47s, aliens with Gulf War military tech attack in the middle of WW2, thing like that.

The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump is set in a world where all religions are true, where magic works, and where magic is used to duplicate technology in the early 90s-mostly through endless puns of varying quality. That said, the book itself is an enjoyable noir/technothriller hybrid about strange doings in Angel City, and for all the bad jokes feels appropriately gritty and multicultural, with a lot of freeways and bad hamburgers. As somebody who grew up in a very mundane LA, it's feels just like home.

Hounded from Manticore in the wake of Field of Dishonor, Honor has landed on Grayson, to grieve, heal, and take up her new responsibilities as Steadholder Harrington. But not all is well on Grayson, and Protector Benjamin's reforms have provoked a powerful conservative reaction. Honor is the target of a massive conspiracy to set Grayson back to the bad old days, and of course the Peeps are up to their usual military tricks.

There are moments in this book that really work-everything from the assassination attempt against Honor to the confrontation in the Chamber of Keys is really compelling and dramatic. That aside, this is where the cracks in the series show. One common complaint is that Honor is infallible, and this would've been a perfect place for her to stumble a little. Sure, Honor is a very good starship commander and martial artist, and she wins her pistol duels, but she's operating entirely out of her element. She could've failed to delegate effectively when promoted from battlecruiser captain to superdreadnought admiral, or screwed up civilian administration somehow, or just have more cultural problems. But no, Honor is perfect and so is almost everything in her life, and she has to win her victories by unimaginable margins.

The other problem is that while Weber is a decent wordsmith and knows how to steal from history, he's a lousy sociologist, and the more we see of Grayson the less it holds together. I just don't buy the balance between the Steadholders, the Protector, and the Church, or the way that Graysons seem so ordinary and American, when in fact they're a monolith religious nation practicing polygamy and radical gender inequality living on a planet that's basically a toxic waste dump.

In my headcanon, this is where the Honorverse ends. Sure, there's more story to tell (and books to sell), but her personal arc has reached its limit. Weber might agree, since the later books get bloated with secondary viewpoint characters, digressions on treecats, and all kinds of nonsense.

Pimping ain't easy, and if you ever need to cite a source for that, Gentleman of Leisure is a great one. This book is about Silky, master pimp, and his stable of whores: Sandy, Kitty, Linda, Tracey, and Lois. It describes in their own words why they choose this life, what it means to them, and how they manage the complexities of working on the street.

Getting into this, I wasn't sure exactly what pimping entailed (aside from the commercial stuff), but the book does a great job depicting how Silky cajoles his ladies into focusing their lives on him, working long and unpleasant hours and handing over all their money for even a slice of Silky's life. It's grotesque, toxic, and fascinating. This isn't the life for people who are all there, emotionally speaking.

What really makes this book stand out (and why I bought it) is the photography; stunning posed and candid photos of some damn fly people looking their best in the funkiest decade of fashion. Hate the people, love the style.

I've read a fair number of general's memoirs, and Slim's is one of the most humanistic and readable. Transferred to Burma in 1942, Slim arrived to an army in administrative disarray and an overwhelming Japanese assault that turned into a near-rout. Through perseverance and energy, Slim managed to hold the line in India, rebuild his army, learn how to fight the Japanese, and then counter-attack. Few other Allied generals of the war experienced such immense swings in fortune.

The best parts of the book are how incredibly British Slim is, and a glimpse into the polyglot, colonial army of the British Empire, with Brits, Indians of hundreds of tribes and castes, and Africans all fighting alongside Americans, Chinese, and miscellaneous members of the commonwealth. Next are the observations on command, organizational spirit and morale, and the management of an army at the end of the most shoe-string logistics system an army has ever had to operate with.

Slim has few kind words for the Japanese (at one point he describes them as "the finest military insect on the planet"), but he admires the tenacity of their ordinary soldier, while critiquing the blind aggressiveness of their commanders, and the brutality inflicted on prisoners and the Burmese population. This is only fair; the Imperial Japanese Army were some of the worst war criminals this planet has ever seen, and Slim's thoughts about their command structure and penchant for atrocities are only too true. If casually genteel racism of the mid-20th century sort is a deal-breaker, this is not the book for you.

As with most books of this type, the worst part are the battles, and endless lists of divisions and corps attacking various towns. To be honest, I could never keep track of the battle, although some of the maps later in the book proved quite helpful. Part of me wished for a little bit more context on Slim's life, and his role in the Indian Army in the interwar years, but he wasn't the type to talk about himself like that.

In closing, a fascinating look at a forgotten theater of war, and a humble memoir from an able soldier.

I'm sure that war is complicated and confusing. I'm less sure that it is chaotic or complex.

War, Chaos, and History is an immensely frustrating and obscure book, that while erudite and interesting, ultimately fails to make a contribution. Beaumont promises to use the new sciences of complexity and chaos to make sense of war. The test of nations has escaped a complete description in history, from the partiality of records to the impossibility of grasping the evolution of a battle occurring across miles of space and the fallaible minds of thousands of soldiers. I'm sure that Beaumont knows his material, the footnotes make that abundantly clear, but Beaumont doesn't really advance an argument for the use of a interdisciplinary methods combining chaos, complexity, and military history. Instead, the rambling and disconnected chapters seem to repeat the same points, about non-linearity, the incompleteness of doctrine, and the importance of using German words in your sentences.

There are several interesting questions that could be approached: What distinguishes winners and losers in wars, or even success and failure for a single commander across different battles? Perhaps tracing the evolution of linear doctrine and geometric ordering of forces to modern small unit tactics and Maneuver Warfare theories. Or getting into the morass of procurement debates about qualitative edges vs cost and numbers. None of these important historical questions are specifically addressed.

War Stories knows precisely what it is. This is an anthology of infantry stories: bleak stories about mud and dust and void, moral ambiguity, and psychological trauma. Grouping the stories into Wartime Systems, Combat, Armored Force, and Aftermath is a wise editorial choice. The usual technological suspects are all here: drones, powered armor, combat drugs and cyborg soldiers. However, the stories are of universally high quality and each of them manages to say something interesting about the technology of warfare. This is military science fiction at its most thoughtful. When reviewing an anthology, I always like to lift out a couple of exceptional stories, and I loved "Warhosts" by Yoon Ha Lee and "War Dog" by Mike Barretta as eerie, imaginative, biopunk inspired meditations on combat, surviving, and winning.

That said, thematic coherence is a two edged sword, and while I agree with the stance that this anthology takes towards warfare, by the end I wanted a little more diversity. Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak aimed to deconstruct the Starship Troopers/Baen machismo typical of the genre, but I think there's still space for a little humor, absurdity, even glory in the future of war. And if you don't like the politics I've laid out at the top of this review, you'll hate this collection. Forewarned is forearmed. My second criticism is that while the grunts are the heart of war, they aren't the only people who fight. We could've used a little more on pilots, sailors, officers, strategists, diplomats, and drill sergeants. Don't let these minor gripes turn you away: this is a amazing book, and a worthy companion to The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century.

The Order of Things is Foucault at his most Foucauldian, a grand tour through the history of orderings, discourses, scientific methods, and ultimately Man Himself from the 16th century through the 19th century. He's at his best when he's making the incommensurable theological commentaries of the 16th century readable and relateable for modern eyes. His discussion of the rise of Classical era human sciences of difference, biology, economics, and philology, is deeply read and insightful. The conclusion is the radical claim that prior to the 19th century, Man did not exist as an element of analysis, and that modern (and post-modern) ways of knowing are in fact highly divergent from their predecessors.

My problem is one of style. Clarity is not Foucault's thing, and I get that, but The Order of Things felt noticeably less clear than Discipline and Punish , The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, or The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. The theory is thick here, the strands of argument tangled, and often for no apparent reason. My most common experience reading this was seeing a long series of negative statements ("The science of economics is not this, or this, or this...") that would take pages to resolve into an affirmative of what the thing is. The sentences are amazing: I took to reading them out loud like a Shakespearean soliloquy, and just admiring the rollicking flow of clauses and phrases. But at the end of one of these titanic discursive flows I'd be left with very little, just a philosophical laugh of "Lol wut?"

Some ideas demand density in argumentation, and a lot of intelligent commentators have read very smart things into The Order of Things. But if every reader finds a different meaning, is there a text? Is there actually an order to things?