Rehder has some amazing war stories from his 33 years working as an FBI agent specializing in bank robbery in Los Angeles, and he is kind enough to share them with us. The book covers the major types of bank robberies with some of his favorite examples. Eddie Dodson robbed over 60 banks in a seven month spree of non-violent 'one-on-one' robberies to fuel his heroin habit. Casper Brown turned a street gang into violent takeover specialists. David Mack was an LAPD officer who convinced his mistress to pull an inside job. The mysterious Hole in the Ground Gang specialized in digging into vaults, and made one robbery and nearly succeeded in two others before disappearing. And Rehder has nothing but scorn for the infamous North Hollywood Shootout bandits, who violated the cardinal "120 seconds" law of bank robbery and then went down in a blaze of gunfire. Heat is a great film, but real life is not a movie, and as Rehder emphasizes again and again-bank robbers never win, and when they do get caught, it's a 15 year sentence. This is some awesome true crime reporting, and lots of fun.

Vietnam was a fractal war-a self similar pattern of bad decisions and disasters at every level. The air war over North Vietnam was no exception, as Mitchel demonstrates in this comprehensive and exhaustive account of Operation Rolling Thunder and Linebacker I & II. Mitchel takes as his analytic frames the tactical learning between the two sides during the years-long bombing into North Vietnam, and the introduction and evaluation of new weapons and tactics. The story is USAF and MiG heavy, but there's plenty of room for other parties: Navy Aviation, SAMs, electronic warfare, and command and control. As Michel describes, SAMs could be dealt with be ECM pods and electronic warfare, AAA took down a lot of planes but could be avoided by flying fast and high, and the ultimate enemy were the MiGs; deadly when guided into ambush attacks by North Vietnamese ground controllers, dangerous in a low turning fight, and ultimately only survivable by alert and aggressive pilots. This last aspect is where the USAF failed.

The book itself is calm, evenhanded, clinical in describing the results of combat encounters, but I don't have to be, and I am shocked that the USAF managed to shoot down any MiGs at all, given how bad their training and doctrine was. How bad? Guided missiles were supposed to be the weapon of the future, to the extent that the F-4 Phantom lacked an internal cannon (and lol at trying to dogfight in a Thud without an anti-air gunsight), but American guided missiles sucked. Designed and tested for use against high-altitude Soviet bombers, they were nearly useless against low-level fighters. The AIM-9 Sidewinder was the best missile, but couldn't be fired in more than a 2G turn and lost guidance when the target flew towards the sun, the ground, or into clouds. The AIM-7 Sparrow took 5 seconds to lock on and fire, required the Phantom to keep its nose pointed at the enemy until the missile hit, and just failed to launch or guide over 60% of the time. The AIM-4 Falcon was even worse, if that's imaginable. Bad missiles came on top of a lack of guns or ranging gun sights. The Phantom was plagued by bad radios-located below the co-pilots ejection seat in a compartment that drained all the moisture in the cockpit. Pilots died when they didn't hear radio calls of "Break break break!" Contrary to popular belief (or at least my prior belief), the Phantoms and Thuds were not totally outmatched in a dogfight-the MiGs were difficult to fly at the edges of the envelopes-but big smokey Phantoms against small agile MiGs stacked the deck against American aircraft.

The real killers were American training and doctrine. It took too long for effective command and control to be made available to pilots over North Vietnam, because while NSA electronic warfare planes were listening to North Vietnamese radios and could hear the MiGs making their attack runs, that data was classified and couldn't be transmitted to pilots. The Air Force put bomber and transport pilots in fighters to spread out the load of combat tours, and air to air training consisted of half dozen mock dogfights at the end of the refreshed course, compared to about one hundred air to ground training missions. Training units were rated on safety, not aggressiveness or preparation for combat, and so discouraged pilots from flying the F-4 at its limits and learning about dangerous adverse yaw flight characteristics. The 4 plane 'fighting wing' formation used by the Air Force let only the flight lead shoot, and had the other three flying formation. The three wingmen couldn't even look out for MiGs, since they had to maintain position, and basically existed to decoy missiles away from the lead. The Navy had solved many of these problems, with the famous TOP GUN air combat school and the 'loose deuce' formation, (oh, and a better variant of the Sidewinder), but for the Air Force, even worse than losing pilots over North Vietnam was admitting that the Navy was doing things better!

There were darker times in the Air Force's history. The 8th Air Force over Europe saw way higher losses. But in a war of choice, in a war where America had technical superiority, even if it was fighting under political restrictions that prevented an all out offensive against Hanoi until Linebacker II, the inability of the USAF to adapt, and develop tactics and weapons that would give it air superiority, was a major failure in leadership. The USAF learned a lot of valuable lessons, instantiated in the F-15, AWACS, and Aggressor training, but too many pilots paid the cost for that knowledge.

Dungeon World is a fantasy heartbreaker powered by the Apocalypse World rules. While it has a few clever ideas, its nowhere near as smart and dangerous as the earlier game, and as with most fantasy heartbreakers, the ultimate question is always "Why this as opposed to D&D?"

((Note: this is a reading review, not a playtest review)).

The basics of Dungeon World are about exactly what you'd expect. Classes, the standard six core stats, a list of moves like "Hack & Slash" and "Defy Danger" and a brutally simple system of roll 2d6+stat (between -3 and +3), over 10 is a success, 7-9 is success with complication, 6 is fail and mark XP.

The system has some truly elegant bits. The Spout Lore and Discern Realities moves are the best general Knowledge and Perception systems I've seen in any fantasy RPG, and worth stealing. Each character class has a list of Bonds-statements that tie one character to another (my favorite is the Wizard bond: "[x] is important to events to come. I have foreseen it!") The GMing advice, on playing to the fiction, mostly empty maps, and using Fronts and Portents to advance the plot and provide enemies, is all top notch and valuable to newbies and experts alike. And finally, I really like the general presentation, the artwork, and the quotes from fiction in the margins.

What I do not like is the system, which is very chancy and doesn't give a lot of room for modifiers-most characters will start with +2 in their best stat, so a +1 bonus is a 50% improvement in character power. The classes are oddly restrictive--no elven clerics, halflings are fighters or thieves, mostly to emulate Old School style, which is a weird choice for a game based off of the relentlessly modern Apocalypse World. Bonds are neat, but I worry that they might pull the group in contradictory directions, or be too densely webbed as written. The system for developing towns and villages is really strong, but misplaced in a game that's about adventure and danger.

Ease of GMing is a very important part of any fantasy game, and this is where Dungeon World and I part ways. D&D4e hits it almost directly square on the head-I can trust that most monsters will run properly out of the box. D&D3.x does it poorly, but at least provides some guidance in the form of Challenge Ratings. Dungeon World leaves it up to you, with an exhaustive bestiary, but no guidance on how tough monsters are. Sure the 20 hp d10 damage behemoth is more dangerous than a 6 hp d6 damage giant rat, but how much more dangerous? Encounter design is really really soft. The exploration rules are similarly abstract. Characters have encumbrance and limited rations which get used up in the delve, but there's nothing about starving to death in the dark, or even why you'd want money beyond a few hundred coin to upgrade your starting weapons. Characters get more options, but they don't get stronger or hit harder, so you can't rely on the loot-level treadmill to drive the action if the plot falters. The style of the game might be really good for one-shots, or death heavy old school dungeon crawls, but then the GMing advice should be aimed at "4 hours of subterranean terror" instead of longer campaigns.

As I said, there are bits and pieces that are really clever and that I can see using in any fRPG campaign going forward, but I just can't see myself running this game over D&D4e, 13th Age, or even D&D5e or 3.x. That's why these things are called fantasy heartbreakers; someone pours their life and soul into them, and then everybody just plays D&D again.

Vacuum Flowers is brightly burning science fiction, half cyberpunk and half space opera, but it's very much style over substance, and while Swanwick is good enough as a writer, he's no master wordsmith a la Gibson or Sterling.

The story starts in Eros cluster, with a woman waking up in the hospital about to have her identity erased by an evil and mysterious corporation. It turns out that her personality as space adventuress Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark is an artificial construct, designed for entertainment. The real her is a personality bum, a chronically depressed loser who tries on new personalities before they hit the market. She escapes, falling in with an ally from her former life, and discovers that she has actual talents as a wetware artist-capable of reprogramming minds. Hunted by cops, corporations, and hyperintelligent hiveminds, she has to embark on a quest to save humanity, and the plot accelerates from there

Lots of interesting things are pointed at. Spacer humanity lives in a culture and economy based on wetware-programming people into useful specialties and personalities. Alien as this is, it's set against the hivemind Comprise, which subsumed the billions of people on Earth and is locked in a planetary cold war with the spacers. Some intelligence are post-human, pushed past reasonable limits of intelligence, or containing multiple minds in a single body. Corporations have rights and people have none. Low-wage space janitors scrape vacuum flowers off the hulls of stations while the elite party in their sheraton command centers. But the cool ideas mostly go nowhere, sex and violence are used for prurient purposes rather than to advance the plot, and the charcterization and style just isn't good enough to anybody who doesn't already love late 80s space opera.

While Claudius the God has a lot of charm, its definitely a step down from I, Claudius. The bumbling virtuous survivor from the first book has grown into an a clever and able administrator, but one that can't stave off the inevitable corruption of Empire.

This is an odd but delightful book. General Hackett was an officer of some talents; commander of one of the paratrooper brigades at Arnhem and later NATO commander of the British Army of the Rhine, and these are his thoughts on military virtues and leadership in the guise of a history. As a history book, I can't recommend it all--aside from some very nice colour plates it is Eurocentric in the extreme, skipping from Sparta to Frederick the Great in about a dozen pages. His sociology of the development of the mass army and the modern nation-state is at a mere primer level.

Where this book shines is when Hackett gets personal, and you'll enjoy it to the extend that you enjoy cranky British ramblings. In short, Hackett sees the military as primarily a virtuous institution built around courage, duty, and loyalty. Leadership, the measure of men and the ability to transfer their faith onto a commander to become greater than the individual or the unit, is the supreme requirement of the officer, and one that is separate from the purely technical skills of logistics or tactics. Hackett has some weird and unPC quirks (class differences are essential to the success of the British army. The Wehrmacht was an honorable enemy.), but if you can put those aside, its a lot like having a cup of a tea with a soldier who's learned a lot of lessons the hard way.

Rafalovich makes a sociological examination of the ways in which ADHD 'troubles' the lives of children, drawing on interviews with doctors, teachers, and parents, to describe the multiple universes in which ADHD operates. The literature and historical review is sensitive and comprehensive, looking at the genealogy and scientific construction of the diagnosis without reducing it to a corruption fiction-a la the anti-psychiatric crusaders. Rafalovich finds a stark divided between neurological and psychoanalytic approaches towards understanding ADHD, and the ways that relevant individuals switch between the approaches in different contexts.

This book is also literally my dissertation, so I'm very sympathetic to the scope and breadth of the topic, and the need to make a dissertation 'doable' rather than complete. That said, I wish he had paid more attention to the rhetorical and symbolic worlds in which doctors and teachers operate: ADHD is not the only means by which students are labelled, it is merely a dominant code in the contemporary governmentality and biopolitics of ADHD and human efficiency. ADHD is a manifestation of something much bigger, implicitly wrapped up in the proper orderings of psychiatry and education as well as childhood.

Sam Adams had a problem. The numbers just didn't make sense. As a low level CIA analyst in 1966 working on a study on Viet Cong morale, his numbers of defections and desertions suggest the enemy would be gone in a year--a trend at odds with their growing strength on the ground. As he tracked down the source of this discrepancy, he realized that the MACV Order of Battle Estimate, the official count of the enemy at about 250,000, was a fiction based on the flimsiest of evidence. Adams struggled for years to get the right numbers out-his own estimate was that there were at least 250,000 more Viet Cong than on the list. In 1968 he was proven right, when during the Tet offensive 250,000 enemy soldiers that officially did not exist swarmed over American positions and dealt the greatest political blow of the war. But Adams was not vindicated, he was an embarrassment, and after five more years of spinning his wheels he quit the CIA for good in 1973.

War of Numbers somehow makes bureaucratic infighting as exciting as any battle. The OBE was the cornerstone of Westermoreland's strategy of attrition; the number upon which all other assessments of logistics and destruction were based. The clash between Adams' evidence based methods (even if the statistical inferences would make a professional cry) and MACV; who ignored small units, large numbers of logistics troops, and even entire classes of the enemy (guerrilla-militia) responsible for the mines and scouting that wore American forces down tactically, is a great story of deceit and failure in American leadership. The perpetrators shift; General Westmoreland (Adams was later the target of a libel suit by Westmoreland for his role in a CBS documentary), CIA Director Richard Helms, MACV J-2, other parties in the White House. Ultimately, Adams comes down to the conclusion that it was a mass collective delusion. A whole group of people responsible for running the war decided to run it on what was politically tenable rather than what was true.

Along with that grand narrative, War of Numbers has some great anecdotes about the life of a spy in the 60s and 70s. Its a lot of overstuffed arm-chairs, endless cables, 5x8 index cards, meetings with people trying to bury you. Two incidents stick out--one where Adams ran all over town looking for a Vietnam expert who worked at the next desk (he had started with her), and a second where he had to specially request a Viet Cong map of South Vietnam for one of his reports (the Viet Cong and government maps had different districts). How could we win if we we're not even on the same map? There's also a lot of black humor: parody songs in the Cosmos Lounge, quotes from Giap in the Saigon office. Adams would probably be the first to admit that he had an easy war, all he staked was his reputation, but his attempts to inform strategy with actual numbers were as a brave of a contribution as anything else.

Theological science fiction is an odd niche, but both religion and science fiction deal with man against the Cosmos, silhouetting the ordinary against the mystery of the unimaginal. The Sparrow is a compelling, finely crafted story of first contact and its consequences, tracing in parallel the Jesuit organized mission to the alien world of Rakhat, and the spiritual reconstruction of Father Emilio Sandoz, the lone survivor. Truly, a wondrous, sensitive, and generally excellent novel.

General MacArthur was the last of the Great Men. It's hard to overstate his talents. Number 3 cadet at West Point (of all time. #1 is Robert E. Lee, #2 a nobody from the class of 1884), decorated for valor again and again in WWI, a brilliant and unconventional commander of amphibious warfare in the Philippines, and Proconsul to Japan, where he single-handledly reformed the devasted country into a modern nation. His genius, energy, vision, shaped the world we live in.

And yet, he was a deeply flawed commander, a tragic hero in the sense of the Ancient Greeks. A brilliant attacker, he was caught woefully unprepared three times, bringing his command to the edge of catastrophe. Valuing loyalty above all else in his subordinates, he flouted the orders of his commanders, finally leading to his dismissal in 1951. He was reckless in exposing himself to danger, but his troops mocked him as 'Dugout Dug.' There was not a racist or colonialist bone in his body, yet he wielded immense powers as an unelected potentate in the Philippines and Japan. He performed constantly, building up the persona of the Supreme Commander, not to conceal weakness but because his authentic self was a Victorian romantic deeply out of time in the 20th century.

Manchester captures MacArthur's genius and flaws in this immense, 700 page, century-spanning biography. This is more than a mere military history, Manchester somehow captures the changing spirit of the age and place, in that distant Pacific Rim ruled over by America.