Command in War is an extremely ambitious work of military history, a study of command over millennia and six major types of war, using case studies from antiquity, Napoleon's battle of Jena-Auerstedt, the Prussian-Austrian War, World War I, Israeli battles in 1967 and 1973, and Vietnam, to examine the organization, processes, and technologies of command.

The theory is extremely robust, if somewhat idiosyncratic and limited in scope. Van Creveld is interesting in how information is taken in by commanders and used to manage uncertainty, so that orders may be given to forces to destroy the enemy. The first and last chapters are particularly well-constructed, containing Van Creveld's general theories on the best organization of an armed force: tactically flexible, self-sufficient units, with just enough formal structure to manage their logistical needs, and loosely controlled with robust informal back-channels. All the technique and technology of modern command, control, and communications is of little help.

The case studies are more uneven in quality. The sections on ancient warfare and Napoleon are strongest. I have come to agree with Van Creveld that strategy before Napoleon was non-existent. The best that a commander could do was guess to place himself at the decisive point of a battle and bull through with sheer physical force. The limitations of horse couriers made actual control of a campaign from a central point impossible. The staff, such as it was, would consist of the commander's household and a Quartermaster General in charge of scouting, selecting where to camp, the baggage train, and all the millions of details that made up the army. Napoleon's staff was still bound to him personally (though by charisma rather than feudal obligation), but Napoleon standardized some procedures of strategic intelligence and was the first to successfully direct multiple independent formations towards a single strategic end, although even the master of warfare ("the most competent man who ever lived" by Van Creveld's estimation) forgot to give orders to a third of his forces at a crucial battle and essentially blundered into the enemy. Likewise, the Prussian General Staff was far less powerful and formalistic than common history suggests--more informal sinews that occasionally managed to bring divided corps together than autocratic masters of battle.

This book gives a good sense of the imaginative and elegant letters and brave cavalrymen that characterized Napoleon's campaigns, and the rising tide of paperwork and schedules that entirely failed to manage the chaos of trench warfare. Where it is weakest is in the modern sections. Radio-based mobile warfare is clearly new in its relative independence from fixed lines of communication and physical space, yet the treatment of the 1973 Yom Kippur War is reduced to incoherence and the psychology of the various Israeli commanders, when it could've been the most robust part of the book. Van Creveld has a better perspective on the Vietnam War, where colonels in helicopter turned the 'directed telescope of command' into a paralyzing instrument of over-control, and statistical methods directed the army into doing what could be measured rather than what mattered. The heart of modern warfare; fast-moving combined arms operations linked through the 'hot medium' of voice radio, is sadly absent from the book.

For what it's worth, the nods towards the visible future of command, via technologies like Blue Force Tracker and streaming video via drone, seem to have turned out to be mostly right, which is an worthy bit of foresight. The conclusion, that the problems of command are intractable, that centralization is as harmful to military operations as chaos, and that the burden of technology may be greater than the benefits, are likely eternal truths.

Social Construction is a specter haunting research. Or at least it is one of the focal points of the Science Wars, between figures arguing the objectivity and integrity of science (usually particle physicists) and those arguing the opposite (usually sociologists or historians or anthropologists or some such). Certainly, Hacking was able to find 25 books of the form 'the Social Construction of X", (one for every letter of the alphabet, bar X), but what is socially construction and why does it matter?

As a philosopher of science, Hacking has a broader view than many of us in the trenches. His discussion of major arguments by Latour, Pickering, Kuhn, Lakatos, Quine, and Popper, to name a few of the protagonists is clear and enjoyable. This is a first rate literature review! I think that Hacking is on to something when he points out that this argument is in fact very old, stretching back to Aristotle and Plato, and more commonly invoked in arguments between Nominalists and Realists. The arguments over whether names and categories are arbitrary and human-imposed, or whether they parallel some deeper structure of the universe, are long-standing and likely unresolvable.

Hackings's major contributions in the book are an analysis of the whys and hows of Social Construction. He identifies a six point scale of construction, from least to most radical: historical, ironic, reformist, unmasking, rebellious, and revolutionary. Social construction tends towards radical formulations because it argues against the inevitability of what is, and that the world as we understand it would be better (more just, less oppressive, more joyful) if we rearranged society. A second part are criterion for judging how constructivist an argument is on scales of contingency--could it have developed differently, nominalism, and the importance of internal or external explanations for the stability of a fact.

Unfortunately, Hacking's own work, when it departs from a review of the literature, is far less compelling. He develops a theory of interactive and indifferent kinds. Interactive kinds are exemplified by mental disorders, and their presence in the world changes in accord with our knowledge of the kind. Indifference kinds are like fundamental particles, and do not care what we know of them. Kinds are probably the least rigorous categorizing schema imaginable, nothing more than "things that are alike, somehow." It is no mere linguistic coincidence that the psuedoscience of Genesis-inspired species is called Baraminology, the study of created kinds. Interactive kinds are trivially socially constructed; Hacking is less vocal on the social construction of the scientific objects of indifferent kinds. I'd judge "kinds" to be too floppy of a concept to do philosophy with.

The four case studies, on mental illness, child abuse, weapons, dolomite, and Captain Cook's death, are recycled from other work and not particularly well suited to philosophic theories in Chapters 1 & 3.

One big question, that is not adequately answered, is 'is social construction a worthwhile approach.' Hacking makes a compelling case that some of the leading theorists classified as 'social constructionists', such as Latour and Bloor, are no such thing. Social constructionist research is mostly based on shoddy readings of theories which say no such things, and therefore should be avoided as bad work. However, by linking things, the idea of things, and the social and material matrix in which the thing and its ideas are embedded, social construction opens an immense scope of potential questions and common conversations for scholars. As a research program (in Lakatos's terminology), social construction has been immensely successful. We should know how to use it more precisely.

Beevor manages a masterpiece of military history in Stalingrad. He covers this battle completely, from Operation Barbarossa, to the siege and the kessel, and the final disintegration of the Nazi 6th Army into Soviet prison camps and post-war ignominy. The narrative moves easily and naturally between Stalin and Hitler in their supreme HQs, staring at maps and radiotelegraphy reports, to the titanic clash of Panzer divisions, and air fleets, and above all, the dire struggle for survival face by the ordinary soldier. Stalingrad was a meatgrinder, fought by nations that did not give a whit for human life. Deaths on both sides were over one million; exactly how high we'll never know, given the paucity of records. The city was flattened, entire armies annihilated, and Beevors recounts again and again the last letters of men going to their death, and human cost of that battle.

What I did not expect was to feel sympathy for the Nazis. Soviet soldiers died horribly; without sufficient weapons or supplies to stop Panzers, executed under the arbitrary discipline of the commissars, but whether it was truth or effective propaganda, most of they knew they were selling their lives dearly in defense of the beloved rodina. Nazis soldiers died for Hitler's pride, in foolish hope that they would be rescued from encirclement. They died starving, frozen, crawling with lice, from disease and from Soviet mistreatment in prisoner-of-war camps. Even genocidal war criminals deserve better.

Stalingrad was the turning point of World War 2, the battle that broke the Wehrmacht, and proved Hitler incompetent. This is the single best book about that battle imaginable.

This book is a decent enough, if a little tedious cyberpunk novel. The split narrative follows our heroine, Soledad, as a musician in the Central American anarchist cruce of Bamaca, and after its destruction, her new life as a refugee in the Oakland node, hanging out with much the same people. Foy has a gift for description, and there are some beautifully lyrical passages which balance out the slow plotting and passivity of the characters.

But my problem with this book is a more a problem with the whole genre of second-wave cyberpunk, the stuff deliberately riffing off of Gibson that takes as axiomatic that Art is Politics, and that stories about anarchist poets and hackers and smugglers are Real and Authentic because their very existence shows how shallow the Plastic Virtual Lives of Those Corporate Slime are. It's what happens when an artistic movement starts believing its own propaganda, and ironically becomes mere style disconnected from any actual human experience. This isn't a bad book, but it's very much on the level of "so, you've read all of Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Cadigan, Shirley, Effinger, and you want another cyberpunk novel? This one has good sentences, why not?"

This has been called the single best volume on the American Civil War, and I can only agree. McPherson covers 1850 to Appomattox in depth and with style, offering as complete account of the war as anyone could manage. The book takes its time to set the stage, using 200 pages before Fort Sumter to develop an economic and political history of Antebellum America. The balance of powers between North and South was coming under strain from exponential Northern industrialization and westward expansion. Its hard to muster much sympathy for the Southerners: They were hypocritical in their demands towards government power: remonstrating Free States for abolition while demanding universal application of the Fugitive Slave Act, opposing internal infrastructure development while lobbying for Federal support to conquer Cuba, and above all, their policies were grounded in the justification of owning human beings as property. The question of whether a diminishing slave society would set national policy destroyed the Whig party, and ultimately catapulted Abraham Lincoln to the White House with essentially no Southern votes. Rather than lose their privileges, the South seceded and started the war.

We all know it ended, but McPherson drives the narrative with battles, generals, strategy, politics, the home front, and more. As can be expected, the quality of the research is top-notch, drawing from the best academic literature leavened with primary sources (Northern Generals got Biblical at times. I must quote General Sheridan on orders to destroy the Shenandoah Valley, "The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over war.") As a good historian, McPherson tries to make an argument for contingency, that there were many ways that war could have ended, but aside from an early collapse of 1st Bull Run, it seemed that the North had too great of an industrial advantage, and the South too bent on independence, for this pivotal and cataclysmic period to have ended different. Still, a fantastic history and book, and the best starting point for serious exploration of the period.

Edited volumes like this one are hard books to judge. If there is a purpose to a book with lofty title of 'Foundations', it would be to canonicize a set of core readings, such that a new scholar might be able to get their bearings in unfamiliar terrain, the basic principles and arguments of the discipline are laid out, and a case made why these arguments are worth including in one's own work.

For basic principles, this book does a decent enough job. The opening article, 'Handicapism' by Bogdan and Biklen, was originally published in 1977 and still reads as a fresh call to action against social sciences which reify and reinforces discrimination against people with disabilities. The two other theoretical articles, Siebers on 'Disability, Pain, and the politics of minority identity' and Erevelles with '(Im)Material Citizens: Cognitive Disability, Race, and the Politics of Citizenship' offer useful comparisons to Critical Race Theory.

Unfortunately, that's as far as the theoretical links go, which makes this book a lousy guide and persauder. Someone coming in from sociology, political science, history, or any less relentlessly radical academic perspective will be left at lose ends. The case studies which make up the rest of the book fail to rise to the quality that I'd demand of a canonical work.

While we should all strive to do better, to fight for justice, to recognize how we benefit from privilege and oppression, if these are the foundations of disability studies about all it does is point and say, "Look, look at the injustice!" Referring back to Hacking's Social Construction of What?, there's a tendency to, once something has been satisfactorily demonstrated to be socially constructed, assume that it has therefore been dismantled. Pointing out injustice is not the same as rectifying it, and disability studies has relatively little recourse to medicalizations' ability to make individual troubles scientific and universal problems with potential solutions, or the minimal life support provided by the post-austerity welfare state.

Storygaming all-star team here, with Jason Morningstar (Fiasco) creating a Powered By The Apocalypse game about the Night Witches, the all-female Soviet bomber regiment.

It's a really specific topic for a game, but one that has been customized perfectly, as witnessed by Jason's thoughts on character sheets. Characters are distinguished by Natures (a personality type, which is fixed), and a Role (which can change). Perhaps the cleverest bit of game design are the Marks, a sort of strategic damage track representing the psychological toll of war. There are long odds against the Night Witches, and even if they avoid the simple Harms of flak, Nazi fighters, and crash landings, they'll eventually run out of options and be forced to Embrace Death. The gameplay itself is similarly made to order. Each mission has a day phase where characters rest, recuperate, prepare and generally live, and a night phase where they brave the hazards of the Eastern Front to make attacks on German positions. Unless players are ungodly lucky, they will take damage, but failure means interrogation by the NKVD. Better to die honorably in the air for Mother Russia!

This is a brilliant, but very narrow game. The art and presentation are great. While there are great quotes from real Night Witches, and a solid bibliography, there wasn't enough fluff to make me sure of my ability to portray the unique challenges of friendship and combat that the game demands, a problem that might be amplified by a rotating GM model. The systems ties to the Night Witches setting are great touches, but make it hard to adapt. I could see some of the ideas being used in any setting with a strong rest/hazard divide; like fire fighters or Battlestar Galactica Pilots.

So yeah, buy this game if the idea interests you, or you want to see some absolutely brilliant design. I loved reading it, but I honestly can't see myself ever playing it, sadly.

The good folks at War is Boring described Vietnameria as Maus for the Vietnam War. I'm not sure if that's true; I don't generally read comix and Maus isn't even on the pile. What I can say is that this is a book about identity and trauma, about survival and family. The story follows G.B. Tran's family, starting with the funerals of grandparents, moving through the childhoods of his parents, the escalating war, and then G.B. coming to grips with his almost unknown family. The story is tragic, most especially G.B.'s father, Tri Huu Tran, who was an artist, teacher, and intellectual in South Vietnam, and who seemed to have lost all those things in his flight to America, leaving a shell of authoritarianism and resentment (although the alternative was several years in a prison camp, so...) Some of the art is quite evocative: busy cityscapes, or refugees trying to climb out of an abyss in the shape of Vietnam.

The advantage of going home is being able to grab old childhood novellas off the shelf and stuff them into bookrace. In this case, Boy is quite a good book, a touching and darkly humorous collection of anecdotes about Dahl's childhood in his massive Norwegian family in England, the tragedy of losing his sister and father in a less confident era of medicine, magical summers in the Oslofjord, and above all, English boarding schools. Dahl's education was a nightmare of canings from cruel figures of authority, from the headmaster on down to prefects. Somehow, Dahl kept his natural contrary nature, taking pleasure in the little things like taste-testing chocolates (inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), sports, or photography. There's of prelude to the future African adventurer and WW2 fighter pilot, but little that would make one think that this is the childhood of a beloved children's author--except for the crystal clear quality of the reminiscences.

I can't believe that 20 years after Snow Crash a major author could present a cackling corporate dystopia full of bad puns with a straight face, but here we are.

Atwood's books are impossible to separate out from their politics. The problem with MaddAddam is that the politics are so resolutely delugist as to be indefensible. (Delugist is a term that I'm working on, particularly in regards to climate change, with the idea that mankind is being punished for its industrial sins but that a righteous society will arise from the ashes. ) This is a dangerous fantasy, because you and the people who you love won't be among the righteous. In fact, there won't be any pure and moral survivors, just the traumatized victims who managed to be the last people standing when everything fell apart. Particularly so in this case, with the survivors being the MaddAddam crew that Crake put together--who by the way never discuss their key role in releasing the plague that destroyed humanity, the Crakers as an idealized race of God's children, and surviving Painballers, neurologically traumatized gladiators lifted from Mad Max.

The plot, such as it is, wanders around the various problems of survival for our small band, although without much urgency, flashbacks to tough guy Zeb's early career, and "strong female narrator" Toby's lovelorn moping over Zeb. The only parts that are particularly interesting are the half-recorded stories to the Crakers, and seeing how they compare with more factual accounts elsewhere in the book.

I started this review by mentioning Snow Crash, because I'm ashamed to admit that it took me far too long to realize that the settings were basically identical. The difference is that Snow Crash is a delightfully gonzo parody of cyberpunk and late-Reagan America. MaddAddam is the same hacker conspiracies and joke names, but with the earnest hairshirt eco-moralizing of a Greenpeace activist. The joke just doesn't fly.

There's an interesting book here about the Next Nature that grows from the wreckage. The Crakers and Pigoons are obvious dominant species, able to out-compete any natural species and with no existing predators. Do they find a balance, or strip the Earth bare again? Did the modifications to make the Crakers perfect pacifists work, or does hierarchy, myth, and violence arise again? There might be an interesting fourth book, but I doubt that's happening, and have little faith that Atwood would deconstruct her universe in such a way.

Reread The Windup Girl instead.