Strange and Secret People is solid piece of scholarship concerning the relationship between Victorian folklorists and fairies. Silver discusses what fairies represented in the immense intellectual turmoil of the period. The chapters cover topics like the creation of a British national culture palatable to the native elites, rather than imported French or German stories, as well as fairies as representations of anxieties about female sexuality, the lower classes, disabled children, and the pains of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps the most interesting parts where the discussions of Darwin and the pseudo-science of fairies, and various attempts to link fairies to either a vanished race of pygmies similar to the tribes encountered in Africa and Asia, or the future spiritual evolution of the human race. Science-as-it-could-have been, rather than science-as-it-is. The final chapter concerns the fairies as always vanishing but never quite gone, and the way that they were finally relegated to nursery tales and robbed of all power.

I can’t fault Silver’s scholarship; I doubt that there is a single source that she missed. On the other hand, I think this book could’ve used more theoretical grounding, and more of a focus on the Victorian folklorists who recorded these primary sources. There’s too much analysis of the Victorian’s psychosexual hangups, and not enough of why the Victorians thought these stories were important. A second weakness is some unclarity in this very long period, and what may have changed between early Romanticism, the heights of Imperial power, and the pseudo-science of Theosophy and other spiritual practices.

Lords and Ladies is Pratchett in the middle of his skills, a confident writer knowing exactly what he wants to say. Granny Weatherwax and the Witches return to Lancre at the height of summer for a royal wedding, but something is wrong. Foolish young girls have been dancing around a ring of standing stones, reality is weakening, and the elves are coming back. This is a witches book, but it brings in the wizards for support as well, and bonus jokes.

It's impossible not to love the witches as characters, or the tiny kingdom of Lancre, but where this book excels is in its depictions of the enemies. Pratchett strips away centuries of fuzzy folklore to get to the essence of elves. They are predators. They think they're naturally better than you, and their magic means that you start to think like them. Pratchett compares the elves to wasps and cats, and develops a psuedo-scientific explanation for their weakness to iron and magnetism, and why

Briggs is apparently one of the major figures of folklore as an academic discipline, with a PhD from Oxford, and later president of the Folklore Society. The Personnell of Fairyland is an odd little volume. Even if it doesn’t quite match modern standards, the organization and ‘facticity’ of the book make it clear that this is a serious and scholarly collection of British fairy-stories. However, the subtitle is “for those who tell Stories to children,” and every third story or so has a darling little woodcut illustration.

As expected, this is a book of fairy tales. Each individual story is brief, and I recall the longest being no more than seven pages or so. The stories are divided into four major sections, heroic fairies who have great and mythical powers, brownies or little fairies who work in great swarms, tutelary families connected to a particular family or house, nature fairies, and finally assorted giants, witches, and monsters. Additionally, there’s a dictionary of different types of fairies. Generally, the stories involve humans interacting with fairies, sometimes tricking them but usually being tricked by the Fair Folk. There’s some deaths and maimings, although less than you’d see in unbowdlerized Grimm’s fairy tales. The worst thing that English fairies do in these stories is abandon humanity. Some of the tales are in plain English, some in dialect, without much pattern or explanation as to why.

As an introduction and basic reference, this is a decent enough introduction to English fairies. However, it entirely lacks context, and unless you are a particularly gifted reader, I can’t see reading these stories to children.

The Tooth Fairy is a dark meditation on the pains of growing up, following a trio of boys in rural England during the 60s. Sam, the main character is haunted by the titular Tooth Fairy, a shape shifting fairy who exacts a terrible price on Sam’s loved ones. This is a really good psychological drama about just how alone children are, about the uncanny bonds of friendship, and about the roiling tensions of puberty. The periodness of the setting is very present without being overwhelming: drugs, delinquency, white collar despair, pop music. Oddly enough, my least favorite parts were the overtly supernatural. The malevolent, protean, codependent Tooth Fairy just didn’t cohere as an external force of menace, or really more than a super extended metaphor for various growing pains. A stylish and fun book, but not my cup of tea.

About Face is Hackworth's first book, the one he really wanted to write, and a damn fine memoir about loving the Army, building a career, and then burning it to the ground after decades of systemic betrayals. Hackworth grew up as an orphan in California, and lied about his age to join the Army in 1946, when most people were glad to be getting out. He learned the trade in the elite occupation forces at Trieste (TRUST), and then the hard way in Korea with the 27th "Wolfhounds" Infantry Regiment, where he was battlefield commissioned as an officer. Between Korea and Vietnam Hackworth bounced around the civilian world and Nike missile anti-aircraft units, marked as a soldier with the potential for stars, even as he was caught between his abrasive nature and the '100% efficiency' culture of the New Army; a 100% efficiency often achieved by fudging results.

Vietnam was what finally broke Hackworth. He fought with the 101st Airborne, and remade and commanded the 'Hardcore Recondo' battalion (see Steel My Soldiers' Hearts), but he became incredibly cynical at the hamfisted use of firepower, the ticket-punching attitude of careerist officers, and the way that a combination of strategic obscurity and improper training in infantry basics was getting thousands of American soldiers killed for no damn reason at all. Despite time in command, in training schools, and in the Pentagon, Hackworth couldn't move the machine, and so in 1971 he blew everything up by giving a candid interview to ABC's Issues & Answers where he dramatically countered the "Vietnamization/Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel" Pentagon line. The response was immediate and drastic. Hackworth was followed, wiretapped, investigated for numerous crimes, and finally forced to resign, where he fled to Australia ("As far away as I could get from America and still speak English") to make his own way. And then after 18 years he writes this book, and uses it to launch a second career as a war reporter and defense analyst.

That's the duality of Hackworth. Unquestionably a brilliant soldier; uneducated orphans lying about their age to enlist do not get groomed for the highest command without an immense amount of talent, luck, and energy, Hackworth was also an egoist and a braggart of the highest order. Rules simply did not apply to him, and Hackworth and his men stole jeeps, partied hard on base, ran brothels, scavenged everything they could get their hands on, dealt out 'NCO justice', slept with other men's wives, lied about everything that might get them in trouble, etc. etc. There's a lot to learn from in Hackworth's earlier career (sweat the details, an organization only learns what the boss checks, focus on the fundamentals, loyalty runs downwards before it runs up), but the big deal, his Issues & Answers interview, seems mostly like the last futile gesture of a broken man. What could be done in 1971 to save the war? What did the American people not know, that was heroically revealed? The timeline reveals that Hackworth's alleged crimes were dug-up mostly as a response to the blatant attack of his TV interview; other officers got away with the same or worse. But I have a sense that in some grander sense, his interview was all for the best. General Hackworth would have imploded hard enough to take out a side of the Pentagon.

Everything in this book is written to contrast 'Hackworth the Warrior, Stud of Studs, Master of Battle' against the 'Perfumed Princes' who lied failed to achieve victory in Korea or Vietnam, and betrayed the trust of their troops the American people through a cabal that covers up inadequate training and shoddy procurement. The writing is pulpy, the stories slanted, but this is his first book and both writing and facts are more considered and balanced, before years of "Hack the Great War Correspondent" went to his head. Whatever else, Hackworth had charisma, and it shines through. Even though I don't want to like him, I can't help it.

Diplomatic Immunity is a callback to the earlier Miles stories, with a relatively simple espionage-intrigue related plot, and madcap heroics to save the day.

Imperial Auditor Vorkosigan's honeymoon is interrupted with an urgent message to go to Quaddie space and sort out a problem between a Barrayaran trade fleet and the Quaddie authorities. The Quaddies, genetically engineering humans designed for zero-G with four arms, didn't do a solid job investigating the disappearance of a Barrayaran officer, and shoreleaves problems nearly escalated to a shooting war. Miles cuts right to the center of the problem, and slight spoilers: there are Cetagandan black ops involved with an arsenal of horrific bioweapons. Only fast thinking and suicidal heroics can save the day.

This is a pretty average Vorkosigan novel. I can sort of feel that Bujold has said most of what she wants to say about these people.
But average Vorkosigan Saga is still a cut above most books.

I'd heard that The Lost Fleet is the (relatively) new hotness in milSF, and I wasn't disappointed. Campbell drops you into the heart of the action. Captain "Black Jack" Geary is a relic from the start of a very long war, rescued from a drifting cryopod by a fleet that in the intervening years has turned him into a Hero (capital H) and figure of speech. When an audacious sneak attack goes horrifically awry and the senior officers of the Alliance fleet are executed, Geary is put in command of a fleet a century removed from his time, with a mission of getting as many people home as possible. All of this happens in the first ten pages, and the rest of book is a rocket, with two battles and lots of thoughts about the differences between Geary and the diminished modern officers. A century of grinding attrition have eliminate the finely grained tactical skill and honor the characterized Geary's era, and he has to build those traditions back up. A lot of milSF plays with perception and reality of command, but Campbell turns it to 11 by making Geary have to live up, or at least around, his insane reputation.

That said, I do have a couple of strikes. First, this book is weak on description. I have no idea what the setting looks like or feels like, aside from a universal religion of ancestor worship. Secondary characters and ships are introduced mostly to be blown away; Geary has only a few more allies at the end of the book than he does at the beginning. Second, while Campbell is studious in making his space-navy make tactical sense, introducing communications lag over light-seconds and relativistic effects, he never specifies the acceleration of his ships, the core measure of a spaceship's performance. The ships seem to recapitulate the classes and capabilities of a Jutland-era Dreadnoughts and auxiliaries, rather than working from some sort of first principles on weapons and defenses. Finally, I'm not sure if I buy the sociology of the 'fleet in collapse.' Military organizations are somewhat of a hobby of mine, and while grinding attrition warfare can really erode the morale and command skills of a force (see the US post 1970, France after 1916, or the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1944), it also clears away deadweight paper-pushing officers and teaches the skills necessary to survive battle by default. These late war forces are often crude and demoralized, but they can be very very effective.

I'll be interested to see where this series goes.

I feel disappointed, and a little betrayed. Debt was my most important book of the decade; A sequel on bureaucracy could be an equally ground breaking contribution. Unfortunately, this is a wandering and disconnected series of weakly researched essays that, while making a few interesting points, buries them under digressions and inaccuracies.

Graeber start with the experience of having his stroke-ridden mother declared legally incompetent, disabled, and then dead, and the kafka-esque absurdity of the paperwork. This process is no less ritualized than any Malagasy funeral, but yet the Western academic tradition seems entirely incapable of understanding bureaucracy: it is a vacuum of symbols from which meaning cannot be extracted. The most powerful tools of thick description and grounded theory are like Antaeus against Hercules.

Directly, Graeber postulates that violence and administration are too sides of the same coin. That behind ledgers and rulebooks is always a man with a club, and any group of men willing to do violence will have administrative support. Internally, bureaucracy is a way to concentrate power among insiders, and with nod to Feminism and Critical Race Studies, bureaucratic techniques allow those with power to avoid doing any interpretative labor; the work of figuring out what other people desire and accommodating yourself to it. Subordinates spend an immense amount of effort figuring out the minds of their masters, if only to avoid being crushed. Those in power have the luxury of entirely ignoring the whims of those under them.

As a revolutionary project, Graeber seeks to revitalize the Left against the neoliberal combination of bureaucracy and extractive capitalism that he calls the 'worst of all possible ideologies' (think Tony Blair or Hillary Clinton). He gestures toward Imagination (with a capital I) as key, and the alliance between avante-garde artists and the proletariat as the base of the Left, but has little to substantiate this idea, or break free of old circular debates about the nature of sovereign power, or the relationship between play and rationality.

Unable to analyze bureaucracy directly, Graeber has to turn to the cultural encrustations that have grown around it. Some of this stuff is spot on: did you know that James Bond and Sherlock Holmes are mirror inversions of an elemental British bureaucratic hero, why all the bosses in American police procedurals are black, or the occult links between Dungeons & Dragons and the Western magical tradition and idealized Roman Law. But some of the cultural stuff misses, like his read of Star Trek or the Nolan Batman movies, and ultimately Graeber is not a natural media studies type, and this seems digressive from the point of book on bureaucracy.

And when I say 'inaccuracies', I mean that when Graeber makes specific claims about technological history, or human cognition, or the like, the footnotes lead to a justification that everybody knows this, rather than a scholarly source. There was one moment where he talked about the rise in management jargon with a phrase like "if you traced the rise of it in business speak since 1970, you would see..." and I thought "If? Aren't you a professor? Can't you get an RA to run this down in a week?" The whole book is full of moments like that, and their presence makes me less confident of Debt, which is a shame.

Some interesting thoughts, but not nearly enough to save the book. I'd prefer that he baked this one for another couple of years.

On a Red Station, Drifting takes some of the standard science fiction tropes: interstellar empires in decay, space stations ruled by a singular artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and runs it all through a heavy Vietnamese filter. The result is a compelling novella that centers around Confucian values of filial piety, harmony, and the family as a model for society.

Linh is a planetary Magistrate on the run from an empire falling to civil war, and her own challenge to Imperial authority in a memo which has earned her a death sentence. Quyen is a station administrator presiding over a failing station and an unhappy family. The two clash over power, respect, subtle snubs of courtesy and disastrous breaches of protocol. I'd say that the story is most notable in the way that it inverts conventions, with women as the central characters and Confucian values rather than Aristotelian values shaping society. It's a coherent and well-imagined universe, and one that made me question my default belief that the future would look pretty much like me. After all, on an interstellar scale Vietnam has just as much space capability as America.

An intro to college teaching is a big subject, and the best that I can say is that Rotenberg attempts to cover as much of it as he can. However, I found relatively little in here that's actually useful. The best specific advice is to continually assess your class (assess, as opposed to evaluate with grades), to focus on learning rather than teaching, and to be clear and fair in your expectations. Anybody who's had a halfway decent teacher and paid attention should know all of this. Overall, it's a collection of vague generalities that is most useful as a source for poaching some language for a teaching statement on a job app.

The strongest part of the book are the references to the standard texts in the field; the interlocution isn't worth your time, so just go to the primary sources.

For how adults learn: Kolb, A. Y. & Kolb, D, A. (2005). Learning Styles and Learning Spaces: Enhancing Experiential Learning in Higher Education. ACAD MANAG LEARN EDU June 1, 2005 vol. 4 no. 2 193-212 (and the rest of the Kolb Experiential Learning theory)
For designing classes: Wiggins & McTighe. Understanding by Design
For grading and evaluation: Walvoord & Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment.