If you've been following the War on Terror, you probably know Nagl; Author of the influential Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, one of the COINdinista who along with General Petraeus wrote the Army's first Counter-Insurgency field manual. Nagl is a classic soldier-scholar, seeing combat first in Desert Storm and then in post-2003 occupation of Iraq, and also a Rhodes scholar with a Masters and PhD from Oxford. As such Nagl's 'knife fights' aren't really about battle. They're about trying to shift the Pentagon over to counter-insurgency, working from within the Army as a speechwriter and training officer, and outside as founder and President of the Center for a New American Security. This is potentially a very interesting theme, but while Nagl has some fascinating things to say about his collaborators and obstacles, the quest to get the army on track in Iraq is obscured rather than clarified. Rumsfeld is the clear villain (he would not let the military use the word 'insurgency'). Petraeus is the clear hero for implementing COIN principles, but the day to day is rather vague. Compared to Adams' incredible "War of Numbers", there is relatively little about the decision-making and learning of the military.

It's interesting to see who Nagl thinks is toast and who's coming back, by the people he calls out and praises. Rumsfeld is obviously gone. Joe Biden is irrelevant. Petraeus will be coming back. Hillary has potential, or at least is someone you don't want to cross. One reviewer on Amazon said that this is Nagl's 2016 positioning book, and while that's uncharitable, it's not entirely unfair. Though Nagl is currently a school principle in Philadelphia (and claims to have a commitment for several more years due to his son), he has credibility as a Washington power-player with CNAS, and may be back for round two.

That is in some ways worrying, because this more than a memoir about taking the theory of counter-insurgency and applying it to practice. This is Nagl's chance to develop the strategy of COIN, particularly applying the events of the Arab Spring, and he doesn't do so with any particular insight. COIN principles require a major investment, 1 soldier per 50 locals, to build local security and institutions. COIN implies multi-year, multi-billion dollar investments. Meanwhile, the New World Disorder is expanding; in Syria, in the Ukraine, in West Africa. Caution about putting American soldiers on the ground is warranted, but for all Nagl's principles, there's little about building a capability for Military Operations Other than War into the Department of Defense. More tellingly, small strokes at the start of a conflict may be cheaper and more efficient than nation-building at the end (would ISIS have arisen if the Free Syrian Army had toppled Assad with American advisers in 2012?). The New World Disorder spreads quickly and unpredictably--how can the American Empire contain it, while still working within Constitutional limits? Not saying that Nagl should be perfectly predictive, but there's a particular dark irony to publishing a book that says "Iraq was the midterm, Afghanistan is the final" as Iraq War Round 3 erupts.

There are also some areas where tighter editing would helped. Nagl repeats himself more than once. He's a smart man, and evidently a nice one, he might be one of the few field grade officers with a sense of humor, but this book doesn't quite make it. Consider this a four star book that got dropped to three stars, either because Nagl isn't willing to tell us where to go next, or because he (more worryingly, for a strategic thinker) doesn't know.

Videogames have come into their own as an art form when they can generate criticism like Killing is Harmless. Chapter by chapter, Keogh explores Spec Ops: The Line as a 'high noon' moment, where shooters a genre become aware of themselves, and begin to comment on their tropes. Every inch of the game, and its links to other works (Call of Duty, Apocalypse Now, Bioshock...) are covered in detail. Fortunately, Keogh doesn't pretend to have answers about the causes or consequences of violence in video games, but he is right to note that the game has opened up those questions.

I'd been hearing good things about the Master Li and Number Ten Ox series for year, and all I can say is that I wish I'd listened to them sooner. This series is an amazing picaresque novel about a crafty and wizened con-artist/detective and his client, a strong and pure-hearted villager, as they wander through mythic China getting into trouble and setting things to right. The setting, the word-play, the fully-realized cleverness of every aspect of this novel make it as masterpiece of modern fantasy.

I don't know why I like political cartoons: they're barely politics, they're barely art, and the people who make them barely get paid. In an age when Michael "DEBT" Ramirez has two Pulitzers and Glenn and Gary McCoy are still syndicated, it might be best to entomb the whole medium with Thomas Nash and Paul Conrad and call it 'done'.*

The Nib is a brave effort by cartoonist Matt Bors to bring the medium into the 21st century, with the hope that the right image in the right time can go viral, can say what people can't say on their own, and make a difference. Like the cover says, this volume is a record of the best of the Nib's first year and a bit, with a talented list of artists you can google on your own. The topics are a smorgasbord that is very very 2014. Dumb internet jokes about the sad states of millennials, long confessional graphic essays about miscarriage, rape, and depression, stabs against the injustices of shootings in Ferguson and at Charlie Hebdo.

Personally, I would have cut some of the longer and less artistically interesting essays (lots of literal talking heads) in favor of more sharp or symbolic pieces, or even essays on what the hell 2014 was, but this is a solid collection of young and diverse artistic talents. That's why I'm dinging it a star compared to my much treasured books by Tim Kreider. But if you like paper books and political cartoons, there's nothing better that's to celebrate the present state of the field.

*the fact that I know all these names is a sign of a deep problem. If you recognize these names too, seek help.

Is 'landscape writer' a thing? Kim Stanley Robinson makes it his thing, and in this book he takes us to Antarctica, continent of ice and rock, the last great wilderness, a beautiful and deadly place.

I've been there, just as a tourist during one of the nicest summers on record, but KSR nails the ineffable qualities of the place and the strangeness of light and distance. Robinson spent a season in Antarctica with the NSF's Artists and Writer's Program, and it was time well spent on all sides. By far my favorite character was Ta Shu, a feng shui geomancer and artistic resident streaming the landscape back to an audience of millions with a running commentary on its five-dimensional harmony and nano-poems. Ta Shu feels both entirely authentic and very alien.

blue sky
white snow

There are more mundane people as well, and the A plot concerns the future of the Antarctica and the Earth, as scientists wrestle with evidence for the last warm period, support staff grumble under the feudal structure of science, oil exploration teams prepare to extract natural resources, 'native Antarcticans' try to stay below the radar, and ecological saboteurs plan a massive attack in the name of the planet. There's a sorta a love triangle between X, a blue collar General Field Assistant, Val, an elite expedition guide, and Wade, senator's aide, but the characters, while round and unique, feel somewhat muted compared to the landscape and the simply trials of getting anywhere alive on the continent. The only true shared culture of Antarctica; the early expeditions of Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen, come through again and again, along with the disagreements between different political factions. Though this is science fiction, the issues that Robinson explores are still very much alive.

Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed is a very hard book to write about. It's clearly great literature, but exactly why is hard to pin down.

The Dispossessed centers on the story of Shevek, a physicist and idealist, but the true characters of this book are the twinned planets of Urras and Anarres. Urras is a world much like own our, of nations and government and money, a garden planet riven by dominance and war. Anarres is a dry and dusty moon, home to an exile civilization of revolutionary anarchists. The story takes place in alternating chapters, an Urras track beginning with Shevek's escape from Anarres to Urras, and an Anarres track following his life and growing dissatisfaction with his homeworld.

This is a book about revolutionary anarchism, about the radical potential for humans to be truly free. But what separates it from most utopian literature is Le Guin's reflexive critique of Anarres. Most utopian literature is about a plan; "if you designed a society like, this is how it'd be perfect." Le Guin shows us a society that is freer and more egalitarian than any that exists on Earth, backed up by a rational language that makes even thoughts of ownership and dominance difficult to express, but she is also wise enough to show how the revolution has become conservative and fearful, how social norms replace law, how the dominance games of politicians and academics still play out in the absence of formal power, and how true freedom must begin and end in the spirit.

The Urras plot concerns Shevek's final work on a Theory of Simultaneity and Sequency (the caps are deserved), a unified theory of physics which would make faster-than-light travel possible, along with the ansible communicator from the rest of Le Guin's Hainish cycle. Fictional physics on this level aren't really my cup of tea, but the book takes a solid run at how cosmology, and how we perceive time, matters as a fundamental basis for society and ideas like property and profit. Shevek's idealism won't let him give his invention to either the grubbing 'invisible parliament' of his own world, which opposes new ideas, or the profiteering and warmongering Urrasian academics who host his stay. There's a war and a great strike, but somehow the action on Urras seems unreal and irrelevant, compared to the dust and hard work of Anarres.

Stepping back to look at the big picture, The Dispossessed covers a lot of the same territory as Left Hand of Darkness, with a lone ambassador coming to another world, but I think The Dispossessed does a better job by giving us some context for Shevek, and his principled opposition to walls and barriers of all kind, especially walls that exist in the head and heart. Le Guin's talk of Simultaneity and Sequency is also about the question "can two people really meet?" and "how do we know when become ourselves?"

This was also a solid year for the Hugos as a whole. The Mote in God's Eye could've easily won in any of the past five years or so. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said is one of my favorite Philip K Dick stories. I haven't heard of Fire Time or Inverted World, but both sound fascinating.

Illich makes a radical critique of education, capitalism, statism, and almost everything that is both extremely focused and also directs slashes at nearly every underpinning assumption of society. Illich's most direct criticism is at the idea that formal education solves problems. Rather than being about skill acquisition or personal development, Illich identifies schools as the ideological wing of the consumption-production engine that is capitalism. The role of schools is to produce ignorance rather than insight, to create credentials and envy of credentials rather than mastery, to suck up surplus labor and intellect in the Promethean furnace of a culture consuming itself. The criticism starts with Dewey's ideas about education, and moves through Johnson's Great Society, international development, drawing heavily on Illich's personal experiences in Mexico, the Vietnam War, and the industrial design of the transistor radio. Don't mistake this for Marxism though; Illich calls out the Soviet system as another gear in the world-spanning educational system.

Against traditional classrooms and curriculum, Illich imagines 'learning webs', where computers would connect people who wanted to learn something to people who already knew it, forming tutoring pairings and affinity groups that meet in cafes and converted shopfronts. Mass production of tapes and audiobooks, along with appropriate technology in the developing world, will liberate minds. Most of Illich's criticisms are directed at the liberal consensus, and he's not afraid of citing Milton Friedman's voucherization of school systems as a positive example, but mostly it's the idea of any sort of formal, obligatory, schooling that is the enemy. There's a direct line between military discipline and educational discipline, and for Illich both are wasteful, anti-human, and evil. The institutional attempt to achieve a goal will always fulfill it's opposite.

As a historical artifact, this work was published in 1971, when for a brief glorious moment it seemed like the Counterculture would triumph, and that all the corrupt and evil institutions of a rotten society would crumble to be replaced by a new dawn met people where they were. Now, more than 40 years on, we know that this moment would last only a little longer. But Illich, even in his strident utopianism, wasn't wrong. Speaking as someone in the 23rd grade, too much education is useless credentialism that serves to indebt the ambitious working classes. Those with power and money have their own networks of private tutors to pursue actually effective education for their children, while basic skills like knowing how to do something, or how to think in a straight line for 500 words, are increasingly the privilege of the elite.

This book should be required reading for educators at all levels. Like all great ideas, Understanding by Design presents a process that seems like common sense, is surprisingly difficult to implement properly, but could have astounding results. The premise behind Understanding by Design is that learning doesn't happen by accident, or merely by hard work on the part of students and teachers, but from the deliberate mastery of skills in pursuit of hard questions. Understanding by Design doesn't require much more work on the part of teachers than other approaches, but requires great courage and clarity in describing what is being learned, and why.

UbD centers around understanding, and the idea that when students really get something, they're able to perform effectively with knowledge and wisely transfer what they've learned across domains, rather than simply reciting facts or plugging through the steps of an algorithm. "Understanding" is a slippery phrase that is somewhat unfashionable. For example it's not in the original 1956 Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and is relegated to a basic level in subsequent revisions, but the word serves better than any other to mark the difference between someone who gets it, and someone who has not yet. The common enemies of understanding are 'coverage without context', textbook driven learning akin to reading the encyclopedia A-Z, and 'activities without purpose', hands-on activities that do not connect back to a larger point. Rather, the goal is to help students uncover Big Questions for themselves; the eternal scholarly and humanistic debates that link back to individual life experience and mastery over specialized skills.

Desired understanding must be linked to a proper assessment of that understanding. Here, Wiggins and McTighe make their single strongest pedagogic claim, that understanding can only truly be measured by authentic performance-based tasks, typically complex and realistic and built around creating reasoned and supported answers, so that a student may be successfully proven to have learned something. Assessment is a also a continuous process, and UbD recommends a continuous feedback loop of practice and evaluation, as well as 'one-minute essays' at the close of class about what students have learned and what they are confused about. The book supports realistic assessment over teaching to the test with a survey of major research that shows that better performing countries have realistic problem-based assessment, and that this method when used in America, leads to improvements in all schools, with the greatest improvements in deprived under-performing schools.

The final step, planning for learning, connects understandings and assessments to the daily practice of what is done in the classroom. This section is the least developed, introducing the WHERETO heuristic, but mostly leaving it up to educators to decided what in their box of tools is appropriate for the situation. It's a fair trade-off, given that they need to supply advice for teachers in every topic from K-16, but it annoyed me that just when we're about to get our hands dirty, the book backs off to a level of abstraction.

Good teachers will know everything in this book intuitively. Hesitant, or less well-prepared teachers (ahem, junior faculty) will benefit from having some wise words to justify what they know is right. Organizations will benefit from a common plan and language for building up binders full of good classes. This is a wonderfully crafted, action-oriented, theoretically grounded, guide for creating classes that matter, rather than classes that merely have to be completed. If you're going to read one book about teaching and curriculum make it Understanding by Design.

Most of my Vietnam War book reviews include the phrase "Vietnam was fractally fucked up". In The Perfect War, Gibson identifies the mathematical seed of that fractal; an ideology that he deems Technowar, and traces its ramifications across Indochina in one of the best general histories of the war, which covers the choice to enter Vietnam, the ground war, the air war, and development and corruption.

Any honest accounting of the Vietnam War has to engage with the fact that Vietnam was a defeat, despite the overwhelming superiority of the American military on paper. Theories on this defeat fit into two major paradigms. Quagmire theory, as exemplified by The Best and the Brightest, argues that a series of decisions which individually seemed like the best alternative at the time, added up to an strategic error. Revisionist theories, as in Summer's On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War argue that the full weight of American power was never applied due to perfidy in the Johnson administration and a stab-in-the-back from the anti-war movement. Gibson takes a third path. The military and strategic apparatus of the United States did exactly what it was supposed to, destroying Vietnam with a level of brutality that stopped short only of nuclear weapons. But despite this violence it could never win because of fundamental intellectual flaws.

Technowar, as described by Gibson, is a war of technologically sophisticated industrial systems directed by officer-managers. Victory is achieved through qualitative and quantitative margins of superiority in armament. Cost efficient application of key military inputs (tanks, bombs, ships, soldiers) would modulate strategic outputs (victories), and the United States, by virtue of have the best military inputs, would always achieve the best outputs. The logic of technowar, adapted from operations research and industrial management, is evident in strategic statements from military planners across the political spectrum, including Robert McNamara (the arch-technowarrior), Henry Kissinger, Maxwell Taylor, and General William Westmoreland.

More than a strategy, technowar was also a closed intellectual system. American capitalism and democracy is 'natural', so Communism is an 'unnatural Other' that infiltrates society. The enemy can only be conceived of as a flawed and inferior mirror image of the American military. The Maoist People's War strategy and tactics used by the Vietcong and NVA could not be contained within the system. Further, the closed intellectual system of technowar contained it's own justification. Unable to locate victories on the ground, technowar took to measuring it's own inputs: sortie rates, hamlets fortified, and above all the body count. The need to produce statistics falsified the war at all level, the lies "legitimated" in a process of institutional doublethink through medals and promotions for the most productive officers, and new names and propaganda for civilian programs.

This closed intellectual system made victory impossible, since strategy was generated in a kind of fantasy world. On the ground, with the soldiers and pilots who were the labor force of technowar, this fantasy generated demoralization, fragging, and atrocities against Vietnamese civilians. The Perfect War cites Lt. Calley of My Lai heavily, not as an exemption, but as an example typical of how the war was fought that happened to rise to public awareness. The My Lai massacre was a natural outgrowth of a strategy that could only measure success through bodycounts, and demanded quotas of the dead from officers.

The basic issues of the average Vietnamese civilian; land reform, honest government, an end to the violence, could not be addressed because they did not exist within the 'target space' defined by technowar. If anything, the chapters on corruption in rural development are some of the best writing I’ve seen on the war. Victory, if it were possible at all, could only mean a stable South Vietnam, in the model of South Korea or Taiwan. Due to the unique political and geographic circumstances that created South Vietnam, its government was defined by corrupt cliques of minor warlords, with nominal Vietnamese sovereignty requiring US officials to look away from the diversion of nearly all aid into private accounts of senior officials. The situation with the Piaster, and the 5x figure between official and black market exchange rates is fascinating. Somebody in the United States must have been getting immensely wealthy with the ongoing currency spread, and given that the official numbers were backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid, it was directly at taxpayer expense.

This is not quite the perfect book. It’s long and somewhat difficult reading for someone less interested in the topic and the theory. There are some rough edges where the Foucauldian and Marxist theory components meet technowar, which itself could use a little more historical development. The sources lean heavily on The Pentagon Papers and Lt. Calley’s testimony, although I agree that these are sufficiently representative of official and on-the-ground thinking in the war; and other sources back up these primary accounts. On the whole, however, Gibson ably covers as much of a very complex war as I’ve seen in a single volume, and does so with a theory that continues to have explanatory power, in this age of drone strikes and international terrorism.

Put this one at the top of your Vietnam War bookshelf.

Everything I said about Dauntless applies to Fearless, as Geary leads his fleet deeper in Syndicate space before returning home. There's more battles, more traps, more honor and cleverness on the part of our hero.

Where this book departs is that it introduces some new characters. Captain Falco is a rescued POW and self-proclaimed hero, with a Douglas MacArthur-esque penchant for trying to bend reality to his ego. Captain Falco provides a useful counterpart to Geary's cautious doubt and honor. Some of the minor commanders move up and display a little initiative. Best of all, Geary starts a relationship with Co-President Rione, a tough and skeptical politician who is afraid that the legendary hero Black Jack might set himself up as king back home, but likes the man John. It's a little hair-pulling, watching nominally mature adults act like kids, but people are believably done.

Of course, as a scifi setting buff, what I really enjoyed was the mystery of the hypernet gates: nobody knows who developed the key FTL technology, and the destruction of a gate could create a supernove that'd wipe out multiple star systems. Was it aliens? Aliens (officially) don't exist. In narrative terms, this is slamming a clip into Chekov's gun and racking the slide. I'm excited to see what happens next.