Haidt is much better psychologist than political philosopher, and this book is both monumental and dangerously flawed.

On the good side: Haidt draws broadly from research in psychology, anthropology, and biology to develop a six-factor basis for morality (Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation), and show that moral judgement is an innate intuitive ability accompanied by post-hoc justifications. Morality serves to bind non-related groups, i.e. society, together, and moral skills have been favored by various evolutionary mechanisms over human history. This theory is, frankly, really good and really well developed.

Haidt then goes on to show that Liberalism draws from only the first three moral factors while Conservatism draws from all six. This explains both the differences between liberals and conservatives, and why conservatives beat the stuffing out of liberals at the polls. This is also incontrovertible.

But Haidt is unwilling to follow his theory to its ultimate question: Can a democratic political system that privileged the rights of the minority procedurally sustain decision-making based on all six moral factors? Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, and Fairness/Cheating are universal factors; everybody uses them, and we mostly agree on when they are upheld or violated. Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation are intrinsically provincial factors; they're different for every culture, and every individual.

A moral order for a pluralistic society which takes the latter three factors seriously must either force people to uphold a morality they do not believe in, or segregate people based on their different interpretations of morality. Perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to such concerns because I'm a liberal Jew, but forcing false beliefs on and/or ghettoizing people seems profoundly wrong. Conversely, giving a Moral Minority the ability to gum up the works whenever they feel their rights are under attack is killing good governance.

Where conservatism fails is that we are no longer living in separate communities. It's one global economy, one atmosphere, one water cycle, one oil supply, etc. Haidt faults liberalism for damaging American moral capital in the 60s and 70s, but he doesn't explain how conservatism can become big enough rule the globe.

The basis of this book is that writing should be play-even for professional writers there has to be an element of fun and joy. As long as an author can keep having fun, they can write indefinitely and improve their craft. While I'm no fan of the Iowa Writer's Seminar, (and this book is steeped in that tradition), it has a lot of useful tips and exercises for writing a little every day, and improving your own writing. I could see this useful for teaching a creative writing class, or as a self-guided seminar.

For a fan of literature as opposed to a practitioner, there's also a lot to enjoy here, with a feast of short fiction, essays, poems, and plays used as examples. Sometimes it's a little hard to see the relevance to the theme of chapter, but as someone who mostly stays away from modern fiction this was a lovely sampling.

Dark secret: I've somehow made it this far through my life without reading Frankenstein. This is the 1818 text, which reliable sources assure me is far superior to the self-bowdlerized 1835 revision. It's hard to evaluate this book apart from its place as a foundational work of science fiction and gothic horror. While it still has the ability to impress and horrify in places, it's hobbled by a weak central character. Victor Frankenstein is unworthy of the creation of his 'monster', his rejection arbitrary and cowardly. For all its pain and loneliness, the monster is surprisingly aesthetic and moral. Victor, dude, you stitched together an 8 foot tall thing from corpses and shocked it to life. You were surprised when you succeeded?

Ernie Pyle is the doyen of war correspondents, the poet of the infantry, a delightful and engaging friend. Everybody read Ernie's columns during the war, as he provided an honest on-the-ground look at the men who made up America's army. Ernie shared their dangers and hardships, sleeping rough, dodging bullets and shells while being drawn inexorably towards the front. This quest for the truest, closest picture of the war is what makes Pyle great, and also what got him killed in the invasion of Okinawa. This book is like having a incredibly observant and empathetic friend writing letters home, and should be required reading for student of WW2.

Let me close with a few quotes that sum up Pyle's work.

"Tunisia - April 22, 1943.
When I got ready to return to my old friends at the front, I wondered if I would sense any change in them.
The most vivid change is the casual and workshop manner in which they talk about killing. They have made the psychological transition from the normal belief that taking a human life is sinful, over to a new professional outlook where killing is a craft. In fact it is an admirable thing.
As a noncombatant, my own life is in danger only by occasional chance or circumstance. Consequently I need not think of killing in personal terms, and killing to me is still murder."

[a draft of his last column, found on his body]
"On Victory in Europe - 1945
Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.
But there are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world...
Dead men by mass production.
Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come to hate them.
These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference..."

What a writer. What a human being.

"War is hell."
- William Tecumseh Sherman

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

Most brutal armies: The Mongol Horde. The Nazi Wehrmacht. Military Assistance Command Vietnam? Yes, it was that bad.

This book fills a vital gap in the literature. According to Turse, roughly 30,000 non-fiction books have been written about Vietnam (I have quite a few to go. *gulp*). Those that concern war crimes tend to focus on specific incidents, particularly My Lai. None look synopticly at how America fought the war. Drawing on the files of the US military Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (those that haven't mysterious disappeared), and interviews with veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse has compile a chilling account of the routine occurrence and sanctioning of war crimes.

An estimated million civilians were killed in South Vietnam during the American war. Some of these were the collateral of the American juggernaut: victims of aerial bombardment, Agent Orange, and random shellings. Many more were callously personal: village bunkers cleared with grenades, children run over by convoys, girls on bicycles knocked down by passing troops. And a final category is chillingly inhumane: torture and execution of prisoners, buzzing farmers with helicopters until they ran in terror and then machine gunning them as Viet Cong, hours long gang rapes of teenage girls by combat patrols. Day after day for years on end, in every province of the country, American soldiers mistreated Vietnamese civilians in ways that violated every law of war.

Turse admits that this book is not a complete story, but he tells enough to show a clear pattern of abuse starting at the highest echelons of command. Body count-driven strategy meant that commanders were encourage to manufacture kills by any means necessary. Higher echelons didn't bother to check that the bodies were accompanied by weapons. Similarly, nobody was sanctioned for war crimes. Lt. Calley became the fall man for 40 more senior officers, and suffered only a few months of house arrest and the loss of his reputation. The Mere Gook Rule, which started that American lives were precious, firepower was cheap, and Vietnamese lives worth nothing at all, was applied at every level-from shooting 'escaping' prisoners to flattening villages and relocating the population to squalid strategic hamlets.

I believe strongly that war is a moral enterprise, and in Vietnam those in command showed the utmost moral cowardice and disregard for the honor of their uniforms and the American flag. In seven years of war, Vietnam experienced something equivalent to the My Lai massacre every week. What happened there was just as bad as anything on the Eastern Front in WW2, my previous gold standard for man's inhumanity to man.

I haven't read Don Quixote, so maybe I'm not getting the full depth of the references, but this seemed like a joke that got extended way past the point of being funny-a literary SNL skit that had about 20 seconds of humor tops. Father Quixote is a simple Spanish priest with a famous last name. He gets promoted to Monsignor through a chance encounter with a bishop and decides to go on a trip around Spain in his old car "Rocinante' with his friend the Communist ex-Mayor, who he calls Sancho. They drive, drink wine, argue about Catholicism and Marxist, drink some more, argue about the state of Franco's soul, get in trouble with the law, and drink more. It's bleak in a Greene-ian way, but out of habit rather than any good reason. Greene seems to be having a conversation trying to square his Roman Catholicism and his Leftist, but I'm not sure anybody should listen. Read The Quiet American instead.

KSR is one of the acknowledged masters of contemporary science fiction. His Mars trilogy stands like a monument to ambition and understanding. That said, the short story is not his natural format. These stories feel cramped, hemmed in and ended before they reach their conclusion. Repetitions in themes and more annoyingly pacing become apparent: mountains, climate change, baseball, dreams, science, history-each story punctuated by a leaden last line. There are a few standouts, the award winning "Black Air", and goofy and enjoyable "Arthur Sternback Brings the Curveball to Mars", the paired ruinpunk stories of "Venice Drowned" and "Glacier", and the eerie dream-horror of "Before I Wake", but on the whole, the volume is puffed out with filler that sadly illuminates the limits of KSR's talents rather than his strengths.

Military fiction written by veterans is an interesting genre. On the one hand, it frees the authors from the dryness of facts to make a more interesting and expressive story than their personal memories. On the other hand, it can leave you wondering what was left out, and what happened because it was true or merely because it made good literary sense. It's impossible to doubt General Simmons' credentials as a warrior and a historian. He was there, and his novel has the bronze gleam of truth. But truth alone does not make for a good war novel.

The basic literary flaw is the protagonist, Captain Bayard. He is a blank slate, overshadowed by the famous warriors around him-the Red Snapper, Sergeant Havac, even his platoon commanders. Command seems to be a reflex with him, as the company attacks or defends using the Quantico school solution, usually with a fair degree of effectiveness. He makes no human connections to the men in his unit, the lot of a company commander seems to be a lonely one. Flashbacks to his childhood in Ohio and early career in Washington DC are mere filler, despite romantic entanglements and class conflicts. And the descriptions of battle are adequate, but don't convey the desperation of conflict in the great retreat from Chosin.

The details in this book are absolutely spot on, but like a uniform on a mannikan, there's nothing beneath them. Meh.

Not nearly as good as Footfall or Turtledove's Worldwar, more serious than Live Free or Die, and more credibly thought out than The Darwin Elevator, A Sword Into Darkness is a fun bit of action with some serious flaws as a novel.

Mays really really wanted to tell a story where a Guided Missile Destroyer saves Earth from an alien invasion, and that's what you get here. The action sequences are top notch, with the authenticity and rapid-fire jargon that comes with 18+ years of experience as an surface warfare officer in the US Navy. He makes guided missile combat exciting, and manages a few neat developments on standard scifi space warfare with 'tactical lag' and 'oblique intercept trajectories.' As an applied physicist, Mays also manages to make the technobabble decent-assuming you buy his superalloys and magic photon drive, the engineering seems to hold up. After those high points, the quality descends sharply. The Deltans wind up having surprisingly good reasons to attack Earth in the manner that they do, but act in ways that let the protagonists be awesome, rather than according to an internal logic. I disagree with some of his political choices: there's no way NASA and the astrophysics community would sit on a visible drive flare, even if it was ridiculous, and as lousy as the military industrial complex is, I doubt they'd mess up a clear and present danger like an alien battlecruiser coming in system just because of interservice rivalry. Most fatally, anything in the book not directly related to the battles is not good at all: characterization, description, sentences. I don't have any quotes to hand, but the writing was ham-handed, even by the standards of mil-SF.* I almost shut the book on the first page, and while it did improve, I have a pretty high tolerance for schlock. Definitely at the lower end of its genre.

*Mays, if you ever read this review, I am genuinely sorry. Criticism is easy, writing is hard, and you've done more publishing a novel than I ever have. That said, you gotta work on the literary qualities--do some non-genre workshops, try some short character sketches, maybe try a collaboration. Ideas this good deserve better sentences.

Sun of Suns is a perfect alignment of plot and setting. Schroeder wanted to write something in the vein of steampunk or space opera: sword fights on exploding battlecruisers, glittering 'civilized' cities and dank pirate hideaways, heroics and sacrifice and revenge written across the sky. A lesser author would just say 'screw realism' and do it: Schroeder actually does the world building to make it work.

Enter Virga, a 5000 mile bubble of air orbiting Vega, hemmed in by a shell of ice and light from within by artificial suns. Zero-G forests hide shoals of fish and birds Towns rotate to generate gravity, lest their inhabitants become enfeebled weightless spiders. Immense floating seas and fogbanks conceal pirate armadas, while jet-propelled men-of-war launch rocket barrages before closing to board. There are rumors that the whole thing is sustained by/protecting itself against post-human high technology. I'm not a meterologist, but the incredible weather of Virga and the ships that ply its sky are both awesome and pass my smell test.

After all that praise for the setting, it pains me to do anything less for the plot and characters, but they're merely good as opposed to great. Revenge is a major motivation, and contrasted against friendship, human decency, and the possibility to make something new. There are a lot more Virga books, which I'll read when I get the chance, but Sun of Suns stands on its own and then some.