Wells uses archaeological evidence to argue that the Dark Ages weren't so dark after all, and that a vibrant culture of nobles and merchants, ruling over newly productive agriculturalists, thrived between 400 and 800 C.E. For the average worker living in the cities of the Rhine basin, the Baltic Sea, or London, there wouldn't have been much change from year to year as Rome weakened. New forms of art around finely crafted gold brooches and animal designs represent a shift away from Mediterranean culture to local cultures.

It's a compelling argument, and the included images of gold artifacts are quite beautiful. This book is aimed quite clearly at college freshmen and the casual archaeologist, who'd be scared off by footnotes or inline citations. Normally, I'd give this book three stars as in introduction to the topic with an ax to grind, but I'm knocking off a star for oddities in included images, such as talking at length about Childeric's unique signet ring without showing it, and including several pictures of the author's European vacation rather than site maps.

Richard Sorge was one of the greatest spies of all times. For 8 years he orchestrated a top-level Soviet operation in Tokyo, literally operating out of the German Embassy. He was a close confidant of Ambassador Ott, his top Japanese source Hotsumi Ozaki was a member of elite Japanese think-tanks and part of a weekly breakfast with the Prime Minister. Sorge and Ozaki both pursued their covers with dedicate, maintaining a reputation as insightful journalists. Sorge's information may have provided warnings of Operation Barbarossa, and reassurances that Japan would not attack Siberia while the USSR was occupied by Germany. The unwinding of the spy ring, and the slow march to execution, is also tragic.

This book is a nearly month by month account of the Sorge ring, and the man himself. Sorge was brilliant, an alcoholic, a womanizer, a scandalous loudmouth beloved of the German expat community in Tokyo, and a charismatic man who inspired loyalty even in those he betrayed. The workings of his relationships with his mistress Hanako, radioman Max Clausen, and with the distant 4th Directorate in Moscow, swirl around the tensions and secrets of his life. Prange is a dedicated and detailed historian, and this is a fascinating subject, but somehow this book was a slog, a real life spy story of narrow escapes and information that disappeared into the void of the Soviet strategic apparatus.

Deadly Sky is a thematically organized oral history of (like the subtitle says) the American combat airman in World War 2. McManus draws from a vast repository of letters and memoirs to describe the men who fought, their living conditions, the dangers of their mission, and what they thought about the job. American combat airmen were compared to the rest of the military, physically and mentally on the high end of the bell-curve. Conditions at base were relatively good, and missions typically came every few days. For these "luxuries", they paid in dangerous and terrifying mission, enduring the frozen stratosphere, flak, and fighters to accomplish their mission. During the worst periods, combat air units suffered 80%+ attrition over the course of six months.

This book is weighted more towards the bomber pilots of the 8th Airforce, and could use a little more context around some of McManus's favorite sources, but it's a masterful summary of the men in their own words.

Trotti wrote this book as a response to the question "What was it like to fly one of those thundering smokers in combat", and he excels in doing so. With two tours of duty and over 600 missions, Trotti knows his stuff, and he manages a delicate balance between the sheer exhilaration of flight, the mental strain of staying ahead of a twenty ton supersonic war machine, and the overall senselessness of the war itself.

Rather than a day by day diary, Trotti takes a more literary approach, focusing in detail on a few exemplary missions. One is a Rolling Thunder strike over Vinh, a precisely timed operation involving aerial tanking, ECM support from Willie the Whale, and dodging SAMs to strike a flak site so the F-105s can hit a truck park. The second is a check-out flight in a fresh Phantom, taking a clean plane out just to see how fast it can go. Trotti also talks about BARCAP, flying guard for Navy ships, and close air support with napalm and snake-eyes for troops in contact just outside Danang.

The F-4 Phantom is my favorite airplane for reasons I cannot explain or justify, and Trotti has written an amazing book that describes what it felt like to fly one of them when it mattered most.

Bonus: Paradise of the Phantoms

The Vorkosigan Saga has been one of my major pleasures of the past few years, so it's interesting to see Bujold turn her talents to fantasy rather than science fiction. It's also interesting to see what elements get carried over into a very different universe.

Ista is an unconventional fantasy heroine. Middle-aged, embittered by past failures, imprisoned by her family on suspicion of madness, an unnecessary relic for her daughter the Queen, and unsure of what she is supposed to be doing with her very high and very constricted way in the world. As a simple matter of escape from her recently dead mother's servants, she goes on a pilgrimage with unconventional companions, and winds up in a border fortress beset by a supernatural mystery. Ista has only a few days to begin to unravel the tangled skein before they are besieged by a potent sorceress queen, and only desperate action and supernatural intervention can save the day.

As a matter of world-building, the strongest parts of this book are concerned with the supernatural, with the five gods who bestow their double-edged blessings on Ista, and the demons who power a form of magic based on entropy. There's a great matter-of-factness to the undoubtedly real gods of the story, and they ways in which their agendas and powers go beyond human understanding. The Father, Mother, Daughter, Son (and Bastard) religions of the region are clearly inspired by Trinitarian Christianity, but is not a slavish copy of any real world religion. I wish I could say the politics matched up to that, but for all that Bujold "got" Barrayar, Chalion is medieval without given a sense of the interplay of dynasties, inheritances, and legacies that make actual history so dense, or the grandness of individuals that makes epic fantasy epic.

The gods are richly imagined, true, but the difference between science (even advanced super-science) and magic is that science is limited in what it can do. Ista undergoes immense changes over the course of the book, makes wise decisions in the heat of the moment, and deals with the consequences, but the initial impetus of those decisions is always the gods, and the outside intervention robs the novel of key tension. Ista starts rejecting the gods, because the last time she listened to them 20 years ago, two good men died, but even with that looming over the story, I never really doubted that she would win because she had the Bastard inside her, which outmatched any demon. Miles Vorkosigan doesn't get to ride into battle at the helm of some super-tech battlecruiser with more firepower than his enemies can dream of; he has just his wits and a few tricks.

I enjoyed Ista as a character, curmudgeonly as she was for a protagonist. There are parallels to a more damaged Cordelia Vorkosigan, the same strength of character wasted away rather than rewarded. Ista seems to arrive at her conclusions by giving no fucks, rather than a truly external perspective. Lissa and dy Cabon also felt familiar as supporting characters, along with the way that major issues (invasion, the divine) pivot on the romances of a handful of people. And of course, the idea that the Great Men of the previous generation were secretly gay.

Paladin of Souls is a decent book, but it never really captured me. I probably just have different tastes in fantasy, more epic, more weird, but too much of this book feels pro forma for me to really love it.

Bujold stretches her legs away from interstellar thrillers and into a little psychodrama. Miles' "evil" clone Mark is back, and he starts by borrowing the Dendarii Mercenaries for a mission to dispense some indiscriminate justice on the Jackson Whole clone-immortality business. The commando raid goes wrong, Miles' rescue mission goes even more wrong, and when the dust settles, Miles Vorkosigan is (mostly) dead and missing in action, and Mark has a lot of explaining to do to all the people that he's hurt.

The second act, on Barrayar, is some of the best stuff that I've seen from Bujold, as Mark tries to find his own identity while dealing with an alien culture, and come to terms with his parents Cordelia and Aral. Cordelia Vorkosigan is who author insert characters want to be when they grow up (in a good way). Lazarus Long and Jubal Harshaw are irritatingly smug pikers.

Unfortunately, the third act is not as strong. Mark embarks on a rescue mission to recover Miles-or his body. This goes poorly, and Mark is captured and tortured by a very unpleasant sadist. This isn't the first time that sex, torture, and violence has come up in the series, and like in Shards of Honor, I don't buy it as natural part of the story. Not to seriously analyze authors, but Bujold seems to like breaking her protagonists, and with Miles putting his life together, she needed to introduce Mark as New Xtreme Miles. I don't mind grimness where it fits: Reynold's Revelation Space has war criminals torturing each other against a backdrop of extinction machines wiping out humanity, and I love it. But somehow that sort of arbitrary sadism doesn't fit into the Vorkosigan universe.

In the middle of the book, Cordelia describes Miles as a knight-errant. The Vorkosigan books have a romantic heart. I guess the idea is to make dragons for our heroes to slay, but scarier than any dragon is a dedicated, resourceful, and dangerous human being with goals utterly opposed to your own. Miles Vorkosigan makes a great protagonist because of his energy, his ability to inspire, and his total disregard for the norms of civilized behavior when it suits him. For a book that plays with the idea of 'mirroring' as motif, Mirror Dance misses a chance to create an antagonist capable of looking back at our heroes.

Hammond's book is probably the strongest general introduction to Boyd, so it'd be just like me to read the introduction last, after the general biography (Coram's Boyd), the academic analysis of OODA loop theory (Osinga's Science, Strategy, and War), and the application to business (Richard's Certain to Win). This book is an intellectual biography, tracing the development of Boyd's career from fighter pilot and the author of the Aerial Attack Study, to formulator of Energy-Maneuverability and one of the inspirations behind the F-15 and F-16, to the last third of his career, and the search for a grand strategic synthesis via the OODA loop and an unpublished presentation, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, along with the reform a hopelessly gold plated military procurement system.

Hammond was one of Boyd's confidants in the latter part of Boyd's life, a partner in long late-night phone conversations, a bouncing board for ideas, and a reviewer of scientific concepts. He paints a loving, almost hagiographic portrait of a brilliant unconventional thinker, the very antithesis of a USAF company man who won again and again by having the data and facts, against the politics of mediocrity. However, Boyd suffered greatly for his efforts: He retired on a colonel's pension and refused more than a token paycheck, and that only so he could maintain his Pentagon access. The military reform movement broke down in political disarray with the end of the Cold War. Modern strategists talk about the OODA loop all over the place, largely due to Hammond's book, but real strategic thinking is a rare bird.

The Art of Wargaming is a fascinating book, a compendium of advice and key questions that remains relevant almost 30 years later. Perla is an academic who designs and runs professional wargames for the Naval War College, and an ardent hobbyist gamer who can speak about the difference between Avalon Hill and SPI games and the biases of various trade publications. Perla (likely, I can't say for sure) wrote this book as an academic career building block, to bulwark up a small professional wargaming community in his interest, and a direct response to Allan's War Games. In many ways, the books compliment each other. Perla has a narrower focus on US Navy wargaming and an agenda to push, but he also has much deeper knowledge and clear perspective.

The first third of the book is a history of wargames, stretching from Sun Tzu and various European forms of "battle chess", to classic Prussian General Staff kriegspiel, to the heydey of American hobby wargaming in the 60s and 70s, as well as the Naval Electronic Warfare Simulator, a 60s era mainframe monstrosity that let virtual fleet clash in real time. Allan has a better view of seminar gaming and RAND's political simulations, but Perla can talk about the hobby, and the relatively simple Avalon Hill games against the "monsters" that SPI made, and how most games are rarely played, or played solo.

The second and third sections concern Perla's perspective as a game designer, and the role that wargames can play in a professional environment. Wargames are distinct from training exercises, which are tightly constrained to speed learning the proper execution of necessary skills, and operations research, which seek analytic mathematical models. Rather, a wargame is a sequence of decisions made by players, under pressures of time and imperfect information, with rule-bounded consequences, in order to develop the intangible strategic skills of leadership. A wargame is a conversation between its developers and its players, and the most important question is "why": why did the players make their decisions; why did the designers embed these assumptions.

Perla includes several lists of questions to help guide vital debriefings (I refuse to call the post-wargame discussion a 'hot washup') and game design. These lists seem like enumerated common sense, which is high praise. I have to say that Perla and I share many biases as gamers, even if we come from entirely different gaming traditions, in preferring games that abstract away the "weeds" in favor of key decisions, and which look towards the player's process as the key element of gameplay, as long as outcomes are not distinctly immersion breaking in anachronism. Though he has a grognard's disdain for TSR and the goblins and elves of fantasy roleplaying games, he seems the acme of his ambition as the commander's viewpoint game: fully encompassing the fog of war and uncertainty in action, and predicting a bright future for computer aided gaming tools.

I do wish that Perla had written a little more on applications, provided a deconstruction of a few games, or more examples of how he'd build a game to his specifications. The futurism is well... predicting the future is hard, and this book came out a few years before Real Time Strategy emerged as a genre, or before eurogames revitalized board-games for adults. But one of the advantages of the lost time is that Perla isn't thinking about the debates in realism and interfaces and fun in the same terms we are, and that in some sense he's closer to the important issues of information, decision, and action (shades of the OODA loop there) than we are today.

I'd love to see what he thinks of Command: Modern Air Naval Operations as a computerized version of what he does for a living, or of the COIN games (A Distant Plain, Fire in the Lake, etc) as modern representations of asymmetric warfare, or of the Paxgames community. And given that last I googled, he's still around, I may do that.

Pork Chop Hill is an oral account of a month long rolling battle towards the end of the Korean War, a series of brutal night infantry engagements around hilly outposts. S.L.A. Marshall based his book on immediate oral histories, debriefing the survivors of entire companies right after events happened, and then reconstructing a timeline. What emerges is a scattered and desperate narrative. Men alone in the dark, grenades and automatic weapons going off all around them, unreliable lines back to lifesaving artillery batteries, sudden snapshot violence and trance-like states of total exhaustion. Marshall pushes his hobby horses here: That only about 1-in-5 soldiers directly takes action in combat, and that better training and small arms are vital to saving lives.

On the plus side, this is a very candid portrayal of warfare. These are inexperienced men in dangerous situations, and many men panic, freeze, and die, even as some exhibit extraordinary heroism. Dislike of the KATUSA's (Koreans's attached to US Army units is balanced by frank admiration for the Ethiopian contingent to the UN mission. While the people are real, there is barely any characterization beyond 'grenadier' or 'manned a Browning machine-gun', and the writing is as choppy and confusing as the battle itself.

Rex Stout is one of those classic authors of detective fiction that's worth revisiting in modern times. Starting with this book in 1934, the morbidly obese genius Nero Wolfe solves crimes from his parlor, while his man Archie dashes around New York in a high performance roadster, interviewing witnesses and collecting evidence. Come for dazzling plot twists and leaps of intuition, stay for the word-play and sarcastic relationship between Wolfe and Archie.