I'm terrible at poker. Not wanting to embarrass myself at the next poker night, I got Gordon's book. This is perhaps a little more advanced that what I could use, but it's a quick and readable introduction to poker strategy, and the art of imperfect information, livened up with examples from the table. Gordon provides the basics of "tight-and-aggressive" strategy, and why it wins most of the time, along with the bigger picture of tournament games and poker psychology. The mathematical parts of the book, on pot odds and quickly figuring the odds of your hand against an assumed AA or AK hand, as well as avoiding common statistical mistakes, is a little rough, and will take me another reread.

If there's any criticism that can be fairly levied against The Little Green Book is that it's become so popular that the 'meta' of the game has moved to take advantage of it. This book won't make you a star, but hopefully it'll keep me from embarrassing myself next Thursday.

Broad knows what's up with missile defense. As the New York Times science correspondent during the 80s, he was close to many of the principles in various stabs at Star Wars during the Reagan administration. The prime mover was Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, founder of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and the conservative doyen of nuclear scientific clientage. For all his successes, Teller had a checkered record as a scientist. The mainstream academic community had turned against him in the 1950s over his betrayal of Oppenheimer during the Red Scare. He hadn't made a major scientific contribution on the order of his Manhattan Project peers. And the public regarded him as a Dr. Strangelove-esque madman who's plans for peaceful hydrogen bombs had come to nothing.

In this climate, Teller grabbed onto the scientifically advanced bomb-pumped X-Ray laser as a way to defeat the Soviet nuclear arsenal, shield America from mutually assured destruction, and ensure his place in the history books. Theoretically, the X-ray laser could amplify an H-bomb into beams of coherent light billions of times brighter than the blast itself, shooting 100,000s of independently targetable beams at a nuclear strike. Theoretically. Engineering this thing would be a nightmare, as the whole apparatus existed for only a nanosecond next to an exploding hydrogen bomb.

Teller's optimism, vision, and passion were his greatest assets as a scientific leader, but in this case they lead to his downfall, as Teller oversold Reagan on the potential of the X-ray laser. The narrative mostly follows Roy Woodruff, the nuclear scientist in charge of the X-ray laser program, and his attempts to properly inform the Reagan administration and the public about the serious limits and uncertainties around Star Wars in the face of Teller's PR campaign and scorched earth bureaucratic warfare.

The story of Star Wars is bigger than just Teller and Woodruff, but Broad's framing is essentially correct, and provides a gripping and technically accurate account of some of the most fraught science politics in recent memory.

The Caine Mutiny is a powerful and sentimental tour de force of a novel, about command, responsibility, and becoming a man. Willie Keith is a wealthy dilettante, a Princetonian pianist who's highest calling in life is composing witty couplets at parties. To avoid the draft, he signs up as officer in the US Navy, and after a checkered journey through the academy finds himself aboard the WW1 era USS Caine, a garbage scow of a destroyer-mindsweeper. Their first captain, a genial screwoff and expert shiphandler, is promoted and replaced by Captain Queeg, a petty disciplinarian who immediately becomes the monumental tormentor of Keith's life and the other junior officers. As the Caine conducts escorts and other sundry errands around the Pacific, Queeg's abuses and irrationalities mount, until the exec, Lt. Maryk, relieves him of command at the height of a typhoon under Article 184. Maryk, Keith, and Keefer (an aspiring novelist) are court-martialled, but are acquitted only through the brilliant legal manueverings of the lawyer Greenwald, who badgers Queeg into a paranoid breakdown on the witness stand, and subsequently states that the intellectual Keefer manipulated the whole thing. Men like Queeg are necessary because peace time naval service is tedious and mediocre-that they would be promoted into positions of authority in war is what saves the rest of us while we train to fight.

I have to disagree with this judgment about the necessity of Queeg. Command may be hard and lonely, but Queeg reveals himself as obsessed with minutia, repeatedly refusing to take responsibility for his actions and his command, disproportionate and retaliatory to his subordinates, and incapable of engaging effectively with any sort of external reality. He may not be a clinical psychopath, but any system which would give him command is insane. A man like Queeg is a weak link, to be taken out of the chain for the safety of all.

The main plot is bookended by Willie's pursuit of a girl, which is sentimental and mawkish, and seems almost entirely arranged for him to overcome his prejudices and the inertia of his life. Otherwise, this is a stylish and compelling book, one that stretches to the full length of the story with grace and elegance. Wouk served on a very similar destroyer minesweeper during World War 2, and the authenticity is absolute. I'm thrilled I read it.

Trapped returns to a primitive Earth, set off from the main League of Peoples setting. The plot is a rousing adventure, as five teachers at a school go off on a quest to find a missing student, and run into criminals, powerful Spark Lords, and a god-like alien. The main plot is fun enough, a light heart raconteur with your standard D&D party that soon turns into a bloodbath. The narrator, Philemon Abu Dhubhai, and his fellow teachers, are well drawn as caring people all too aware of their smallness of their lives against their ambitions. Having been called on, they give it their all.

What I didn't like was the implications for the setting. Earth has become infested by magic, a shell of alien nanites that can be manipulated by lucky and trained adepts. There's a dramatic increase in power from the smart doors of the third book, or the intelligent clouds of the fifth. Nanotech can and will do anything. The main plot revolves around an alien called a Lucifer, a nanite hivemind that has gone insane and is being rehabilitated by the Spark Lords, which I just could not bring myself to care about.

Murder by the Book is one of the later, and better loved Nero Wolfe mysteries. I thought it was just alright, as Nero and Archie stumble through a leadless case, where three murders are linked only by a pseudonymous manuscript and its unknown contents. With little to go on, our heroes badger the staff of a small law-firm that employed the first victim, setting an elaborate trap to flush out the murder. The climax, which hinges on a confession that contradicts the confessor's prior actions, is quite moving, but the rest is Archie bumping around New York and a rainy and placeless Los Angeles.

Shadows Linger picks up six years after the first book, with the Black Company sweeping out rebels along the Eastern edge of The Lady's Empire, an expanding force dealing with increasing malaise. They're suddenly called to Juniper, a frozen city at the northern edge of the world, with a problem: The massive and magical black castle that overlooks the city is growing, and no one know why.

Half the story follows Croaker and the other men of the company, the other half follows Shed, a down-at-the-heels innkeeper in Juniper, trying to stay one step ahead of his debts. A hard customer, Raven (yes, that Raven), has a way to make easy money, selling corpses to the creatures in the black castle. As it turns out, the black castle is a portal back to the Dominator, and he's just a few more bodies from returning. Croaker and the rest have to act fast to stop this ultimate evil, and to conceal their own treachery in hiding Raven, the White Rose, and a mass of vital papers from their own boss.

Its more atmospheric and action packed fantasy, but there's something off about Shadows Linger. Shed is entirely despicable as a protagonist, the final quarter is overpacked, and even though I know I read this book before, years ago, I couldn't remember a single plot point or scene, while The Black Company stuck with me.

The White Rose is the most traditional Black Company so far. Six years on from Shadows Linger, the Company has been reduced to a bodyguard for Darling, hiding in a secret base in the supremely strange Plain of Fear, a desert guarded by walking trees, talking rocks, poison reefs of land-coral, and flying whales. Croaker is making little progress on the documents that might contain The Lady's true name when a series of mysterious letters arrive, describing the efforts of the sorcerer Bomansz over 150 years ago which freed The Lady and the other Taken.

This launches Croaker and the Company's wizards into a journey to the Barrowlands, where a flooding river is set to free The Dominator, and a desperate alliance with The Lady. Various shades of grey unite against the pure evil of The Dominator and his super-strong and near unkillable agent in the world.

Cook is in fine form as the various forces collide, and Croaker is forced to choose where his loyalties lie again and again. The denizens of the Plains of Fear and the guardians of the Barrowlands are fantastically strange and cool. A worthy end to the first trilogy.

Harris presents a detailed overview of his own work in psychology (along with a survey of related literature), that explore the ways in which imagination and an understanding of causality and the mental states of others advance in children from about 24 to 60 months. Harris takes a position against Freud and Piaget, who felt that imagination was opposed to realism, and that an excess of imagination was a sign of a failure to understand and adapt to the real world, to demonstrate that even very young children can partake in fictive stances while understanding that they are fictional. Furthermore, several scales of imagination at different age groups appear to be strongly correlated with each other, along with linguistic development and social skills.

Harris provides a useful corrective to older theories in developmental psychology, but while I agree with his premise that imagination is a fundamental human capacity, I'm not sure that the evidence is strong enough to make his conclusions necessary.

Van Creveld states in his introduction that the purpose of this book is to advance the serious study of warfare as an integral and universal part of the human experience, and to defend a long military tradition from the pernicious attacks of its enemies: pacifists, feminists, and pernicious neo-Clausewitzian battlespace managers. The result is sweeping, but also uneven and arbitrary.

The book starts quite well, with an examination of the importance of pomp, ritual, and ceremony in military affairs. As it moves on, it becomes clear that Van Creveld's best depth of sources are in the Classical world and the Napoleonic conflicts. World War 1 is mentioned in terms of its suprisingly militaristic poets, even Siegfried Sassoon loved the thrill of life in the trenches, and anything past 1940 seems to disappear from view. All examples of tribal warfare come from Fadiman's 1982 An Oral History of Tribal Warfare: The Meru of Mt. Kenya. The final chapters on collapses in military culture resulting from mob violence, roboticism, loss of bravery, and feminism are "old man yells at cloud" bad.

I'm someone inclined to be favorable to Van Creveld's arguments. Just look at my "war" shelf, or the airpower pictures I post weekly on Facebook. However, this book is a mess. For an good take on the topic, I strongly recommend Shannon French's The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present.

Perfection is worth waiting for. John Harper used the delay to do more playtesting, polishing his RPG system to a fine sheen. What remains is sleek and stylish game of fantasy scoundrels, searching for the next score in a dark gothic ghost-haunted world. This is a tightly focused masterpiece of game design, that demands that you play by its rules.

The system is elegant. State your intent and roll d6s equal to your action rating. Beg for help from your friends, push yourself, or take a devil’s bargain for more dice. Only the highest result counts. 1-3 is a failure. 4-5 is success with consequences. 6 is success, and multiple 6s are a critical success. Where the game excels is in driving fiction first play. The core gameplay loop involves the player setting their goal and choosing an action. The GM sets the position (controlled, risky, desperate) and the effect (great, standard, limited), the player finds extra dice, you roll, and tick off clocks.

The system has enough bits to communicate difficulty, but is fast and light and gets out of your way, because what this game is really about is making the city of Duskoval and the dangerous lives of scoundrels come alive. Play is divided into three phases. In free play, players wander the city talking to contacts, getting into and out of trouble in a traditional linear RPG style. When they’ve gathered enough information to identify a likely target, the play switches to the Score. Pick one of six plans, fill in a detail, roll Engagement, and hit the ground running in media res to demonstrate that these are professional scoundrels. Rather than tediously planning a heist, players spend Stress to create flashbacks (“of course these are the guards I bribed”, “I memorized the canal schedule and a barge is passing underneath right now”, etc). Finally, in the third section, downtime, players indulge their Vice to recover Stress, work on long-term plans, upgrade their crew and territory, and watch the gangs around them respond. This pacing mechanism, with brief bursts of action interspersed with longer periods of slower work, is an RPG design innovation, and I’m interested to see how the moving parts, between Coin and Reputation and Heat and Stress, all work together.

The setting of Duskovol is mashed together from a bunch of sources, the Dishonored and Thief video games, the Vlad Taltos series, The Lies of Locke Lamora. The result is evocative without being specific. This is a city ruled by cruel and decadent aristocrats, inhabited by downtrodden workers, and infested with criminals and cultists, where the dead linger and forgotten gods lurk around every bend. There’s a district by district break down, but the setting mostly comes through in one sentence descriptions of NPCs and organizations. Lists and tables in fine Gygaxian style provide enough material for a GM to skeleton an adventure, but this is a game that demands that everybody improvise in visualizing and inhabiting the city, rather than specifying everything in advance.

This is a tightly focused game. Reading it, I’m confident that within its wheelhouse it’ll be perfect. The active Google+ community has tons of hacks (and I hacked a much earlier edition for Stross’s The Laundry series). That said, this may not be a game for the faint of heart, and with its mechanics so tied up in pacing and danger, it may not be as flexible as it appears. One-shots are doable, but a lot of the cooler features about crews and downtime won’t come into play.
Compared to earlier editions, the rules for teamwork and leadership are much reduced, probably for the better. On a minus point, there’s a lot of mechanical similarity. A desperate back alley skirmish, binding a hostile ghost, and making contact with a noble at a swanky party are all the same type of action: working down a clock. My personal point of confusion is the Coin stashed away for retirement-the goal of the game-when every bit of narrative around thieves says that your career ends in One Last Job that is too rich to resist, and too dangerous to survive. Still, these are minor gripes for a damn good looking game. Put BitD on the top of your list.