Goodwin examines the character and greatness of Abraham Lincoln through his relationship with a group of men who he beat out for the Republican nomination in 1860, and who eventually became his cabinet. It's fascinating to see how an unlettered backwoods lawyer became the defining political figure of the 20th century, and how Lincoln used empathy, honesty, and forgiveness to outmanuever his opponents. The "team of rivals" metaphor doesn't quite hold through, as the team only became effective once Lincoln established his moral century and dominance over the cabinet. They seemed to fight more with him than with each other. Compared to Battle Cry of Freedom this book is a little light on the history, focusing instead on these great men of the age and their ambitions. Still, a fascinating and important popular history.

ISIS: A History is a strongly sourced, objective account of the rise, personnel, and characteristics of the world's most infamous terrorist group. It's also a poorly edited mass that requires a lot of prior knowledge of the field, and could use at least two more passes to find some actual structure.

Gerges investigates the continuity and change between ISIS and previous Jihadi groups, like Al Qaeda in Iraq. ISIS focuses on the "near enemy" of Shiites and insufficiently devout Sunnis instead of the "far enemy" of the US and the Israel. Thanks to a complete collapse in State authority caused by the Syrian Civil War and Iraq's corrupt and sectarian government, ISIS expanded from a hunted band to a Caliphate dominating millions of people in a medieval nightmare. Gerges and his graduate assistants do the best possible job tracing the rise of ISIS's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the propaganda, but the man is still largely a cipher.

Gerges describes ISIS as theocratic plagiarists, making little advancement to Salafi-Jihadist thinking, but he doesn't really explain what that thinking is, or the importance of establishing of the Caliphate in the kind of utopian Muslim thinking that characterizes Jihad. From a conventional polisci perspective, it's true that ISIS provides basic government services (water, sewage, schools, police, etc) in areas that Iraq and Syria have abandoned, but the same could be said of the Taliban, and the Taliban hasn't attracted tens of thousands of foreign fighters, or routed professional armies. Gerges claims that ex-Baathist officers in the upper ranks contributed to ISIS taking Mosul, but I need more evidence for strategic thinking from the people who brought you the Iraq-Iran War.

Obviously, there's a lot about ISIS that is simply unknowable to the West, because of their tendency to behead journalists and other outsiders. But I found Graeme Wood's 2015 article in The Atlantic a much more coherent introduction to the organization, that if less detailed, is far more revealing.

Cordwainer Smith/Dr. Paul Linebarger was an undoubted genius of science fiction, a visionary writer who plotted out over 15,000 years of radical history under the rule of the Instrumentality, by turns technocratic elites, corrupt and decadent overlords, and deeply moral saviors. His stories touch on love, pain, and the almost-human lives of the underpeople, animals turned into slaves so that true humans may live of life of leisure and near immortality.

Some of the stories are breathtaking masterpieces: "Scanners Live in Vain", "The Game of Rat and Dragon", The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal", and "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" are all first-rank pieces of short fiction. The thing is that the rest of the stories, many of them longer, leave me rather cold, as they wander through Smith's meditations on morality and the human condition and experimentation with non-Western styles. But the four stories I mentioned are brilliant torches. Read them.

The Shadow of the Torturer is a masterpiece of fantasy, a dark and lyrical journey of honor and betrayal. Severian is an apprentice torturer in the Citadel, a boy being inculcated into the mysteries of his guild and the service due their "clients" when he falls in love with the nobly born Thelca. Just after his ascension to the rank of Journeyman, the young Severian makes a key decision, forclosing the torture due his love by handing her a knife. Dishonored, he is sent out into the world with the legendary sword Terminus Est to make his way to the far city of Thrax where he will take up the profession of headsman. He meets strange and dangerous people along the way, falls in love, fights, is betrayed, and so on.

Proper fantasy seems defined by a certain sense of unreality, the idea that "so above so below", and Wolfe's language captures the dreamlike sense that the story is a psychological mirror of his protagonist, while also maintaining the dense detritus of the post-apocalyptic, high-tech, dying Earth setting. There's a particularly gripping moment where Severian finds himself facing a picture of a man wearing a golden helm, a gray desert reflecting in it, and you realize this is a photo from the Apollo program, reduced to nothing more than myth. It's beautiful, and strange, and terrifying.

So at some point in the first book Severian came into possession of the powerful gem the Claw of the Conciliator. He continues his peregrinations towards Thrax, with old companions and one new one, alternately killing with his sword and healing with his gem, as he caught up in the hidden war between the ruler of the world, the Autarch, and the great rebel Vodalus.

Where the first book felt like a waking dream, this one abandons the sense of "waking" for full on fantasy. It was a bit too much for me, as Severian wanders his way through lost hypertech traps and treasure rooms, reacting on impulse rather than by any sort of plan.

I'll probably keep up with the series, but at this point I feel no real urge to.

Brigade size actions are difficult to write about. Too big to gain a really intimate portrait of the men, they're also too small to reveal much strategy. Murphy does his best, focusing on the 173rd Airborne Brigade in the desperate fighting around Dak To in November of 1967. Heavy North Vietnamese forces were entrenched on a group of hills in the Central Highlands, and the Sky Soldiers of the 173rd were brought in to the destroy them. The ensuing close combat was vicious: NVA bunkers nearly negated American firepower, and it came down to riflemen in dense jungle and steep hills, with mortars falling all about. The men fought and died for each other over a set of hills designated solely by number. The result was a microcosm of Westmoreland's attrition strategy. Several of the NVA regiments involved were wrecked, able to do little more than reorganize in Laos for a year, but the 173rd also had its guts ripped out. The terrain meant nothing.

Murphy does his best to depict them men, although we get only a paragraph or two for most of them. It's difficult to track the overall course of the campaign. The closest comparison I can think of is to this book is We Were Soldiers Once... and Young, and while it's unfair, We Were Soldiers Once is far superior.

Before the Incal is everything I wanted The Incal to be, a delightful romp through the deranged and decadent Cityshaft with John Difool, and much less "it was spaaaaace Jesus the whole time". The young Difool bounces between acts of crime and charity, experiencing the banned emotion "love", falling in with an obsolete Bible-quoting robot cop, and foiling the machinations of the Technopope and repeatedly clone President. His investigation, into where the babies of prostitutes are disappearing, uncovers a scandal of galactic proportions that has him leading psycho-anarchists against the news media in a desperate battle for survival.

There's one quote which I think gets the essence of the story. "We know one thing: The babies have their brains injected with sperm and ova from two non-putrefied ancient saints... Then they're frozen and sent to the Aristo-Maternity Ward... So if we want to resolve this mystery, that's where we have to start!"

Yeah, that's the one thing I know. Strange story by Jodorowsky, great artwork by Janjetov, awesome book.

There's something powerful and elemental about portraiture; about meeting another person's gaze across time and space. Similarly, the process itself, the complex dance between the subject, the artist, their actual appearance, what they desire to appear, and the chance that the image captures something of their essence, is also fascinating and powerful. And when portraiture becomes systematized, as it does in the National Portrait Gallery, that adds all the complications of public notability.

There's a great deal of potential in this work. It's a fascinating topic and Schama has the art historical background to pull it off. But only a few sections really gel as a cohesive whole; the first chapter on power, the last chapter on ordinary Britons, some of the asides on caricature and miniature paintings which were carried as a constant reminder of a beloved one. Basically, for an American, what this book needed was more structure and context on about 200 years of British history from 1750 to 1950. I consider myself reasonably well-read and an amateur historian, but I only know enough to sketch an outline of this period, and Schama is so caught up in breathy gossip that I lost track of what he was gossiping about. What could be insightful tends towards a ramble through the British Gallery.

This book probably also suffered because of my tendency to marathon through whatever I'm reading. At a chapter a day, the tone might grate less. Still, lots of beautiful plates and fun words, even if the choice of images in a chapter can be somewhat frustrating.

The Craft series began with dizzyingly cool worldbuilding: what if magic was like law and finance? But at it's heart it always been about choices, and this prequel novel focuses on the choices of two veterans of the godswars. Elayne Kevarian was a teenage killer who saved the life of a man in the last battle, and is now a lawyer-at-large for the skeletal King in Red who rules Desidal Lex. The man she saved, Temoc, was once last of the Eagle Knights, and is now a husband and father. When protests over an urban renewal project in a slowly dying residential district threaten to rise to open violence, Elayne and Temoc put aside old hatreds to try and bargain a compromise solution.

It all seems to be holding, until the developer behind it all is shot, a cop kills a kid, and protests turn into riots and a camp turns into a siege zone. Elayne and Temoc have to decide where their loyalties lie. Elayne sides with the protesters against her boss, but (spoilers) comes away more or less unharmed, and Temoc (if you've read Two Serpents Rise) picks the sacrificial knife back up and restarts the old wars as a hunted terrorist.

Good, but not great, this is a prequel that doesn't grab at my favorite bits of the setting, which is the way the Craft dehumanizes people, and the cutting little contracts Craftsmen make with each other. Temoc's old school Mesoamerican death cult thing is kinda meh. Definitely read these books in publication order.

An edited volume broadly critical of Participatory Rural Appraisal and related "bottom-up" methods for involving marginalized communities in development projects, this book extends a multi-pronged Foucauldian analysis that shows both the utility and limits of this type of critique. The short version is that rather than being "localized", "community-driven", or whatever other buzzword PRA planners use to describe their work as superior to older top-down state and World Bank development models, PRA actually has embedded within it a host of assumptions about the boundaries of communities, the ability of the essentially performative nature of PRA exercises to produce knowledge, and represent another model of modernity and outsider NGOs values, rather than the community itself.

These are good critiques, but the limits, as with much Foucauldian analysis, fall in the "so what" question: Power circulates at a micro-capilarily level; the discourse of empowerment fails to match the material facts of being empowered; PRA constructs its own set of beneficiaries of development, which may not match the local's models; so what? If we care to act in the world, we perforce become involved in instruments of power. Pointing out their existence does not actually make a statement about them. As the introduction points out, the editors chose the deliberately provocative word TYRANNY because they believe that the basically unverified and unaccountable distribution of power engendered by participatory methods is unjust, but they have little vision of what justice actually looks like in their world. There's are interesting perspectives here about how PRA fails, or merely reinscribes modernity, from a variety of scholars and disciplines, but ultimately it fails to make a statement beyond 'thing bad'.

I will note that it is funny that in 2013, 12 years after this book was published, a new edited volume came out titled Participation - From Tyranny to Transformation: Exploring New Approaches to Participation in Development. The revolt against orthodoxy becomes the new orthodoxy becomes the revolt, and on and on.