On the upside, The Hangman's Daughter nails 17th century Germany in a way that say, 1632 absolutely did not. The world of this small German town, its dense web of rumor, honor, misdeeds, piety, and magic felt very alive and very real. The protagonists were more 'modern' in the sense they wanted evidence for their actions, to marry for love, and the like, but they were not just 20th century attitudes implanted in the 17th century.

The story concerns a series of murdered children, and allegations of witchcraft which could tear this city apart. It's up to the hangman, Jakob Kuisl, the physician's son, and the hangman's daughter Magdalena, to get to the bottom of the matter before Walpurgisnach, and an innocent women dies. Another review described the plot as a "scooby-doo", and it's basically that. Old men, (admittedly lethal) scares, and a fair amount of money at the bottom of everything. I thought the translation was basically fine, and that the problems with the novel were more structural.

The Pentagon's Brain is a decent overview of DARPA's long history of being 10-20 years ahead of the technological curve, that unfortunately trends towards the most sensational angle on DARPA's operations, rather than developing a more nuanced understanding of the complexities involved in military R&D. Jacobsen lays out the book in four broad arcs:

The early Cold War focused on hydrogen bombs and rockets. The Vietnam War saw a shift towards gimcrack gadgets, some of which were highly successful (the M-16), some which had massive unintended consequences (Agent Orange), and some which were billion dollar failures (McNamara's electronic fence). Early attempts to understand the minds of Vietnamese villagers are almost played for laughs, with nuclear physicists overseeing social science programs. The late Cold War saw some of DARPA's biggest successes, with the ARPANET and stealth aircraft, but also a diversion into biological warfare defense that has yet to pay any concrete dividends. The post 9/11 era is dominated by fiascos. The public collapse of the Orwellian Total Information Awareness program, which would sluice through electronic data for terrorist signatures, and which was publicly shut down, but privately classified and divided out to the NSA, CIA, an FBI. Enhancing Human Performance is use to convey Frankensteinian fears of super-soldiers and mind control, with little discussion of what was actually deployed in 15 years (basically nothing). The Human Terrain Team project is an unethical boondoggle. Robotics are one bright spot in recent years.

Jacobsen is best when she sticks to her sources, getting old war stories out of 90 year old atomic physicists and the like. She's weaker at detailed documentary analysis, but the synthetic overview of almost 60 years of R&D breakthroughs is a useful first stop.

I can't deal with the big stuff, so let's do the small stuff. This is a pretty competent thriller, with a Machiavellian murderer, a heroic detective, and a good woman caught between the two of them. There's sex and death and high stakes confrontations. I'm pretty sure I read like five novels by Ken Follett with pretty much the exact same plot. Buy it at the airport, leave it at the airport, feel no shame.

Except for the big stuff, which is that this was written by TV "journalist" and serial sexual harasser Bill O'Reilly. And this is where it gets super weird. See, the protagonist Shannon Michaels is basically Bill O'Reilly's id, an Irish-American TV journalist who gets a story stolen from him by a bigger name at the network in Buenos Aires in 1982 (something that actually happened to O'Reilly), and who then goes on a rampage of revenge against the people who wrecked his career, using his IRA training (yes, really) to kill them in ironic ways without leaving any evidence. Stopping Shannon is Tommy O'Mally, an Irish-American cop with a shitty ex-wife, who's basically another layer of O'Reilly's id. And between them this super idealized East Coast prima donna, slumming it as the crime reporter at the New York Globe.

This novel is pretty good when it sticks to what O'Reilly knows, the backstabbing politics of TV news. Whenever a woman shows up... I have seen aliens depicted with more psychological realism and understanding than the female characters in this book. Good ones exist to be seduced by the powerful men, bad ones are ugly, crazy, probably secret lesbians, and deserve to die. A decent book, that is unintentionally hilarious in retrospect.

Who doesn't love a rogue? This collection focuses on thieves, con-arts, private thugs, monster hunters, and all manner of scoundrels. Stories range from high fantasy to straight modern detective stories. There are enough masters of the genre for anyone to find something that they love in here. I think Joe Abercrombie kills the opening, with a story about a package being stolen from a series of couriers, and the anthology is off running. Scott Lynch and Michael Swanwick have the next best stories, but they're all pretty strong, with the exception of a hard-boiled small-town Texas punch out by Joe Lansdale, a story by Connie Willis, and GRRM's own contribution, a history in Westeros that leads up to a massive civil war.

Lots of great authors and great stories. I just wish they'd included at least a little cyberpunk or straight scifi. Fantasy is good, but citing Han Solo in the intro and then not having a single galactic smuggler just seems a little odd.

Barrington offers a thin guide to the business of consulting, and to my eye she seems more concerned with the financial side of things: structuring a start-up consulting firm so any implosions are contained, making sure that clients understand the value that you're delivering, and that your accounting is reasonable. There's less on developing a market, or going from zero to something. Not sure it's worth what I paid for it, but free advice is often worth about the same. A solid reference, if nothing else.

Sgt. Cornett had an exceptional military career, centered around multiple tours in Vietnam. The son of a military family, he enlisted to get a choice of assignments rather than whatever the draft tossed his way. A good record in bootcamp got him through Special Forces Medic training. He didn't fit in with Special Forces culture, and after bouncing around the rear area teaching new troops medic techniques, he wound up with the "Foul Dudes" Lurps, a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol for the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne. Cornett and the Foul Dudes got into a ton of trouble: heavy combat, heavy drinking, smoking Marijuana and worse. It's amazing Cornett even remembers anything that happened, given his substance consumption. Cornett got into tons of trouble off the battlefield, from an annualed marriage to a local beauty queen, to an arrest for drug trafficking after he hit on a waitress at a cop bar in Los Angeles with a trunk full of Vietnamese marijuana. The book picks up again when he joins Project Phoenix, and gets assigned to Montagnard villages, and a Vietnamese Ranger company operating out of Dalat. Cornett winds up marrying the sister-in-law of his commander, Captain Phongm but his American commanders won't let him see his pregnant wife. After she miscarries, Cornett fragged the XO, with the confession "Yeah I blew him up. He was an asshole." The officer survived, Cornett served a few years in the brig, and then returned to the Army as an NCO, competition wrestler, and parachute team demonstrator.

This is a big rambling collection of warstories, and that's its strength and weakness. Cornett gives it to you straight, but the book could benefit from some organization, and maybe a little more insight.

I read this book hoping that it might serve as an anchor for a class on technological change. I cannot in good conscience advise this book for anyone. Hobsbawn offers an account of an industrial revolution that is almost absent of technology, or of change. Rather he describes Britain's preeminance as a result of its martime power, leveraging historical dominance in textiles to absolutely superiority in all manners of shipping and goods.

Britain undoubtedly won the first industrial revolution of water-powered spinning jennies and automated looms, but fared less well in the second industrial revolution of steam-engines and railroads, losing in relatives terms to America and Germany. For a supposed Marxist, Hobsawm seems fuzzy on the generational shift from rural agricultural laborers to an urban and industrial proletariat, or the relationship between scientific knowledge and technological progress.

Decent charts, and a mass of words that signify little and explain less.

Maybe I just don't like economists.

So this is it?

There's a quote that I think sums up the series pretty well, from one of the characters in the first book, something along the lines of "Who cares about the Obelisks? Just another deadciv ruin."

The story runs on three parallel tracks. Two are familiar, one follow Essun as she journeys with the comm of Castrima across the wastes, and towards her destiny of recapturing the moon and ending the Seasons. A second follows Nassum and Schaffa, heading towards a similar journey and apotheosis. And the third is a prequel starring Hoa, a child bred to be the initiator of a great arcane engine, and who's rebellion starts the war between mankind and a living Evil Earth.

The precision of the language from the first book is kicked over in favor of densely woven descriptions of crystals and magic and chaos, burying the reader in a rockslide of details. The clinical, exacting webs of pain and retribution are tangled into generalized outrage against the universe, and a new system of power that demands sacrifice by transmuting sorcerers like Essun and Nassum into rock.

The first book in the series had an almost magical tension between circumstance and individuality, and an ironic and acid ethos: your story doesn't matter vs one person can break the world; just do what is necessary vs necessity is never just. Great writing is ineffable, and the second book slipped and the third one just fell flat for me, for reasons in the characters, settings, and words. It's okay, I just wish the whole thing ended in a better epiphany.

Kadushin synthesizes an entire career of sociological research into a textbook that'd be useful for upper division undergraduates or early-stage graduate students. He lays out the mathematical underpinnings and long history of social network analysis in a way that provides rigorous background for the popularized work of Putnam (Bowling Alone) and Gladwell (The Tipping Point).

Where Kadushin excels is in critically thinking about real networks from a sociological and psychological standpoint. Real social networks are never as randomized as mathematical models assume. Their sorting by self-similarity, influence, and small-world rules means that they are inherently unequal, and tend to benefit centrally placed leaders and extremely charismatic people who bridge dense worlds over the average person. Kadushin's skepticism is a necessary antidote to naive optimism about the power of networks and vague notions of social capital to serve as an unalloyed good. A final chapter on ethics distills the lessons of a career about how social network research is especially risky in compromising people.

**SPOILERS AHEAD**

With The Delirium Brief, Stross reaches an aggressive midgame of The Laundry series. The past five books were setting pieces on the board, moving pawns, feint with a knight or bishop. Now, he savagely uses those pieces, cutting down whole swaths of the setting. Expect to see all your favorites from the series to show up, don't expect them to survive, at least not with all their parts...

In the wake of the CASE NIGHTMARE RED incursion in Yorkshire, the Laundry is very much blown and very much in everyone's bad graces. With thousands dead, and billions of pounds of property damage, it's hard to point out that hey, without us you'd be talking megadeaths. The situation is so bad that Bob Howard is running PR, since everyone else is too disgraced. The Laundry might have a full arsenal of banishment rounds and SCORPION SCARE basilisk guns, but they're no match for a new breed of cultists, chanting horrific words like "privatization", "outsourcing", "reorganization", "efficiency", and "ISO compatible."

Yes, friends, The Laundry is summarily shuttered on a Monday morning, pending a new occult intelligence agency provided by an American company, Golden Promise Security. Golden Promise is an arm of the Church of the New Flesh, the baddies of The Apocalypse Codex, who somehow survived being stranded on a lifeless planet with a dead elder god. The Reverend Raymond Schiller has a new parasite that's even creepier, and a new plan to suborn the British government, either in service or in fear of whatever nasty has taken over the United States.

The first two thirds are a slow burn of bureaucratic intrigue and contingency plans, but the last section explodes in kinetic and arcane violence, as the underground remnants of The Laundry throw in everything they have against Schiller, including making a bad alliance with a Lesser Evil Elder God, on the basis that the thing that just wants to be adulated is better than the one that wants to eat your soul.

As always, it's a pleasure to be back with Bob, and the whole Mahogany Row or Deeply Scary Sorcerers finally makes sense. I actually enjoy Stross's cutting remarks on bureaucracy and the drugs-and-sex-and-corruption at the top echelons of society. Nobody gets mad like a Scottish Socialist. That said, I feel like this book could have used another edit for style, and a more judicious use of call-backs. I like this series a lot, and I often thought "who was that, and when they did first show up?"