The sequel to Forczyk's Schwerpunkt, Red Steamroller is much the same but for the rest of the war. This book is tilted heavily towards 1943, which seems to get three times as much space as 1944. 1945 is compressed into "and then Stalin ordered Zhukov to take Berlin before reasonable preparations could be made, leading to heavy casualties."

As expected, Forczyk blends impeccable historical data with a tanker's view of operations. His premise is that the Soviets managed to develop a successful combined arms team through 1943, while heavy casualties deprived the Nazis of their initial advantage. The heavy cats (Tigers, Panthers, and a host of tank destroyers) were mechanical failures that limited the fighting ability of the Wehrmacht. Meanwhile, Soviet tanker training was horrifically poor, with limited real-world driving or gunnery practice, let alone tactics. Soviet tankers were not trained how to boresight their guns, a vital step in making sure you hit what you aimed at.

However, I'm not sure that Forczyk's argument about the decline of the panzer division really holds up. Yes, the Nazis never really had the material resources to reconstitute the forces that did the Blitzkrieg, and yeah, the mechanical reliability of the Tiger and Panther was abysmal, but even given the Nazi penchant for inflating statistics, he cites dozens of encounters where a handful of Nazi heavy tanks in a defensive position inflicted massive casualties. Tanks may be strong on the armored offense, but they seem even more powerful on the 'shoot-and-scoot' defense. Having failed to capture Moscow in the initial offensive, I'm not sure that there was a chance of a Nazi victory in the East. A more skillful defense would have increased casualties.

I'm glad I read Forczyk's books, but these are really for the specialist.

1776 is exactly what it says on the cover; a history about the crucial year of the American revolution. 1776 is focus on George Washington and the men around him, following the patriots from their triumph at the siege of Boston, to the bloody expulsion from New York, and the hard trek across New Jersey which ended with the sudden battles of Trenton and Princeton (America-we'll murder you in your sleep on Christmas!).

McCollough, as dean of the American historians, has a keen and sensitive eye in drawing narrative and character from the archives. He finds Washington and his colleagues in a moment of transition, unsure in a task no one alive has ever attempted, failing at time, but always learning from their mistakes and buoyed by the common purpose of independence. There's a lot more to be said about the revolution, but we're lucky to have a book by one of the master historians on this moment.

On Strategy is the cornerstone of the 'revisionist school' of Vietnam War historiography-those who argue that the war was ultimately winnable with a greater degree of military commitment. Summers uses Clausewitz to castigate the civilians responsible for Vietnam, President Johnson and Secretary McNamara's systems analysts, for failing to set objectives with a chance of victory. Army senior leadership is close behind, for failing for the siren lure of counter-insurgency and failing to hold to traditional strategic arts in a nuclear era.

Summers' argument is dressed up in a lot of Clausewitzian jargon, but the core is fairly simply. Vietnam was a war fought in 'cold blood' without a mobilization of the population, which separated the American people from the military mission, as color TV brought the savagery of war to everyone's living rooms for the first time. American posture was a strategic defensive, which require endurance and the hope that the situation of the war will turn in your favor. Tactical successes at Ia Drang, in the Tet Offensive, and the Christmas Bombings were rendered irrelevant by a refusal to bring the war to North Vietnam, and strike directly at their political leadership, their military logistics, or their alliances with China and Russia. American leaders took counsels of their fears of turning the Cold War atomic hot, and bought into North Vietnamese propaganda of a people's war.

In the one sense, Summers isn't wrong. Vietnam was fought without clear objectives beyond the continued existence of the Republic of South Vietnam. But he misses some key points. If War Comes to Long An is accurate, Viet Cong terror and assassinations had decimated the South Vietnamese government long before the main introduction of US troops. As a battalion level officer in Vietnam, Summers should have something to say about the tool of ambush and mines, and the difficulty in bringing communist guerrillas to battle. The American people were not comprehensively mobilized, but it's hard to think of a strategic US interest at issue in Indochina, both in terms of contemporary superpower politics and with the benefit of historical hindsight.

Finally, for the "well if you're so smart, you do it" question, Summers' suggestion for how to fight the war involves a cordon of US troops stretching across Laos from the Vietnamese DMZ through to the border with Thailand, and heavy ongoing air strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong. I can't see this being easy, or avoiding a massive escalation of the Cold War.

My final assessment is that Summers wants to have his cake and eat it to. If Vietnam demanded full American mobilization, it was definitely part of the Cold War and must be seen in terms of DEFCON levels and nuclear risk. If Vietnam is a limited war, then the relatively paucity of American interests in the region against the absolute interests of the North Vietnamese leadership to reunify their country must be accepted. Either way, Summers isn't wrong but he isn't yet right. This is an important book on the Vietnam War, but one that must be read carefully and in context.

The Things They Carried is a tour de force of a book, about war and love and truth and the power of stories. O'Brien chews over his experiences with an infantry platoon in Vietnam from the distance of 20 years, writing about his own moral weakness, the deaths of his friends, and carrying the weight of your life up and down those Indochina hills.

O'Brien chews over war stories, and the difference between the "truth" and his own memories of what happened, if there's a moral lesson to be extracted from the random deaths at the hands of boobytraps, snipers, and American firepower that defined his life, and his career as an author.

I wish I had the words to review this book properly. But I don't. O'Brien is and always will be the first author of the war.

American Rasputin is a story of what happens when an ideologue gets close to the levers of power. Rostow came from humble origins, his parents middle-class Jewish immigrants who were anti-Tsarist first and pro-Socialist second. Rostow rose through Yale, Oxford, and Columbia on the strength of his skills as an academic economist. In World War 2, he served in the OSS, picking targets in Nazi Germany for bombardment, and gaining a healthy respect for the ability of airpower to cripple a nation. In 1960, he published his magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, a major work in development economics, which argued that Communism was pathological, that all countries proceeded towards a liberal democratic capitalist modernity, and that the United States had an obligation to use its preeminence to lift the Third World out of poverty and past communism.

Rostow had been making contact with political figures in the Eisenhower administration, but he had a real alliance with President Kennedy. Rostow was first deputy national security adviser and then head of the State Department planning group, where he began advancing the line that would define his career. North Vietnam was the major problem in American foreign policy, and had to be dealt with using maximum force. Through 1961 and 1962, Rostow was the loudest voice pushing for bombing North Vietnam. When Operation Rolling Thunder kicked off, Rostow demanded bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, and even invasions of Laos and North Vietnam.

Rostow was a canny bureaucratic infighter, and became a close confidant of LBJ through the darkest days of his presidency; hence the "American Rasputin" moniker, given to him by adversary and chief peace negotiator Averell Harriman. Rostow was able to manage LBJ's anxieties about being shown up by Kennedy's whiz kids, castigating those in the administration who had lost confidence in the war. With little formal power, Rostow made few of the actual decisions that mattered, but he carefully managed the available policy options to justify escalation and further bombing.

Rostow faded from public life after leaving office, moving to Austin to head the LBJ School of Public Policy. He never lost his essential contention that the Vietnam War was justified, that more bombing and more troops could have turned the tide, and his theory of economic modernization justified a more aggressive foreign policy. This biography is a fascinating portrait of a proponent of muscular liberalism, and how much harm can be done in the name of opportunity and security.

Resilience Thinking is a slim book about sustainability and systems in ecology. Structured around five case studies, this volume is both a manifesto and a strong work of popular scholarship. Brian Walker clearly elucidates the failures of command-and-control ecosystem management based on optimizing one part of a system for efficiency. As the case studies in ecosystem management show, human prosperity is based around ecosystem services. Over decades and centuries, human intervention in these systems has disrupted natural cycles, the accumulated damage pushing these systems across a threshold where lakes become stinking stagnant ponds, coral reefs bleached deserts, and forests highly flammable pest traps.

The antidote to fragility and collapse is diversity of response, pluralistic management systems, and recognizing slow changes in key variables, like ground-water salinity. Systems with many species and redundancies perform better under pressure. Long term build up of phosphorus in water, or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, cannot be easily reversed once a tipping point has been crossed.

There's an element of tragedy to this book. With over a decade since its publication, I can't bear to go and check on how the cases have performed. The logical of capitalism, of maximizing immediate profits and protecting voter interest groups, seems too strong to easily overcome. And as a card-carrying ecomodernist, I wonder how resilience fits in with a program of intensification and decoupling. Still, this is an important book and one that deserves careful attention.

Jordan McKell is a freelance smuggler, taking jobs in dingy spaceport bars when he's offered a contract to take a strange ship with a seal cargo of alien artifacts to Earth. When one of the crew is murdered by a saboteur, and alerts are put out for him and the ship, McKell realizes that he's stumbled into something big. The cargo of the Icarus could upend an interstellar transport monopoly, and a lot of people want to make sure that they get the benefit. It's up to McKell to figure out who to trust in his crew of strangers, along with his partner, an alien Ixil who's a composite being.

Zahn blends gritty smuggler space opera a la Firefly or Han Solo with an Agatha Christie parlor murder. It's okay, though nothing to write home about. The setting seems cobbled together out of scifi tropes, rather than a cohesive vision of anything. And as a mystery, the alien tech allows for deus ex machina explanation of what happens, rather than a careful piecing together of clues. Finally, there's the twist. McKell isn't actually a smuggler, he's a deep undercover cop trying to bust a galactic crime lord. This makes some of his personality traits make more sense, but I'm not sure I like a bait and switch that big.

Babel-17 is basically strong Sapir-Whorf, the novel. A series of attacks on Alliance military bases are preceded by strangely coded messages, and when polymath poet, linguist, and space captain Rydra Wong discovers that the Babel-17 messages are a language not a code, and one of incredible precision and expressive power, it's up to her to find the source and start a dialog.

Delany is a master of eyeball kicks of language, of strong self-indentity and beautiful decadence. Wong puts together a fascinating space crew of misfits, including a massive clawed pilot-wrestler, a live trinary navigation group and dead trinary sensor group, and a platoon of kids to turn the knobs. She visits a noble who dreams of death in a million exotic configurations, and falls in with space pirates. The setting is a fantastic fait accomplai, artistic weirdness that holds together in a glittering pattern. This is a very strange world of people who consider their lives entirely mundane, and it's a fantastic tension.

The meat of the novel hangs on the ideas of what can and cannot be translated, and a space pirate named The Butcher who speaks a native language without the words 'You' or 'I'. Wong realizes that The Butcher is the key to the whole mess. Babel-17 is a constructed language designed for sabotage without self-awareness, a control system for a schizoid spy that with her genius she is able to rework into a force for good. This is a very strange novel, totally unique, and well worth reading.

Sin in the Second City is salacious historical non-fiction about Chicago around 1900, starring the sisters Minna and Ada Everleigh, madams of the infamous Everleigh Club, the grandest brothel in a city of sin. The sisters ran a premium service, cultured girls at $50 a night plus drinks and tips, the almost legitimate tip of a vast enterprise of vice. Aldermen, European royalty, and millionaire heirs all came to party in a mansion with rooms decorated in mirrors, precious metals, and oriental fantasies.

But no party could last forever. Crusading reformers worked against 'White Slavery', where innocent girls were corrupted into prostitution with lies, drugs, and force. Preachers and prosecutors waged a decade long battle against corrupt political machines, and finally started putting the prostitutes in jail. The Everleighs got out just ahead of the crowd, taking their money and retiring to obscurity in New York, where they walked along Central Park, had a small literary circle, and obscured their past.

Abbott perhaps strays a bit too far into literary non-fiction here, inventing details which are probably right but also unverifiable. She does a masterful job making Chicago, and the sexual weirdness of the age, come alive.

The Sorrow of War is Vietnam's counterpart to the works of Tim O'Brien. Bao Ninh was one of ten survivors from the 500 men who went south with the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade in 1969. His narrator, Kien, is clearly an alter ego. In this non-linear, densely woven story, Kien moves through collecting the dead and missing in the Forest of Screaming Souls just after the armistice is signed, years of desperate and horrifying combat with a scout platoon, and the alcoholic shadow of a life in Hanoi driven by the external power of a Novel inside him.

The counterweight to Kien's story is that of Phoung, his childhood sweetheart who's innocence is taken forever by the war, the person who Kien is first complicit in destroying, and who he cannot ever save. The Sorrow of War is a strange, tough, sentimental novel. It's genius and popularity in Communist Vietnam is proof enough that even the victorious walk away deeply wounded. This is an important book for anyone curious about how the Vietnamese saw their 'American War'.