Jones does an astounding job at his singular goal of recounting the siege of Khe Sanh from the perspective of the men who were there. Stitching together interviews with veterans and after action reports, he blows away the fog of war to depict the terror of night assaults by the NVA, and hunking in the trenches and bunkers waiting for your number to come up.

There's a little bit of stage setting, with just enough gestures at the context: The Tet Offensive, Bernard Fall's release of Hell in a Very Small Place, LBJ, and interservice rivalry, to make sense of the story, but mostly he sticks close to the men and their experiences. Jones rates Khe Sanh a limited tactical victory. American air and artillery devastated the NVA regulars, and while giving up the base was a strategic embarrassment, a more secure location a few miles away continued to control the NW corner of South Vietnam.

Okayish self-help, grounded in Brown's research into shame. Basically the feeling "I am bad" is deeply corrosive, and should be avoided in favor of gratitude and authenticity. Even one of the most-watched TEDx presenters of all time can feel like their life is a mess. A gloss of quick studies over some common-self on how to live a life, that seems deeply at odds with how people actually live theirs.

Railsea is China Miéville's young adult take on Moby Dick. Sham is a doctor's apprentice on a moling train. In the richly imaginative setting, oceans have been replaced by a world-spanning web of railroad tracks. Infested by monstrous versions of ordinary burrowing creatures, strewn with fascinating salvage, and maintained by the angels, the railsea is a place of adventure.

Sham has been ticking along in his life when he finds an image chip in a wrecked train, showing a place where the lines narrow down into a single track. He searches after this impossible end of the railsea, teaming up with scientist siblings, his own moling train, and fighting pirates, the navy, and mysterious powers.

The setting is imaginative, and there's some stuff I really liked. All serious captains chase a Philosophy, some massive and deadly beast which left them scarred and maimed and symbolizes some major concept. Technology comes from dead civilization ages of metal, plastic, and glass, and odd relic left behind by aliens. Someone made and broke this strange world. But the characters are ciphers, the plot meanders, and the final climax ends on a hollow note.

Also, I've read a fair amount of Miéville, and this book felt like running through a checklist of concepts already used to better effect in Iron Council and The Scar. Trains, nomadic societies, abysses and monsters. Miéville's radical politics are toned down to a mild anti-authority hum. Okay YA, but nothing to write home about.

Everybody know the story of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cicero, Cato, Octavian, Brutus, civil war, assassination, the last grasp of liberty, and the foundation of both tyranny and centuries of peace and prosperity. Roman politics are a common metaphor for our own times. In The Storm Before the Storm, veteran history podcaster Mike Duncan (Revolutions, The History of Rome), writes about one of his favorite periods, the Roman Republic between the Second Punic War and Caesar's Civil War.

As expected, Duncan ably brings weaves together the lives of his protagonists and their events, to describe a gradual degradation of Roman political norms to mob violence and military force, as the sclerotic Senate proved unable to decisively deal with concerns like corruption in the provinces, the lack of civil rights for Italian allies, transformation of the countryside from yeoman farmers to slave estates, and the ambitions of 'new men' without noble pedigrees. The abortive Gracchian agricultural reforms, Gauis Marius's remaking of the army, and Sulla's dictatorship are the centerpieces of this book.

Duncan ably uses primary sources (the Romans wrote a lot of history) to provide detail and spice to his world. He'll admit he's biased in favor of the Populares and against the Optimates. This is a well-sourced popular history, which is both its strength and weakness. Duncan doesn't have much theory about the collapse of political norms, and the lives of the figures eclipses some questions I had about how Roman politics normally operated, and the balance between formal bureaucracy, networks of patronage, and the ability of oratory to shift the mob at the right moment.

It's with some dismay that I realized that I didn't actually own any H.P. Lovecraft, and this from a guy who doodled Elder Signs over all his high school notebooks. While his works are public domain, there's something to be said for physical books. This Canterbury Classics edition comes with a beautiful leather binding, an iridescent octopus on the cover, gold leaf pages, and an introduction giving an overview of his life and work. Inside are 26 short stories, arranged in chronological order, and covering the essential Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, etc.

Reading them all in order is a burden. Early Lovecraft is not great, little gothick tinglers that require much faith and imagination from the reader that this is horrifying. When he hits his stride, Lovecraft is every bit as good as his titanic reputation deserves. The later stories contrast the growing insanity of their narrators against the dizzying cosmological nihilism of deep time, and the ancient civilizations of Elder Things and Old Ones and Mi Go and Deep Ones who once warred over Earth, and who's remnants trouble our dreams.

Selling an collection of free stories is always a little tricky, but this is worth it for the physical qualities of the binding, and for a strong editorial voice. A little bigger than the "core" Lovecraft, a little more portable than the "complete" Lovecraft, this is a great collection for any fan.

How do you non-fiction where the protagonists died at sea without a trace? With very careful analogies and circumventing interviews. The October 1991 Atlantic storm was a meteorological freak that threatened ships across the North Atlantic. The 72' steel swordfishing boat Andrea Gail was lost at sea with all hands, other ships capsized, a National Guard helicopter went down with one fatality.

Junger reconstructs the gritty lives and deaths of the crew of the Andrea Gail. He's at his best with the history and present reality of the North Atlantic fisheries, back breaking industrial labor, and big paydays that never seem to be quite enough to lift this fishermen and their towns out of poverty (and that's pre collapse of the fisheries). Storms build fast and deadly, and well, a ship can only last so long before the ways break it down, swamping the water-tight compartments that give it buoyancy and sending it to the bottom. Junger's book cemented his reputation, and is one of the canons of modern non-fiction literature.

Solip:System is a novella set between Hardwired and Voice of the Whirlwind, featuring disembodied consciousness Reno in a plot to bring down the Orbitals, using the Black Room personality hijacking software. It's very much a triumph of style over substance, cool and slick and bleakly self-destructive. We never really have a chance to get to know Reno or what he wants, beyond his death wish. There's no sense of risk in the plot, no real sense of danger of exposure. I read this as a bridge, and it seems to have worked well enough, but I can't recommend it as anything much above average.

I can recognize this book as a pillar of Civil War history, while also recognizing that the historiography has moved past it, and while the collection of primary source accounts are vital, in terms of research questions, writing style, and place in a larger academic debate, Lee's Lieutenants is obsolete and painful.

Freeman makes a close study of the campaigns of the Army of Northern Virginia in terms of the leading subordinates of Robert E Lee (he had previously written a massive biography of Lee). My dissatisfaction comes from my inability to get a good feel for the period, for why these commanders acted as they did in moment. The section that I read covered the crucial transformation from a mob into a semi-professional army, and I still have little sense of how 'old Army' veterans interacted with political appointees, the energy of ambitious young men, or the masses of common soldiers. The battles of the Civil War were a fascinating last gasp for when the physical courage and strength of a commander could make a decisive difference, for when information moved at the speed of horse messenger and battalions at a quick march, but I have little sense of how generals decided to deploy and attack. Confederate commanders seem to spend as much time sniping at each other in dispatches as they fighting the Federals. I have rarely read so many words and learned so little.

Part of this may come down to political differences. Freeman clearly idolized the Confederate generals. He grew up down the street from General Jubal Early, and his father was a Confederate veteran. I think we should be honest about the causes and consequences and call the war 'The Slavers Rebellion', and remember the Confederates as such, if at all. Freeman thought they should be memorialized, and their crimes covered up. I could forgive an opposing point of view, if it had something interesting to say. For example, I really enjoyed Guderian's memoirs, and Nazis murdered almost all my relatives who stayed behind in Poland.

You're probably familiar with the late 70s military interest in the Human Potential movement as written up by Jon Ronson in The Men Who Stare At Goats and adapted into a movie. The basic gist is that a few renegade officers envisioned a unit of tuned in Warrior-Monks, who would dominate the battlefield with ESP. The whole thing got funded with the DoD equivalent of spare change, and went nowhere because it was mostly nonsense.

One of those efforts which actually went through in 1985 was a six month school to teach 25 Green Berets the basics of Aikido and Zen meditation. Strozzi-Heckler was one of the instructors in the Trojan Warrior Program (logo: a trojan horse over crossed lightsabers, with the motto "May the Force be with you" in Latin.) This book is structured as a journal of the school, and Strozzi-Heckler's own thoughts on the relationship between his warrior tradition, the profession of arms as practiced by his students, and Reagan's America.

Strozzi-Heckler is evangelical about Aikido, and the benefits of its "way of harmonious spirit." Rather than opposing strength on strength, Aikido is about entering and blending with the attack, an using its energy against the aggressor. Martial arts are a relatively easy sell to the Green Berets, but Zen and meditation are much harder. Strozzi-Heckler and his fellow teachers endure mockery and deception as they try and get their soldiers to become comfortable with their feelings, with sitting quietly, and with emptiness. And even though he's in good shape, Special Forces training is hard, and Strozzi-Heckler is injured several times in the dojo and in ruck marches. Maritime training along the Atlantic Coast seems very dangerous.

The description of the course is interspersed with essays on warrior culture, machismo, the potential of honor in the atomic age, and the ethics of teaching New Age techniques to men who will likely be deployed to a dirty war in Latin America. These essays can get repetitive, but Strozzi-Heckler circles around to two basic core ideas: Warriors are authentic in thought, word, and deed; and warriors strive for self-knowledge and self-improvement in a holistic sense. The students know the value of the warrior ideal, and it pains them to fall short, to be caught up in machismo posturing and military careerism. Yet those transcendent moments of physical excellent, of measuring oneself against the Ultimate in battle, make up for lousy pay and a chance of death. Strozzi-Heckler learned a lot from this book, and his students did too, although not enough to make aikido and meditation part of Army Basic, or even Special Forces training.

My edition is the 1992 paperback, with an afterwards about the Gulf War. I'm interested to see what's changed in light of the Long War on Terror.

I picked up this novella through a humble bundle a while back. It's okay, but kind of frustrating. Aliens have made landed on Earth, and geneticist Marianne Jenner and her adult children are at the center of events, as it's revealed that the aliens are humans taken from Earth 70,000 years ago, and that both cousin species must worth together to find a cure to an alien plague that threatens them. There's skepticism, panic, violence, and deceit, and at the end a brutal betrayal. This novella feels like it's Frankensteined out of the corpses of more interesting scifi concepts, and never really come together, though apparently it forms the basis of a trilogy.