Fire and Fury is an easy pick for most controversial book of 2018, covering the chaotic first six months of the Trump White House, from the inauguration and lies over crowd size, to the brief and terrible reign of The Mooch as communication director. Major excerpts have already been published, Michael Wolff's adherence to journalistic norms criticized, and Donald Trump's basic mental fitness litigated again in public. As I write this review, the scandals of the day are 'shithole countries', the blatant lies about his weight in his annual check-up, a looming government shutdown over DACA, and oh yeah, Russia.

So what of the book? Wolff has a very breezy, fly on the wall style, and instantly draws you in to the drama. The main character is Steve Bannon, the quote-unquote intellectual of Trumpism, a perennially disheveled strategist who brooks no compromise with liberals or the media. Against Bannon are the First Family pair of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (Javanka), and the RNC axis of Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, and actual law-makers. The chaos is constant. I follow this stuff way to closely, and the book was bringing back scandals that I barely recalled. How innocent we were, when Michael Flynn was our biggest concern.

The picture that Wolff paints is one of a White House without any chain of command or focus, riven by intense factional rivalries, opaque staffing structures, no familiarity with government, a legislative agenda of pure fantasy, and at the center of it, the sucking void of The Donald. Trump is quoted only periphrally, usually in public statements like his speech to the CIA, but his need to be adored, his co-dependence on the despised Media, and his utter inability to understand that there is an external reality, and that people has their own identities and desires beyond how much they liked Trump.

If I have one real problem with this book, it's that it far to kind to Steve Bannon. I get that the guy can't keep his mouth shut, even as other sources realized that maybe Michael Wolff wasn't their friend, but come on! His 'American Identity' ideology is fascism light, he 'won' an election by losing the popular vote by 3 million, and his wars against the international order and domestic administrative state have drawn clear battle lines and lost potential allies. Bannon does not need to be built up, he needs to be drawn exactly as small as he is. And Trump's racism, sexism, and general complete unfitness do not need any other blinders.

Political junkies absolutely have to read this book. It's like catnip. Ordinary people can probably stick with the excerpts.

Mornings on Horseback seems to have cemented McCullough's style and reputation as the dean of American historians. This book follows the young Theodore Roosevelt, from his ancestors to the start of his second marriage in 1886. It is, as the phrase goes, "a life intensely lived." The Roosevelt were New York aristocracy, and young Teddy was coddled by privilege; servants, European tours, the best of everything. At the same time, he exerted maximum effort, long marches and rides through any wilderness he could find, hunting and naturalism all bundled up into one, actually working at Harvard and in the New York legislature. Simultaneously, this was also a family stricken by illness and sudden death. Loved ones fall alarmingly fast, and Teddy was suffered from asthma for much of his childhood before finding a psychological cure (in McCollough's estimation).

McCullough hasn't yet figured out how to transmits the complexities of 19th century politics, and the book flags towards the end with the famous ranch in the Dakota Badlands. This is a great portrait of the boy, and excels particularly in showing Teddy in college, but it dearly feels like volume one of a larger project never finished.

Tithe is a modern take on faerie tales. Faye lives a very unenchanted life, following her-never-quite-made-it rockstar mother around New Jersey, scraping together cash for cigarettes and trying to avoid teenage trouble. When she finds a wounded faerie knight in the woods, she's drawn into a deadly game of intrigue between the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, with her lives and the lives of her friends as the stakes. Oh, and she's also not a human 16-year old, but a faerie changeling.

This is a quick YA book, and there's not much interesting in the way of plot or character, but Black has a talent for realism and imagination, in the gritty world of New Jersey, and the fantastic courts of the fey.

I was really pleasantly surprised by The Prisoner of Zenda. I've read a fair amount of 19th century literature, and it can often feel ponderous, weirdly racist, or just plain dull. Zenda is a book that holds up, with a fast paced adventure once you're past the first few chapters. Rudolf Rassendyll is an idle Englishman of the gentry. A trip to Europe to visit the fictional German principality of Ruritania on the eave of the coronation of its new king Rudolf IV leads to an amazing adventure. It turns out the two Rudolfs look almost identical, and when the king is drugged by his half-brother, the villain Duke 'Black' Michael, Rassendyll has to stand in for the coronation. And when the real King of Zenda is kidnapped, Rassendyll has to keep up the impersonation while working to free the king. He romances a princess, swordfights various blackguards, and executes daring raids on the formidable castle of Zenda. Rassendyll's honorable attitude is a real pleasure to read, an honest bravery that exemplifies the best of Victorian virtues.

Play is a real treasure of a popular science book. Based on Brown's work as a clinician and deep familiarity with the literature, it moves through the deep important of play to all animals, and especially human beings. Far from being frivolous, play and a playful attitude is associated with learning, with success, and with a longer and healthier life. Imaginative play, exuberant play, and play free from consequence or adult supervision, is what makes us human, and what makes life worth living.

Brown strays into pat self-help in places, and Boomer kid-shaming in others, but this book is everything I wanted to be Exuberance to be.

In theory, this should be right up my alley. A fantasy novel set during the Vietnam War. I can neither confirm nor deny that I've run that D&D campaign multiple times. I'll even go for Magical Realism Vietnam War a la Apocalypse Now or Going After Cacciato. In some ways, given the shambles of the actual war, it serves well enough as a playground for psychological drama above logical sense.

The first half plays it pretty straight. Lt. Kitty McCulley is a nurse in Vietnam in 1969, much like our author. Her life consists of 12 hour shifts on the ward, treating a rotating cast of wounded GIs and a long-term group of Vietnamese patients. Americans don't stay long, either well enough to head back to their units or hurt enough to be medevaced to Japan. The Vietnamese lucky enough to get care at a medical facility are there for quite a while. There's a lot to be said about Xinhdy, a cheerful woman with a hip wound; Ahn, a little boy who lost a leg; and Xe, a holy man who lost two legs. When she's not on the ward, Kitty is dating helicopter pilots and suntanning at the beach. The memoir is pretty solid, as far as these things go. I've read a lot of memoirs from the soldiers perspective, and for them a date with an American nurse was the white whale-holy grail of things to do in Vietnam, and it's fascinating to see that sexual environment from the other side. The never very pretty Kitty has her pick of sexy, charming, crazy liars.

The second half of the book, the fantasy part, is where it comes apart. Xe bestows an amulet on Kitty that lets her see auras and heal by touch, and then dies. When a new surgeon comes in and begins kicking the Vietnamese out of the ward to die, Kitty finagles an evacuation for Ahn. She and the boy are shot down in the jungle, where they wander through an increasingly unlikely series of encounters. They meet a crazy GI who's the lone survivor of his squad, and gain the loyalty of a village by fighting a giant snake and healing the victims of an airstrike. Then Kitty is captured by the VC and rescued by the Americans, only to have a General propose to kill her in case she's been subverted. At the end, it's back to The World, only to find America unusual and strange. Kitty drifts around in a nurses version of a PTSD fugue, working night shifts and edging towards suicide, only to find salvation when her flight to LAX arrives at the same time as a planeload of boat people refugees.

The memoir worked well enough, and I'm a fan of the 'lightly fictionalized' memoir genre, since few people have lives that nicely match a three act structure. But I didn't much like the magic. Auras are a cheap trick to tell readers the emotions of characters rather than showing. The ability to heal by touch is a power fantasy for a nurse, in the same way that to kill by will is a power fantasy for a warrior, but Kitty doesn't do much with it. And while the parts of the story set in the hospital felt very grounded, the parts set in the hinterlands of Vietnam felt very floaty and imaginary. You can be there, without being there.

John le Carre had a baby with one of those earnestly confessional 'smart young modern lady' memoirs, and it's a fun and interesting read.

Lindsay Moran was a 'Real Spy', a CIA case officer running around the Balkans in the late 90s doling out hundred dollar bills to the human wreckage thrown off by collapse of Yugoslavia. But as it turns out, being a real spy is far from romantic or fun. Moran chronicles how the Agency's obsessive secrecy destroyed her social life and moral center of balance, making her paranoid and cagy, trapped in destructive relationships with local losers, and ultimately spinning her wheels doing nothing in the lead up to 9/11.

The best parts of the this book are the descriptions of training at The Farm. The CIA training course seems like a lot of fun. Actually being a spy involves meeting assholes in smoky low-end diners and convincing them to lie to you for money. Moran quit the agency in 2003, disgusted by its inability to meaningfully do anything about Al Qaeda or the coming invasion of Iraq (fun fact: Case Officers were prohibited from meeting with people with terrorist ties in the 90s.) The picture of HUMINT that she paints is broken boys playing a pointless game with their foreign counterpoints. For a book published in 2004, there is some foresight about the CIA's transformation into a secret army (see The Way of the Knife), but overall, the biggest sense is that the whole CIA is crazy, and only does its job by accident.

It's almost exactly 50 years from the Tet Offensive, one of the most decisive and misunderstood campaigns in history. Tet was based on delusion on both sides. The Communist leadership believed that the people of South Vietnam were primed to join a general offensive and overthrow the puppet government. General Westmoreland and MACV were sure that the Communists were on the ropes, and that the key battle was at the remote firebase of Khe Sanh. On the Vietnamese New Year, Jan 30 1968, VC units backed by NVA regulars launched attacks across South Vietnam, showing that the Communists were capable of massive organized operations with exceptional operational security. Most of these assaults were repelled, but the city of Hue fell to the Communists, with small pockets of resistance around the MACV compound in the south of the city, and the ARVN headquarters in the northern parts of the 19th century citadel.

What followed could only be described as a fiasco on the American side. Marine companies were fed into the city piecemeal, and told to expect only light resistance. What they found were Communists fighters dug in, with ample supplies and reinforcements, willing to contest every block and building. Bad weather and restrictive rules of engagement prevent the Marines from using their artillery and air support at first, though by the end of the battle shells were falling freely, wrecking 80% of the city. The Marines hadn't done any urban combat since Seoul in 1950, but they relearned fast. M48 Patton tanks become mobile bunkers. The Ontos tank destroyer, armed with six 106mm recoilless rifles, would scoot out, demolish a building with a salvo, an retreat. Marines learned to 'walk through walls', avoiding doors and intersections by blasting holes in the buildings. Over 24 grueling days, they forced the Communist forces to retreat.

Both sides claimed victory, but the surest losers were the civilians of Hue. The Communists wasted no time setting up revolutionary tribunals and executing "enemies of the people". The Americans and South Vietnamese had no formal policies of execution, but their lavish use of firepower did not discriminate between fighting positions and refugees sheltering in bunkers. Suspicious GIs shot first and asked questions never, gunning down people searching for food or trying to cross the lines. Thousands of civilians were murdered by their supposed "liberators". Westmoreland's reputation, tarnished by Tet, was done in by the Battle of Hue and the Siege of Khe Sanh.

Bowden is a talented author, and he makes the action come alive again, putting you there with the Marines and the Vietnamese. This is the authoritative account of the Battle of Hue, and a required part of any Vietnam War book collection.

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat is an omnibus edition of the first three Stainless Steel Rat books (self titled, Revenge, Saves the World), all featuring Slippery Jim deGriz, best thief in the galaxy. A high-tech bandit in a society where perfect law enforcement means that criminals are very few and very skilled, deGriz steals because he's bored with a bunch of high-tech gadgets and simple cons, avoiding killing people at all cost. His skills and ethics get him recruited into the Special Corps, the real secret police, run by former thieves.

On the plus side, when the books work they really work. Slippery Jim always has a new identity, a clever plan, a non-lethal solution that has a lot of chaos and him walking safe and sound through the middle of it. It's high-action and high-octane.

The downside is that the stories get increasingly lazy. I quite enjoyed the first one, where deGriz is recruited into the Special Corps and tracks down a psychotic con artist who built an ancient battleship in plain sight and then slipped right out of his clutches. But the next two books have less cleverness and more straight up non-lethal violence with sucker punches, sleep gas, and smoke grenades as he goes after militarists trying to conquer the galaxy and a time travelling megalomaniac. Some parts of the book haven't aged well at all. Angelina, deGriz's first enemy and than wife after Special Corps conscience surgery, is positively cringe worthy. This might also be the first time I've been concerned about a fictional character's alcoholism, as deGriz works his way through bottle after bottle. I've heard that authors who drink while writing have their characters drink to excess, and it sure feels like the drink or two Harrison had as he did the daily writing turned into a drink on every other page, punctuated with epic benders. A lot of fun, but ultimately fluff that never quite becomes first rate.

Vietnam is far far more than a war. As a region that's been settled for thousands of years, and a trade nexus for the South China Sea, it has a long and complex history. No single volume could possibly cover the whole history of Vietnam, but Kiernan makes an able effort, trying to draw some cohesive themes out of a mass of history.

Geography is destiny, and again and again water appears as a major theme. Rice based settled cultures flourished in the Red River delta in the north, the Mekong delta in the south, and the innumerable smaller rivers up and down the coast. Archaeological evidence records a culture that made great bronze drums and had complex chiefdoms. Vietnam enters the historical record roughly 2300 years ago as a province of China. The Vietnamese were ruled as internal vassals for roughly 1100 years, with intermittent rebellions, before finally breaking away under Ngô Quyen in 934. The next thousand years were a mess of feudal history, marked by the rise and fall of dynasties, civil wars, and a few great kings. The major trends of this era were the conquest of the southern Champa kingdom by firearms equipped Vietnamese armies, increasing trade across the region and with Europeans, and military victories over the Chinese, combined with an import of Confucian culture, and a system of scholarly exams based on knowledge of the Chinese classics.

1887 marked the third turn in Vietnamese history, with the authoritative victory of the French over the Vietnamese, and the colonization of the last independent Vietnamese kingdoms. French rule was marked by exploitation, but also the introduction of the romanized Quoc Ngu alphabet, and the rise of a local vernacular culture rather than one based on Chinese classics. Journalists and revolutionaries agitated against the French, and syncreatic millenialist sects arose (the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao). The course of the first and second Indochina Wars are covered briefly, as well as Vietnam post-1975, with the slow redevelopment of the country postwar, and economic liberalization without political liberalization.

Someone who knows more about the pre-1954 history of Vietnam might find something to criticize, and if you have strong opinions about the present government, you'll likely be disappointed. My biggest problem with this book is that it is very dry. I like this kind of stuff, and it still took me 10 days. Glad to have read it, even if I still can't remember the order of the dynasties.