This book is a readable, if dry, account of how the CIA worked circa the late 1980s, which is far more exciting when read between the lines. Kessler is (was?) one of the preeminent intelligence journalists in Washington D.C., with a string of books about the FBI, spies in Moscow, and the Reagan White House. In 1990, Kessler approached the CIA public relations office about writing a book, and got a favorable response: hours of interviews with key officers, including then Director William H. Webster, large amounts of access to the buildings, and relative freedom to write whatever he wanted within the constraints of national security.

The picture he paints is one of dedicated professionals, hard at work within a sometimes opaque bureaucratic structure. Where the CIA has erred, it has done so because the world is inherently uncertain, or because their worst excesses were ordered by the White House. The idea of rogue agents and operations is part of the bad old days before the Church Committee. The new CIA, as reorganized by Director Webster, is an efficient team player, supplying fair intelligence to the President, in line with American values. Sure, the CIA operates everywhere except for the "Five Eyes" nations, but it's mostly precautionary, and a way to get sources in place to prevent surprise. The four Directorates are somewhat insular, but all good in their own way. Operations talks to foreigners and recruits them to be agents. Intelligence analyzes everything coming in, and synthesizes it down to intelligence assessments for the White House. Science & Technology runs spy satellites and a real life "Q-branch." Administration makes sure that everybody gets paid on time, and secures the agency overall. Webster gets a glowing report: former judge, FBI director, bringing the CIA into the modern era by reversing the politicized decisions made under Casey, the previous CIA director who was a Reagan campaigner staffer, and providing much needed support to the public relations office and the office of general counsel.

Reading between the lines, I got the sense that Kessler was brought on to help rehabilitate the CIA after the Iran-Contra affair, and justify its relevance after the fall of the Soviet Union. He wound up getting a little seduced by the agency, so the epilogue, which was written after the Aldrich Ames case broke, runs directly counter to the rest of the book. CIA compartmentalization is a joke. The security people are entirely incompetent. Deep philosophical cracks in the mission of the CIA need to be filled before it can be the intelligence agency America deserves.

My final verdict is that this book is a picture of a kind of business as usual that no longer exists. The post-9/11 CIA, an agency of drone strikes and extraordinary renditions, is very different from the gentlemen analysts and Operations great gamers Kessler writes about. There are a few illuminating anecdotes here, but far too little about the contemporary crisis of Iran-Contra. Kessler knows his stuff, but this book has not aged well.

Among the Thugs stands next The Hell's Angels as an unflinching look at a violent male subculture, in this case the classic English football hooligan of the 1980s. Buford was an American living in England. What he depicts as an idle curiosity about a strange feature of English culture, much sensationalized by the press, became a multiyear sociological study.

It is an undeniable fact that by all conventional measures, attending a football game in England is a terrible way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Bad weather, hours walking and standing on cement terraces, and being crushed in narrow passageways and too-small cages by a drunk, chanting, mass of the lads. There's also a chance of random violence at the hands of supporters of the other team, of the police, or the crowd itself. And then there's the minor problems of no parking, poor transit, and sanitary facilities consisting of 'pee on the people lower than you'. But somehow, thousands if not millions of English headed out to the grounds every Saturday. Football gives the week meaning. In a series of short narrative essays about his experiences across England and the continent, with all sorts of fringe members of "the Firm", Buford explores what that meaning is.

Buford's first topic is the crowd itself, human individuality compressed into the herd, submerged in the crush, the chanting, the mass of movements. The crowd is the the base of everything else in football, an animal energy that is the true draw, not the action on the pitch. Crowds are fickle things, always an outsider to the body politic. The crowd demands a leader, but one cannot just declare themselves the leader of the crowd, you must be chosen.

The second theme is violence. The crowd is a means to an end, and "when it goes off", as signaled by someone throwing a trash bin through a window, the crowd becomes animated in mass violence, from throwing stones at riot police, to mass property destruction and semi-random knifings. If being part of a crowd is transforming, being part of a violent mob is ecstatic: Buford describes feeling like he could fly, the electric thrill of chasing and being chased, and he was a journalist maintaining his distance from the event.

The third theme is racism. The lads are proud to be English, happy to tell you they don't much care for non-white people or foreigners, and delighted to go to another country and be as beastly as possible to the inhabitants. Buford attends a National Front white power disco, a profoundly weird homoerotic punk-rock rave, of shirtless skinheads men jumping up and down in a mass and rubbing each other's heads while their girlfriends look on. While the football firms are gleefully racist, and white power foot soldiers football fanatics, there's not a true alliance between the two, because the mid-80s leadership of the National Front are a bunch of dweebs afraid of the raw physicality of the crowd.

And of course there's the minor stuff, life "on the jib" to get as much stolen beer and illegal rides out of football as possible. After all, who can compel payment from a crowd? There's the ambiguous relationship between hooligans, the press, and law enforcement. There's the Hillsborough disaster, and crowd control reform. There's the international hustling of 'DJ', a counterfeiter and aspiring photographer from a privileged background.

But ultimately, this book is about The Lads and their mythos. Buford observes that in England, it is just not done for members of the literati to talk about the working class, and so no one will admit that the true "English working class" has vanished. I quote in full.

"It is still possible, I suppose, to belong to a phrase-the working class—a piece of language that serves to reinforce certain social customs and a way of talking and that obscures the fact that the only thing hiding behind it is a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits. This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell."

Yeah. You feel that?

Go Manchester United!

Alexandre Dumas is one of the titans of world literature, writing fantastic adventures of musketeers and prisoners seeking terrible revenge. History has unfairly forgotten his father, a truly remarkable soldier treated shabbily by posterity.

The eldest Alex Dumas was born in the colony of Saint-Domingue, son of a renegade marquis and a slave. He grew up wild in free in the hills around the port of Jeremie, and then went with his father to France, where he lived a style that only a truly decadent French heir of the blood could manage. When the money ran out, Alex enlisted as a private of dragoons. He was a skilled rider, deadly swordsman, and courageous leader, who's natural abilities saw him promoted to corporal. The ancien regime was no friend to the black man, with its wealth maintained by an empire of slavery, but individuals of ability could thrive.

Then came the revolution, and Alex Dumas found his calling. A celebrated exploit on the Belgium frontier made him a valuable recruit for a Free Legion of Americans, mostly 'coloreds' from the Caribbean who served the revolution. In a single bound, Dumas was promoted to Lt. Colonel, and then to Colonel and Brigadier General as the Committee of Public Safety decapitated generals for the anti-revolutionary "crime" of losing a battle. Dumas's greatest moment was as commander of the 40,000 man Army of Alps, where he organized spring victories over the Piedmontese that opened the gate to Italy. He was reassigned to the brutal counter-insurgency in the Vendée, where he tried to restore some manner of honor and humanity to troops which had come to regard royalist Frenchmen as subhuman. For all its many crimes, Revolutionary France was the first color-blind society in a thousand years, one that attempted to live up to the promise of "Libertie, Egalitie, Fraternitie", rather than shoving slavery under constitutional compromises.

Dumas somehow survived the purges of the Terror, but he could not survive the ambitions of a certain Captain of Artillery, who had secured command of the Army of Italy. Dumas served under Napoleon, again bravely leading from the front and personally securing key victories, but failed to ingratiate himself with the coming ceasar, and was written out of the official dispatches. He was chief of cavalry on the ill-fated Egyptian expedition, and things went from bad to worse, as his ship home wound up wrecked in the ardently anti-Republican Kingdom of Naples. Dumas was imprisoned for years by that shaky regime, until another invasion by Napoleon liberated him. But his health was broken, and a combination of personal animosity and rising imperial racism denied him opportunities for further service or even a pension. He died when the young Alexandre Dumas was four, leaving a titanic memory in his son's mind.

Reiss depicts an age of idealism, and a larger than life character who has been unjustly forgotten, but there's a lack of verve that keeps me from giving this the full five stars. It's a good book, and the authoritative account of Alex Dumas, but the essence of the Revolution eludes it.

Damnation Alley is pure post-apocalyptic cheese, decorated with some ideas of genuine weirdness that uplift an otherwise mediocre by-the-book thriller. Roughly 25 years after a nuclear war, America is a blasted wasteland, with California and Boston the only two nations of any importance left. Boston is afflicted by a deadly plague, and California has the cure. The problem is the 3000 miles of howling atomic desolation between the two. Only one man is bad enough to make the journey; Hell Turner, last of the Hell's Angels and vicious killer. And to do it, he has a customized, armor-plated, rocket-packing, flame-throwing, all-terrain driving machine.

This book is at it's best when Zelazny is describing the deadly landscape. The sky is full of howling winds carrying the rubble of civilization, which rains down like artillery. Giant rabid bats and mutated Gila lizards rule the desert. The rest of it just feels very obligatory. Here's places where it's still 1970, before The Bomb. Here's some rustic farmers who are innocent and helpful. Here's an attack by a motorcycle gang. Good post-apocalyptic fiction uses the end of the world as an acid to etch away the cruft of civilization, revealing what is essential about human nature. Here, Zelazny uses it as a canvas to airbrush thunderstorms and giant bugs.

Nuclear war is defined by horrific paradoxes. Weapons that are fast and accurate are more likely to precipitate Wolrd War 3, with a scenario of a border skirmish leading to a "use it or lose" mentality that devolves to a general apocalypse. "Counter-value" weapons, the ones deemed least likely to actually be fired, are only useful for massacring millions of civilians in futile revenge. Nuclear weapons are so serious that they should be fired only with authorization from the highest of commands, but the President will be the first target of an attack. The basic paradox is encapsulated in "always/never", a stated design goal of the Atomic weapons complex. A bomb should always explode when it is needed, and never explode otherwise.

Schlosser traces the dangerous history of nuclear weapons, full of near-misses and lucky accident, in parallel with the 1980 Damascus Incident at a Titan II silo in Arkansas. At Damascus, during a routine refueling a dropped socket wrench penetrated the oxidizer tank of the massive ICBM, spilling thousands of gallons of nitrogen tetroxide. The crew of the silo and response teams from nearby airbases faced a rapidly evolving disaster. The Titan II was essentially an aluminum balloon, and when enough oxidizer vented the missile would collapse and explode. Or the oxidizer could explode due to a spark. The response was complicated by having to work in a cloud of toxic fumes wearing heavy and balky hazmat suits, and poor communication channels between the silo, the Airforce base at Little Rock, and SAC HQ, which tried to manage the response at long distance. Eventually, time ran out and the missile exploded. One crew member, David Livingston, eventually died of wounds and nitrogen tetroxide exposure. The official report scapegoated Livingston, the only casaulty of the accident, and exonerated SAC command, despite decades of ignoring complaints about hazards involved with the Titan II.

The drama of the Damascus incident is interleaved with the broader story of nuclear weapons. Schlosser traces the absurdity and obscenity of nuclear weapons throughout the Cold War. The bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were hand-built experimental devices. The arguments over control of America's nuclear stockpile between the Air Force, Navy, and civil Atomic Energy Commission, were done in ignorance that the 'stockpile' was as low as a single weapon, which would have to undergo weeks of assembly before it could be mated to a B-29 and dropped. As the Cold War spun up, second generation weapons were dispatched to airborne and forward alerts, which exposed them to the vagaries of aviation and overseas security that was nominal at best. It is a miracle that a bomb did not accidentally explode, or was not stolen by terrorists or coup-oriented NATO officers. Finally, the realities of nuclear war were universes apart from the theories of defense planners like McNamara and Kissinger. If the ball went up, America would deploy the SIOP (single integrated operations plan), which on a "go code" would unleash 10 hours of thermonuclear devastation on the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe. Thousands of bombs would drop, millions of people would die. The SIOP could not be altered or stopped. Theories of nuclear strategy which involved pauses to negotiate before the absolute end of the world, or limited destruction, had no physical means by which they could be implemented. The communication networks simply didn't exist to actually control a nuclear war in progress, even if the President were somehow still alive. The survivors would probably envy the dead.

Though the 21st century has reduced the risk of a nuclear war between superpowers, the bombs are still very much real, and proliferation increases the risks that a second sun will light on Earth, whether as part of clash between India and Pakistan or Israel and Iran, or simply by accident. We have been very very lucky, but eventually those snake-eyes will come up.

I'll confess to having strange attitudes towards nuclear war. I don't remember the Cold War at all, and I've probably learned to stop worrying and love the bomb a little too much, through atomic kitsch media like the video games Fallout and DEFCON, or even deserved classics like Dr. Strangelove. Command and Control is absolutely my jam. If you react with revulsion to nuclear weapons, like a normal person, this may not be. Still, an amazing book, and I'm somewhat amazed that I waited this long to read it.

Now Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is staring at me from the shelf...

Robert Silverberg is one of the grand masters of science-fiction, with a distinguished career as an author and editor behind him. But in the early 1950s, he was an ambitious student at Columbia, teaching himself the craft with a stack of pump magazines in one hand, and books of structural criticism and classic rhetoric in the others. This is grand master Silverberg's letter in a bottle to uncertain fledgling writer Bob, thirteen stories with brief appreciative/critical essays.

What you have are writer's stories, mostly published around 1953. You may recognize the names (Dick, Pohl, Blish, Vance, Cordwainer Smith), but I had read only a few of these stories prior, (and I love classic scifi). Every story is solid, some of them amazing, and the essays provide pointers for how each author used his or her personal style to advance some fictive technique in pursuit of telling a wonderful story. And yes, her, as Sivlerberg elevates forgotten female scifi pioneer C.L. Moore.

Every scifi fan owes it to themselves to read this book. And someone should do an update for stories published since 1980 and 2000. We just need to find our enfante terrible.

Seanan McGuire is fast making a name for herself, and some of that reputation is deserved. Her writing oozes style, and she has a clever hand mixing old tropes and current concerns. But McGuire needs to pay attention to the basics.

Welcome to world of fantasy and terrible loss. In this world, much like our own, children sometimes step through doors to Other Places, where many of them experience a reality more vivid and right then our own. But these doors are ephemeral things, and the children who return to our world are alien to their family, seeking after something them might never regain. There is a secret school for these children, a place of healing and knowledge where they might come to grips with their strange experience. Nancy is one such girl. She spent a long time in the Halls of the Dead, where she learned statue stillness and the sweetness of pomegranate juice, and where her hair turned white, and she wishes to go back. Her parents want her to be normal. So the school.

Nancy is confused by the vocabulary of the school, the dimensions that map out the many Other Places children have been, (Nonsense, Logic, Virtue, Wicked, Rhyme...), but she begins making friends. Sumi wants to go back to a place called Confection. Kade is from Oklahoma, and went to a world of violent adventure a girl and came back a prince. The twins Jack and Jill wound up in a gothic horror of vampire masters and mad doctors. There's some nice bits of contemporary reality for young adults. Kade is trans, Nancy is asexual, Sumi talks about masturbation, but we don't have much time to settle in before students start dying. What was a place of refuge is becoming a deathtrap, and no one seems to be able to stop it.

And spoilers, it turns out that Jill is killing the other students to make a perfect girl to open the door back to her fantasy. Jack kills her sister, and she goes home. Nancy goes back to her family, realizes that no one gets to tell her story, and returns to her land of the dead.

But here's the thing. What separates an anecdote from a story is that in a story, a protagonist faces conflict and makes a decision that reveals their character. Nancy does not. She goes places, meets people, and comes out unchanged, all in a straight line. Admittedly, it's a lush and imaginative straight line, but it's not a story. It's a series of scenes. Storytelling 101, folks.

A history of a continent and a half cannot be contained in 329 pages (plus sources), but Chasteen gives it his best shot. This a fine introductory text, and more enjoyable to read than Kiernan's Viet Nam, but it lacks nuance or detail.

Chasteen traces two major narratives through the many nations of Central and South America. The first is their tripartite cultural heritage, combining in various ways Iberian colonizers, Africa slaves, and indigenous people. The second is swings between conservative and modernizing forces. Conservative politics, whether Catholic or based around a cuadillo strongmen, lead to stagnation and revolt. The modernizers, whether early 19th century nationalist revolutionaries, 20th century nationalists of both liberal and Marxist stripes, and 21st century neoliberals, make grand promises that never seem to pan out for the rural majorities of these countries.

I get the difficulty of writing a synthetic history covering millions of square miles and hundreds of years in a reasonable page count. And there are some things which I like, like short "counter-narrative" chapters that showcases countervailing trends. But I have little sense of South America as informed by its history.

Tunnel in the Sky is an underappreciated gem of a Heinlein juvenile. In the future, an overpopulated Earth expands into space through wormhole gates. Any job in the Outlands, as the other worlds are called, requires passing Outland Survival. The final exam is being dumped on an unknown planet, and surviving a few days until recall. Rod Walker is a high school student facing such an exam.

We meet his family, and get some cool hints at the expanded setting. A new religion called Monism has joined the big three Semitic faiths. China has conquered Australia and irrigated the outback, but population continues to rise. Rod's sister Helen is an officer in the all-female Amazon space marines. We see pioneers going through the a gate with horses and Conestoga wagons, because 'grass-burners' make their own replacements and resupply will be rare until the colony can export food or Uranium back to Earth. Rod's parents are facing a hard choice as well, a 20 year wait in cryogenic stasis while his father's rare metabolic disease is cured.

We get some useful advice on survival, "don't carry a gun, your job is to be a rabbit and live", and then we're off. Rod does fine the first few days, but then someone knocks him on the head and steals everything but his back-up knife. Worse, as days pass and the gate home fails to appear, it becomes apparent something has gone very wrong. The survivors of the 100-odd high school and college students have to settle down and figure out some kind of long term solution for survival. Rod's is pushed aside in favor of a smooth talking college kid, who's early attempt at democracy becomes mired in committees and social niceties, like building houses for newlyweds rather than a defensive wall. The colony is well on its way to becoming a stone age society, when a seasonal migration of 'dopey joes' turns a previously harmless species into a vicious killer. Rod is vindicated, and becomes mayor of their colony for a year, when the gate reopens and suddenly he is no longer an independent leader on a frontier world, but a kid again, with all that that entails.

There are lots of hints of ideas that Heinlein would develop in later works. The themes of power and responsibility in Starship Troopers, the frontier space colonies of Time Enough for Love, and the survivalism of Farnham's Freehold. Heinlein has lighter touch on these topics, focusing more on the coming of age of his protagonists. There are some missteps, the characterization is a little thin, and who stole Rod's survival gear is a dropped thread. Heinlein's attitudes on gender and race are progressive for their time, but they haven't aged very well. His female characters (Caroline, Jack), are the equals of the men, but it takes Rod some time to get over his prejudices against women. Even so, men hunt and women cook. The 'yellow hordes' bit in the beginning is not great, but according to a letter from Heinlein Rod is canonically African-American, which is solid for a book published a year after Brown v. Board of Education.

A classic of popular sociology and underworld linguistics, Maurer takes us inside the world of the big con. In its heydey in the 1920s, mobs of organized grifters would set up elaborate fake betting shops, poker dens, and stock exchanges, where traveling marks identified by "ropers" would be sent in to turn over the life savings to the machinations of the "insideman", the chief grifter of a city. Cons works on any man with larceny in his heart, a desire to win some money on a sure thing.

By training, Maurer was a linguists, and there's poetry in the thieves cant. "Never boast about your rags, but brag about your long crush. That will lead him along to brag about his long hack, and then you're getting somewhere, brother. If he is a hard-shelled Babbitt, why you're one too." Even the names, The Yellow Kid Weil, Limehouse Chappie, The High Ass Kid, convey a romanticism of the lost past, and of the grift mobs who stole with deception rather than force. For the grift is an art, an alternate reality where more money is just around the corner. It's rather fascinating to compare the Big Shops to the online deceptions of modern scammers like Derek Alldred and the romance of this book against the sordid lies of reality.