Call to Arms follows up Duel in the Dark with few surprises or literary merits. Dauntless has spent weeks in dock being repaired. Meanwhile, the war against the Union is going poorly, as seemingly endless waves of battleships and fighters pour out of the wormholes. The Confederation is forced backwards, from one stand after another.

Dauntless rendezvouses at the scene of the last battle, and with the help of the Intrepid, a friendly battleship hiding in a dust cloud, destroys a major supply convoy and finds a major clue to the strategic situation in a captured database. The Union's impossible offensive is being supported by a massive secret mobile supply base. The two Confederate battleships must launch a desperate assault to stem the tide of enemy reinforcements.

Call to Arms has all the flaws of the first book in the series, and few new charms. Aside from a gesture that logistics matter (which honestly is appreciated), the war is Midway in Space. Characters are two dimensional, with the addition of a required fighter pilot rivalry, and a "good" spymaster who usurps the constitution because that's what survival needs. The Union are the USSR in space, except they all have French names (wow, much creativity).

I guess my biggest problem with this series, aside from the generally average writing, is how much the spacecraft seem to run on the will of the captain. The main battery is broken, until it's really vital to get a shot. The interceptors will take 20 minutes to prep for launch, but you can do it in 10 if you try hard enough. Engines and guns are pushed to 110% charge, with no sense that these are delicate machines that are being burnt out for a tactical advantage. I want to sit Allan down with a copy of Shattered Sword and explain that this what heroism looks like, under the parameter's you've sketched.

Is there a way to leave an ebook at the beach?

George Orr is a very ordinary man with a problem. His dreams reshape reality. He wants to stop, but an encounter with an unethical psychotherapist sets Orr and the Earth on a dangerous course, as Orr's dreams are used again and again to "improve" the world, finding solutions to dangerous problems. There's a lot of joy watching Le Guin shuffle her dystopian setting cards-overpopulation, plagues, war, alien invasion, a megalomaniacal tyranny. There's some interesting stuff about dreams, power, what changes and what is invariant. An odd book, but short enough not to wear out its welcome.

The middle book in a trilogy is always challenging. You've got to build on what made the first book good, while changing enough to keep things fresh, while setting up the end-game. City of Blades is a good, but lacks the absolute unity of purpose of the first book.

General Mulaghesh is called out of retirement for an inspection tour of Voortyashtan. Once the holy city of the fearsome Goddess of War, it's now the armpit of the continent, with a host of standard problems, like unruly natives and ambitious redevelopment projects, and weird problems, like the discovery of a strange alloy with super-conductive properties, and the madness and disappearance of a Ministry of Foreign Affairs agent.

Mulaghesh is plunged into a multi-sided intrigue, involving an old comrade in arms and war-crimes, Sigurd's daughter, a brilliant engineer and businesswoman, and the legacy of Voortya and the promise of the Final War. The plotting and characterization is solid, exactly what I'd expect, but the thematic unity isn't there.

Mulaghesh is haunted by the experience that made her a soldier, the Yellow March. When her unit got cut-off behind enemy lines, her commander (who is now the general in charge of Voortyashan) decided on a scorched earth strategy to disrupt enemy supply lines that quickly became a rolling massacre against civilians. The strategy won the war, but those with blood on her hand were swept aside by high command. Mulaghesh spent her career trying to right that wrong, on the premise that "a soldier serves". Her counterparts, the general in charge, the Goddess of War herself, believe that "a soldier takes." I'm not saying that I disagree with Bennett's argument here, but I do a lot of reading in this space, and I think that there's something more interesting to be said about the nature of an occupying military force on an indefinite mission to change a foreign culture, both in the universe of the Divine Cities, and as it related to our own unending War on Terror.

The good news is that Book 3 is right back on track.

"You Gotta Be Shitting Me!" was what one Wild Weasel uttered when he was informed of his mission, dueling the sophisticated SA-2 missile systems that ringed Hanoi so that strike packages could do their work. The Weasels suffered a 50% loss rate from Rolling Thunder through Linebacker II, evolving tactics and technology to stay ahead of the Vietnamese air defense system.

There are some bits that really work, like the opening narration from the NVA/Soviet point of view, on the complex technical process of dialing in an SA-2 (which you can follow along at home). And a few of the combat narratives come together, the frantic efforts to sort out the beeps and buzzes of experimental threat indicator scopes and spot a SAM site before it locks on and kills you. But the rest of the book is an uneasy mash of war stories, a second-hand history of the Vietnam War with a strongly revisionist bent, and not much analysis of the unique mission of the Weasels, or how they did it.

Hampton is pretty good at writing aviation fiction, but he should stay away from history. The best that I can say is that at $2, this is a lot more accessible than Col. Rock's First In, Last Out, and it is not painfully dry like reading a late 60s electronics manual.

City of Miracles stops circling and cuts to the heart of the The Divine City trilogy, the nature of the gods, and the nature of justice. It opens explosively, literally, as an assassin uses a bomb to kill ex-prime minister (and protagonist from the first novel) Shara. Sigurd, who has been living underground as a wandering manual laborer, now has one last mission: REVENGE.

Of course, it isn't that simple. The job against Shara was more than politics, it relates to that fate of the Divine on the continent, and the children of the dead gods. Most are wandering orphans trapped in perennial childhood, but one, Nokov, god of the night, was found and turned into a weapon by the Saypuri military decades ago. Now, he seeks to ascend to his full power, and Sigurd and few desperate refugees are all that stands in his way. Sigurd has to make sense of a career of desperate violence, his strange history with the divine, and the nature of power, as he tracks down the ultimate conspiracy.

Mothers & Other Monsters is domesticity redone through a science-fiction lens. McHugh runs to recurrent themes like a sore tooth: troubled adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, middle-aged women forced to care for someone ravaged by Alzheimer's. Fear, and love, and the ideals that people always fail to live up. She has some talent as a writer, except that she really struggles with endings. Her stories don't end, so much as close with a quick-jab to the solar plexus, a gasp of realization that it always was going to be that way, that everyone is trapped by their history.

The FBI has a carefully curated image as heroic G-men, busting major criminals like mafia dons, bank robbers, kidnappers, and art thieves (hello Robert K. Wittman). But behind the image is a paradox, the workings of a secret police agency in a democracy, a shadowy organization that operates beyond the normal boundaries of the law. In Enemies, Tim Weiner ably traces the paradoxes of the FBI in its long history.

The Bureau of Investigation (not yet Federal) existed before J. Edgar Hoover, but the first director left such a mark on the FBI that's his story is its story. Hoover joined a minor agency, and in the turbulent era of anarchist bombers and Communist revolutionaries around the First World War, turned it into a crack machine for targeting subversives of all stripes. Hoover pioneered wiretaps and blackbag jobs, and a voluminous system of secret files directly under his control. FDR called on Hoover to track down Nazi agents, and the two formed a partnership based on political gossip secret intelligence. The period immediately after the Second World War was perhaps the most influential for Hoover, as he used artful leaks to frame the emerging Cold War, and made his anti-Communist views the dominant framework of the American government.

Hoover ardently believed that Communists aimed to overthrow the American government, and that there was a direct line between Moscow and the American Left (including labor and civil rights activists). Furthermore, a rash of breeches at the CIA convinced Hoover that Communism and homosexuality were linked as well. Hoover's war on "deviance" prompted spying into the private lives of American citizens, especially Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the massive COINTELPRO campaign to subvert and disorganize the American left. Though the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Hoover formed partnerships with Vice President and then President Nixon based on anti-communism, and LBJ based on political intrigue. Hoover was the man who knew all the secrets.

The twin blows of his death in 1972, and the Watergate burglary, where ex-FBI Nixon staffers ran into a newly independent FBI investigation, prompted the first crisis of faith, one from which the FBI has never really recovered. It turned out that the FBI's crown jewels of wiretapping and blackbag jobs had no Constitutional legitimacy or legislative basis. COINTELPRO was massively illegal. Despite all the effort involved in fighting Communism, FBI counter-intelligence was a shambles, and people with access to secrets across the government sold out to the Soviets again and again.

Since 1980, and especially since 9/11, the FBI has repeatedly tried to reorganize itself as a counter-terrorism intelligence agency, mostly to resounding failure. Weiner documents bureaucratic fiefdoms that refuse to communicate, agents without the touch to work confidential sources well, analysts who can't access materials due to outdated computer systems, and a lack of clarity and purpose that stretches for decades. Most cuttingly, prior to 9/11 the FBI and CIA anti-Al Qaeda units hated each other. When the FBI agent in charge died in the WTC attacks, his CIA counterpart said that his death was "the only good thing that happened that day." Despite a worldwide presence, thousands of agents, and billion dollar budgets, the FBI's vaunted successes in the War on Terror seem mostly to be about entrapping mentally ill Muslims into terror plots where the FBI supplies the plan, the weapons, and even the Jihadi rhetoric.

Weiner's book forces us to confront an expensive and painful legacy of failure, an undemocratic erosion of freedoms that has not even brought much security. Yet there's a vagueness about what he thinks intelligence should do, vis a vis subversives and terrorists, that weakens his argument. This is only a partial history, because the FBI does investigate and arrest common criminals. And finally, while it's easy to direct the apparatus of a secret police against unpopular subversives, we need more and better investigations of white collar crime and financial fraud, particularly in the wake of 2008 financial collapse. Enemies is an important part of the picture, and likely the sexiest and most interesting part of the picture, but it is only one part.

Sapiens is a grand history of mankind from a perspective of 100 kilometers up. It is fun and readable, and ably synthesizes several theorists. It is also likely wrong in detail, pessimistic in outlook, and derivative of previous scholarship without doing much to situate itself as advancing the scholarly debate.

Harari begins boldly enough, noting that as recently as 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was just one of several hominid species on Earth, and qualitatively no different from any other mid-sized animal. We had tool use, but so did erectus, social structures, but so did neanderthalensis. And as far as food chains went, humans were pretty squarely in the middle. While anatomically modern humans existed as far back as 200,000 years ago, Harari deems the thing that changed somewhere between 70,000 and 30,000 years in the past the cognitive revolution. Language became more fluid, capable of encompassing a category of things that do not exist, and coordinating the actions of large numbers of loosely related groups. Culture, in all it's varieties, bloomed, and with it came massive extinctions, as the suddenly superior sapiens wiped out all other hominids, and the megafauna of the Americas and Australia.

The next revolution was the agricultural revolution. Wheat, barley, rice, and potatoes enabled settled agriculturalists to massively increase their population density. Agricultural communities had kings, laws, and armies, which they used to push back the hunter-gatherer society. This revolution was, as Harari puts it, the greatest fraud in history. Population increased 10-fold, but quality of life declined, as people worked longer hours and suffered more famine, more violence, more oppression. This greatest fraud was recapitulated again and again, in the scientific revolution which turned ignorance into a resource to be exploited, the capitalist credit revolution which made the future itself fertile terrain, and the industrial revolution, which turned the fossil resources of past eons into fuel for the capitalist engine.

The nature of scientific and technological revolutions is something which I actually know a thing or two about (at least if you trust the PhD after my name), and while the general arc of Harari's narrative isn't incorrect, in any specific detail of when knowledge and/or technology changed, and the forces behind it, his facts are firmly in the "lies for children" range of what is accepted. But even he admits that. To paraphrase, history cannot answer "why", and the more that you know about the actual circumstances of a period, the less confident you are in explanations.

I understand this a popular book, and so it's not really about being placed in any sort of scholarly discourse, but I feel like I read this book already. Here's the part lifted from Dawkins, here's Jared Diamond, hello David Graeber, nice to see you Francis Fukuyama. And this would be okay, except that Harari fails to stake out a unique position of his own. He foregrounds culture, and particularly intersubjective imaginaries (things that people as a group believe in; religions, nations, laws, corporations, scientific theories), but fails to press forward either a critique or apologia for the dominant humanist ideologies of capitalism and liberal humanism. Harari is pessimist about the basic premise of progress, but buys into Steven Pinker's framing that qualitatively things are getting better. He argues for the importance of biological and evolutionary approaches to quality of life, while saying that human happiness is both the key to everything and a neurochemical illusion.

And most of all, the overall framing is just a less ambitious version of Charles Stross' theory of history (on a blog post I cannot find right now). I love the shit out of Charlie, but he's a Scottish scifi author, and Sapiens is racking up the big awards and blurbs. Be more interesting.

I'm the kind of person who has Opinions about sushi; Expensive opinions which are best described by the omakase course at Sushi Tsujita on Sawtelle in Los Angeles. So a book about sushi is very much my style. Corson frames the past, present, and science of sushi around the 12-week course at the California Sushi Academy (operated by legendary chef Toshi Sugiura, once sushi chef to the stars).

The history is fascinating. Sushi evolved from a dish of fish fermented in a box of rice for months to a form prizing freshness and bite-sized perfect that we'd recognize in 19th century Japan. The word itself refers to the rice, not the fish. Tokyo-style sushi got a major boost during the post-war occupation, when MacArthur's occupational government approved a standardized plan which allowed sushi stalls to prepare meals using people's limited rice rations. Entrepreneurs in the 80s, including Toshi, found a way to translate exotic raw seafood to American tastes, though not without a lot of editing of the Japanese sushi tradition. Giant rolls drenched in spicy mayo and crunchy tempura bits would be anathema to traditionalists. In Japan, sushi bars are an ultra-masculine place defined by the relationships between the chef and the regulars. America has pioneered innovations like 'all you can eat', sushi boats, and the Rainbow Roll. To meet demand for trained sushi chefs, and to hold back the absolute vestiges of spicy tuna roll barbarity, Toshi compressed the multiyear apprenticeship into a 12 week course open to anyone.

We follow Kate, a 20 year old white girl from San Diego, as she ventures into the very male and very Japanese world of the sushi chef. I'll admit that I didn't much care for Kate initially; she's afraid of her knives, and seems to be a bit of flake. But she preservers, graduates, and gets a job as a chef. Meanwhile, we learn all about the messy process of cleaning meats, the magic of the perfect nigiri, and the science of why fish on rice tastes so good, and why under no circumstances should you make a paste of wasabi and soy sauce and smash your sushi in it.

Corson touches on the problems of overfishing, fish farming, and the problems of rising demand for sushi and falling standards of production. I think a world where more people are eating sushi is a better world, and Corson gives a sense of how even Des Moines can have good sushi.

Keegan is still the preeminent military history, and in this grand and sprawling book he attempts a synthetic history of warfare from the pre-historic dawn to the atomic age. Boldly staking a claim that Clausewitz's famous epigram "war is the continuation of politics by other means" is substantially misguided, a parallel to Marx's misguided grand theory of history, he instead provides a tour through four different types of warfare that is a lot of fun, but on the whole not terribly convincing.

Keegan begins in pre-history. Although the anthropological record makes it difficult to draw precise conclusions about prehistorical warfare, the extinction of North American megafauna provides clear evidence that mankind was a deadly killer, while ancient burials of people killed by flint points indicates that these tools were used against humans. Anthropological studies of hunter-gatherers in the Amazon and Papua New Guinea reveal that violence is endemic, though war is carefully circumscribed by rituals and taboos that describe how violence can be escalated, and where its limits are. This war is typically an arranged skirmish with relatively flimsy ranged weapons which can be easily dodged, and is fought to avenge an insult or for the sheer joy of it.

The first military technology revolution was the combination of the composite bow and chariot, which along with bronze armor and weapons, made a small military elite truly invincible in combat, able to circle masses of foot-soldiers and pick them off at will. Cavalry replaced chariots, but the light missile cavalry solidified as one of the dominant military strategies on Earth, as waves of steppe nomads from the Scythians to the Mongols poured out from endless plains to raid settled lands, occasionally invading and supplanting the existing rulers. In Keegan's reading, steppe nomads fought war not to rule, but because they enjoyed war itself, and the plunder was more lucrative than trading. When they did conquer, as in Turkey, they set up microcosmic steppe camps in the center of their palaces.

Against the Oriental style of the steppe nomads, Keegan puts the Western style of the Greek phalanx and Roman legion, where armored infantry (and later heavy cavalry) sought a decisive clash of arms. The Western style was not without it's mysticism. Keegan suggests the Greeks sought to limit wars to battles which could be resolved quickly, on prearranged flat spaces, rather than lengthy campaigns to despoil the countryside. Rome raised infantry to an imperial power, while the Dark Ages successors were caught between precepts of Christian pacifism and feudal notions of honor.

Western and Oriental styles of war existed in uneasy equilibrium. Heavy infantry could not successful invade steppe lands, but nomadic forces required huge herds of remounts, and could not sustain themselves in settled territories. The fourth style of army, the gunpowder armies that developed from the mercenary companies of 15th central Europe into the royal regiments of new nation-states, were something different. Drill and technology combined the ranged firepower of nomads with the endurance of heavy infantry. Military discipline could be mastered in a matter of weeks, as opposed to a lifetime of training. Only in the Napoleonic Wars does Keegan see Clausewitz's unit of politics and warfare, as the French revolution mobilized the entire people for military purposes. The logic of mass mobilization reached its zenith in the total wars of the 20th century: the slaughter along the Western Front of WW1, the genocides and aerial bombings of WW2, and the atomic apocalypse of a future WW3.

Written in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of high-tech interventionism that the Gulf War, Keegan can't foresee the rise of terrorism and the endless 'hybrid wars' of the 21st century. And while the book is enjoyable, if so very Orientalist, Keegan's argument is weakened by the narrowness of his definition of politics, which seem to be something only states and ministers can engage in. Rather, a more expansive definition of politics (I like the "art of reconciling human aspirations") shows that organized violence, even in the absence of states, can be political, and that cannons speak when words cannot be reconciled. As much as he claims to banish a false 'grand theory', Keegan raises another one weakly grounded on culture, that does not bear much rigor.