The Princess Bride (the movie) is a beloved classic with something for everyone. Adventure, romance, swordfights, kissing, Andre the Giant. It's one of those movies I can watch in my head. The book is... quite different. Well, the heart of it is the same beloved story, but the meta-textual framing is totally different. No longer a grandpa reading the story to his sick grandson, it's Goldman's abridgment of S. Morgenstern's novel, as read to him by his (fictitious) immigrant father, and redone for his (fictitious) son. The "original" novel has all the trilling adventure, but they're separated by hundreds of pages of (now elided) historical and political satire about the Kingdom of Florin.

It's a good story. But the thing is that it was done perfectly in the film adaptation, and the additional material serves mostly to round out the character of Prince Humperdink, who doesn't need it in the slightest. The meta-story is just not as good. And the new material, the introductions to the 25th and 30th anniversary editions, and the partial sequel Buttercup's Baby, are totally unnecessary and actually detract from the whole.

If this is the edition you've got, read it, you'll like it. But just read the real book and skip the rest.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy are figures linked by great achievement and greater tragedy. Their twin assassinations in 1968 seemed to close the door on a better America, leading directly to the paranoid and destructive Nixon administration. They were two major figures in the civil rights movement, and at first glance a parallel biography seems a fine idea. However, as Margolick discusses in the opening, the parallels are weaker than they seem. King and Kennedy communicated relatively rarely, and mostly in official capacities. They were mostly adversaries on civil rights, barely allies, and certainly not friends. While the Kennedy archive is voluminous and staffed with helpful experts, the King Paper Project has only published their sources up to 1962. This, combined with Margolick's own youth in a conservative New England town where Civil Rights was distant agitation, results in an unbalanced book that is a fine character study of Bobby Kennedy, and merely decent on King. The connection between the two is mostly ether.

First Bobby. Raised in privilege as part of Joe Kennedy's sprawling family, Bobby was thrust both forward and into a supporting role. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. was the heir, until he was killed in WW2, and then John was the Kennedy to be President. Bobby got a law degree, and then through his father's connections joined Senator McCarthy's infamous investigation, where he investigated communist infiltration and links between labor and organized crime. Bobby was always the hardest of the Kennedy boys, "Ruthless" the most common adjective to describe him. As Attorney General during the Civil Rights Era, he was in favor of order over change, and only reluctantly ordered Federal law enforcement to protect the Freedom Riders and other anti-segregation protesters. In the great error of his life, he approved FBI surveillance of King.

But Kennedy's black and white morality included a capacity for change, and with his brother's assassination, and his own election to Senate, he became a staunch critic of injustice everywhere, speaking against Apartheid South Africa, poverty in America, and the escalating Vietnam War. Bobby was one of the most forceful advocates for He seemed to truly connect with the youth, and his campaign in 1968 may have well defeated both Vice President Hubert Humphrey and the future President Nixon, till he was slain by an assassin's bullet.

Martin Luther King, Jr was born to an important and egotistical preacher, but the senior King was nowhere near Joseph Kennedy Sr., and no black man could rise far in Jim Crow America. King could have been a comfortable minister to the black middle class, but the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated the power of non-violent direct action, and King rose on the strength of his charisma and vision to fight segregation across the South, and lead the 1963 Million Man March on Washington DC and the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. His vision was not matched by his organizational chops, and he found himself outflanked by the street-tough Black Power advocates from Northern cities, and alienated from his wealthy liberal backers as he turned increasingly against the war in Vietnam. King was organizing a massive white and black 'poor man's movement' when the assassin's bullet he long expected found him and made him a martyr.

This is a good book, but as I said, unbalanced. Kennedy's moral progress is followed in agonizing detail. King's struggles, with other figures in the civil rights movement, with the powers that be, with his own philosophy of love and non-violence against the brutality of "Bull" Connor and others like him, is treated abruptly and mostly with cliched references towards Gandhi. It's a good book, but far from being great.

Call this a 3.5 star book which I'm rounding up because I'm feeling generous.

Kelsea has spent her 19 years living in isolation in the woods with a pair of kindly stepparents when a gang of armed knights show up and announce "You're the queen, it's time to take the crown, come with us. Also men are trying to kill you." What follows is a fairy-tale inspired fantasy romp with dark undertones. Kelsea's mother the queen was weak and feckless, and her uncle the regent worse. The people suffer and nobles prosper. Every kind of vice and corruption is endemic. And it all stretches back to an horrific treaty that promises 10,000 captives a year to an evil Sorcerer Queen. Fortunately Kelsea has enough loyal retainers, a 19 year old's arrogance and snark, and a magic necklace. She rights wrongs, kicks ass, and avoids dying.

There are some cool hints in the world-building that this might actually be a science-fiction story, that Tear and the other kingdoms are a spacefaring colony from Earth, and that magic is remnants of hidden technology. Or it could be standard fantasy magic. Regardless, in the first book it's just hints and not much to build on. The books are in a weird place. Fans of baroque politics and grim revenge a la A Game of Thones are going to be disappointed by a thin setting. Yet there's more rape and sex crimes than I'd feel comfortable going with in a YA book. And it commits my least favorite fantasy world sin, where the only Sane and Justice Person In The Room has 21st century values rather than something more appropriate, like "L'état, c'est moi."

Still, it moves, it's fun, and I don't regret the time spent.

This a fantastic introduction to machine learning.

Textbooks in computer science in general, and machine learning in particular, have to walk a delicate line. At one level of high abstraction, everything is mathematical proofs. At a level of low-level cookbookls, it's a matter of just plugging and chugging, treating code as magical invocations without getting at the why. Raschka's book hits the sweet spot between the two exactly, explaining the underlying math, how that math is represented in Python, and then what to call in scikit-learn and tensorflow to actually do it.

Raschka assumes a little familiarity with Python (you should have Anaconda installed, know how to use functions, the basics of classes, what a list comprehension is and why it's cool, as well as the basics of manipulating pandas dataframes) and enough math to not be scared by statistics and matrix notation, but beyond that, everything is clear and elegant. I found Chapter 6, on model evaluation, hyperparameter tuning, and grid search particularly useful as a summary of what to do with simple numerical data with scikitlearn. The later chapters of the book provide the fundamentals of natural language processing and the use of multilayer neural networks and deep convolutional networks to classify images, as well as the unreasonable effectiveness of recurrent neural networks on a variety of tasks.

This is an incredible book. The only thing that prevents it from getting 6 stars is a lack of example problems, but that is what Kaggle is for.

This is one of the most ambitious book I've read in a while. Alder tackles the origins of engineering as a discipline, the purported inevitability of interchangeable parts and mass production, and the formation of the French Revolutionary state through the artifact of the gun (both artillery and muskets). Taking as a starting point Langdon Winner's question "Do artefacts have politics?", Alder demonstrates that mastery over the 'thick' world of material objects via mechanical drawings, mathematical description, and the tools of analytic theory is intensely political.

This is not a book for the faint of heart. It's long, dense, and prior background in the history of technology and the structure of the Ancien Regime is necessary. But for all that, it's a masterpiece of scholarship.

"What if Biden and Obama teamed up to solve mysteries?" is the very definition of high concept farce. It's also a solid regriftance sales pitch in 2018. This book was pretty solidly average. There's two major approaches that I could imagine following that tagline. One is to do an absurdist, Clancy-esque techno thriller starring someone like The Onion's Diamond Joe Biden. The other is to do a low key realistic novel. Shaffer chose the latter, and I think the story suffers.

Stripped of the presidential trappings, a 75 year old recently retired man is having trouble in life after leaving his job and losing touch with his best friend from work. The sudden death of an old friend, an Amtrak conductor, prompts him to start to investigate, leading him through the seedy side of Wilmington Delaware and a criminal conspiracy involving a motorcycle gang, crooked cops, an insurance investigator, and a chance to bond with his lost friend from work in an armored Escalade. But taken as a mystery, the story doesn't amount to much. All the investigation goes nowhere, until Joe receives a letter from his dead friend explaining the criminal conspiracy. There's a pretty good fight on an the Acela, but that's it.

And from the high concept side, as an exploration of Biden and Obama's friendship, I never really felt like it was more than a shallow caricature of these guys. The only part that really worked were the Amtrak Joe bits.

Masters of the Air is an well-deserved classic of military history, focusing on the Eighth Air Force, the United States strategic bomber arm that was the first American unit to bring the war to Nazi Germany, and which pioneered the tactics and techniques of strategic bombing.

By all reason, the strategic air campaign should not have worked. Army Air Corps doctrine in the late 30s was built around three major pillars: the heavily armed B-17 Flying Fortress was 'self-escorting' and could fend off hostile fighters; the gyroscopic Norden bombsite could hit pinpoint targets with accuracy; and precision attacks on 'vital centers' of industry could cripple an enemy military without the need for battles of attrition. All three of these assumptions would be proven wrong in the skies over German, with deadly consequences for the men who had been trained and equipped on them.

The cloudless skies of test ranges over the American southwest were nothing like the weather over England and Germany. Men froze in the stratospheric slipstream, and bombers were lost in rapidly changing weather conditions. Flak and fighters ripped through the B-17 and B-24s, inflicting proportional casualties as high as any duty in the war, matched only by submarine crews. Nazi industry proved surprisingly resilient. Yet even if every specific of pre-war doctrine was wrong, the bombers succeeded in their most important tasks. Defense against bombers escorted by P-51s in the months leading up to Overlord deciminated the Luftwaffe, and the landings were unopposed from the air. The transport and oil campaigns feel short of paralyzing the Nazi war machine, but delay and friction impeded the panzers, and gave the Normandy beachhead time to stabilize and expand. And the thousands of heavy guns shooting at the sky, and not T-34s on the steppes, had some helpful effect on the Eastern Front.

Miller was inspired to write this book in part by his friendship with Lt. Col. Robert "Rosie" Rosenthal of the "Bloody 100th" Bombardment Wing, and this book shines in depicting the human side of the Eighth. It was a whole new kind of warfare. Crews would take off in English fog, endure hours of torment over Europe, return, and potentially be in London with a pretty girl by evening. War at the limits of technology was intensely dangerous. The first teams, dispatched in 1943, had a one in five chance of completing the required 25 missions. Frostbite, flak, and fighters were the three terrors of this aerial front. Showcase raids, like Schweinfurt–Regensburg and Ploesti, caused terrible losses for temporary results. The courage that it took to fly straight and level, holding formation through the worst, was like something out of Napoleonic warfare, standing in ranks to take fire. Bomber crews were teams as tightly knit as any on Earth. Along with the flying, there are stories about leaves around England, the traditions of the bases, and the devotion of the men to each other.

But the mission was murder. Thousands of the bomber boys died in combat, and many more were grievously wounded, or held captive in Nazi POW camps (this book does not neglect the POW perspective). And point military targets soon shifted to area targets like railyards and factories in German cities, and in the last months of the war 'morale bombings' to break the will of the German people, a campaign of terror through mass civilian death. Miller tries to draw a distinction between the goals of the Eight Air Force and the RAF's city-busting campaigns under "Bomber" Harris, but I'm not sure the Brits deserve that characterization. Area bombing against civilians is a war crime, and we can recognize that without the slide into the fallacy that there's no difference between the air campaign and the Holocaust.

In the end, strategic bombing failed in its goal of shorter, cleaner wars. Attrition moved from the trenches to the skies. But the men who flew those missions were a rare breed. There are damn few of them left. Both my grandfathers served in WW2, one in the Pacific, and one was never deployed. I'm a member of the Commemorative Air Force, which keeps a B-17, Sentimental Journey, flying. This book has deepened my appreciation of airpower, the mission, and especially the men.

Saboteur Extraordinary McKie is back, in a much better sequel that focuses on a more interesting part of the ConSentiency universe. The planet of Dosadi has been locked away for generations, an experiment in applied social science that has gone tremendously wrong. McKei has been sent in to clean it up, though the ultimate motive behind his mission is a mystery.

Dosadi as a planet is like Dune on steroids, a punishingly deadly environment where simple survival has attuned its inhabitants to superhuman levels of competence. Keila Jedrik is the most Machiavellian of its inhabitants, and she leads an organization to break free and get revenge on whoever put her on Dosadi at any cost. Keila suborns McKie almost instantaneously, outplans her opponents with a mental facility which would put an Mentat to shame, and engineers an escape with McKie, who she merges egos with.

Then it's up to McKie to reveal the truth in a mortal courtroom drama. The toadlike Gowachins have an attitude of 'respectful disrespect' towards the law, and McKie is the only human ever admitted to their ranks of Legums. In the Gowachin court-arena, failure is punished with death, and the knife can be turned on defendant, plaintiff, witness, legum, and/or judge. The crime of Dosadi is not the intensive prison-planet environment, but that it serves as the raw material for a body-swapping immortality ring that is the real secret power in politics. The courtroom drama is quite tense, but the whole thing exists to make Herbert's points about power, and how it is too dangerous to put in the hands of mere humans, but also disastrous to hand over to any bureaucratic entity or superhuman. The whole thing feels like a cartoonish first draft of the ideas in God Emperor of Dune, and let's be real; if you're reading this book, you've already read all of the Dune books, and even some of the KJA ones.

I'll admit to being fascinated by Russian strategy and hardware; Deep Battle, all those MiGs, the menacing bulk of a T-72, the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War. Russian tactics might even had some advantages at home, as Curry's blog post on Warsaw Pact tactics in Wargaming discusses. "The correct application of Russian tactics can undermine the morale of opponents. I first noticed this at a free kriegspiel invasion of the Isle of Wight, where as a Russian advisor I planned the invasion force to arrive in the same order as the order of march of a Soviet regiment. It took me 15 minutes to produce the shipping and logistic plan based on Soviet doctrine. Apparently, the other HQ found it most off putting for their opponents to plan so quickly and then be so confident as to sit around drinking beer for the next two hours." And what with geopolitics as they are, you never know when you might be called on to defend Estonia.

Dr. Grau is one of the major figures of Russian military studies, and Bartles is a solidly rising scholar. This is a serious, if dry account of Russian force structure and doctrine. They start with personnel policy. The Russian military is dependent on conscripts, with more of the 'shooters' being long term contract NCOs. Compared to Western armies, officers are more specialized and directly involved in combat. Commanders do more of the explicit positioning and direction of units than in a US-style staff-centered approach. Officers are specialists within a major branch, with a distinction between General Staff and line officers. Russian doctrine should not be stereotyped as simple and mechanical. Rather, it follows basic Clausewitzian principles on the importance of mass, unity of command, and speed in the execution of basic tactical maneuvers to dominate the enemy.

The majority of the book is concerned with the use of the Motorized Rifle Brigade in the attack and defense. The MRB is the basic maneuver element of the Russian Army, and equivalent to a US Brigade Combat Team. I can't say which one would win, but the MRB packs a lot of artillery, a lot of infantry fighting vehicles, and Russians love their thermobaric rockets. The multilayered air defense network is also something

If I have any problems with this book, it's a rather uncritical take on Russian procurement. Grau and Bartles argue that Russia is able to achieve miracles of speed and commonality in deployment, with five-year pipelines for the acquisition of major systems like the T-14 Armata Main Battle Tank, as well as a common architecture for armored vehicle turrets and software defined radios. GLONASS guided artillery shells are supposedly $1000 a pop, compared to $80,000 for the US equivalent. I'm not saying the US Military Industrial Complex is good (it's not), but I'm skeptical a much poorer Russia is able to achieve order of magnitude improvements over Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The T-14 breaking down in Red Square in 2015 is not encouraging, along with the near cancellation of the Su-57 stealth fighter. On the other hand, Russia appears quite adept at refitting older Soviet-era trucks and tanks, and an artillery shell doesn't need to be state of the art to kill you dead.

Finally, this book focuses mainly on maneuver warfare, with relatively little on information operations, hybrid warfare, and how the Russian military has been used as political weight in the near-abroad. But for what it does, it's aces.

Henry Kissinger is the grand doyen of the 'Realist' school of US Foreign Policy. One of the pillars of realism, along with an anarchic and security-centric view of states and their interests, is that high level bilateral negotiations by intelligent and empowered plenipotentiary, can achieve successful foreign policy. Kissinger's role in the the ending of the Vietnam War should be a prime example. After all, he got a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end, peace with honor and all of that. Anything that happened after the American withdrawal was not his fault. Right?

Yeah, right. In this book drawing on a close read of the historical record and new archival sources, Brigham shows that Kissinger failed in every single one of his major goals in the negotiations. His paranoid personal style cut key stakeholders out of negotiations, meaning that there was no broad support for his treaty in the American bureaucracy, the public mind, or especially South Vietnam. Kissinger was a major driver of military escalations, which caused immense suffering without commensurate military or diplomatic benefits. Kissinger had a weak hand, but he played it poorly, dragging out the end of the war.

The American objectives for a political resolution of the war was a peace covering Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, mutual withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese forces, the recognition of South Vietnam as an independent nation with a border at the DMZ, and return of American prisoners of war. Of these, he accomplished only the last. North Vietnamese goals were more flexible, but their essential core was recognition of NVA forces on the ground and a weak political outcome for South Vietnam that would lead to unification on Communist terms.

The major sticking point was the removal of South Vietnamese leaders Thieu and Ky. The hardline North Vietnamese position was that their removal was a prerequisite for negotiations and forming a provisional government that contained the National Liberation Front. Negotiations dragged on for years. For obvious reasons, Kissinger refused to throw Thieu under the bus, but he also never engaged with the possibilities of South Vietnamese politics. The South Vietnamese were very much junior partners in their own fate, and their job was to accept whatever deal Kissinger negotiated.

Meanwhile, with every month that passed, more American troops left South Vietnam, and Kissinger's military leverage deteriorated. Domestic political concerns drove the negotiating position. North Vietnam didn't need to agree to mutual withdrawals, they simply had to outwait the American public. As his military bargain cards slipped away, Kissinger was a strenuous advocate for enlarging the war; secretly bombing Cambodia, invading Laos, and area bombing of North Vietnam in Linebacker and Linebacker II. For what it's worth, Kissinger was right that a maximum pressure air campaign in Vietnam would not lead to Chinese intervention and World War III, especially as a response to the massive conventional Easter Offensive in 1972, but there were no diplomatic results from this coercion. The victims died for Kissinger's ambition.

In the end, as conventional wisdom puts it, "We bombed them into accepting their concession." The final treaty accepted the victories of the NVA, allowing ten divisions to remain in South Vietnam, along with the supply routes through Laos and Cambodia. The political resolution was deliberately vague, and a clear victory for North Vietnam. While they did not get their non-Thieu provisional government, there were no mechanisms to defend South Vietnam, aside from Nixon's word of honor. The political outcome would be settled, finally, as NVA tanks rolled into Saigon in 1975 and America did nothing.

Kissinger was a mediocre negotiator at the close of the Vietnam War. He was much more adept at managing upwards, playing to Nixon's distrust of bureaucracy, love of intrigue and military options, and siege-mentality paranoia. Kissinger has also been adept at shaping the historical record to conceal his basic failure in seeking a settlement. The facts on the ground were the facts on the ground, and Kissinger failed to change them militarily. Rather than bold genius, his negotiation tactics were ineffective and conventional, and ultimately a fig-leaf over a drawn out American defeat. The lessons here are lessons in what not to do.