Bradford was a 20th century British popular historian who had the luck (good or bad) to get his works snatched up by a bunch of ebook publishers. I like battleships and had insomnia, so I read this book. What it is a quick skim over the history of major warships, from the first use of broadsides in battle with the Galleon of Venice in the 16th century, to the last battleship in the HMS Vanguard.

Bradford skims quickly through history, each century gets about two chapters, focused on a major action. The narrative is Britain-centric, with the Armada, Nelson, and the Dreadnought race taking center stage. Guns and armor predominate over communications, accurate gunnery, and strategic considerations. I was glad to get an origin for the odd preponderance of rams from 1865-1900; the Battle of Lissa where an Austrian fleet got in among an incompetently lead Italian fleet and went ham.

Otherwise, well pleasant way to spend a few hours for a hobbyist, but that's about it.

Poul Anderson is one of those names that I've heard a lot, but I don't think I've actually read anything by him before. I bought this book on a recommendation from a friend, and it's pretty good, although not having read any of the other Technic Saga books, I feel like I'm missing some context.

The Terran Empire is a vast enterprise, succumbing under the weight of bureaucratic inertia and the personally corruption and stupidity of the Emperor. When a regional governor's sadism inspires a military revolt, it's up to Dominic Flandry, the last competent man in the room, to salvage the situation.

There's some musing on political stability and corruption, great xenobiology with a tripartate symbiotic alien species, and action and adventure. Flandry is a decent man in service of a bad cause, and it's fun to watch him wheedle and deal in service of a galactic order that promotes bad men and punishes good ones. There's a long, slow, seduction of a beautiful blond, space battles, aliens of all sorts. It's a big kitchen sink setting, and one thing that struck me was how fast everything moves. The longest story arc is a transcontinental journey from a crashed spaceship across a primitive alien world to get back to the spaceport and hijack a ship. Anderson does this in about 50 pages. David Weber and John Ringo wrote an entire series of doorstoppers (March Up Country etc) on the same subject.

I'm sold enough that I'll read the rest of them, assuming I can work out the best way to get ebook omnibus versions.

Three Hearts and Three Lions is one of the iconic novels behind Dungeons & Dragons, and hence all of modern fantasy. Holger Carlsen is a Danish engineer pulled out of the 20th century to a fantasy world where the realms of men are beset by the forces of Chaos. He meets with fantastic beings; witches, faeries, dwarves, and giants, finds loyal companions and courtly love, and quests to reclaim his true identity and pivotal role in the Great Battle to Come.

Anderson has a way with words, and does some nice stuff with the 'modern man in medieval times' bit. Holger is very much a classic hero, with few if any flaws. The depictions of the faerie court in the first bit are top notch. I dislike the use of dialect to indicate strange accents (Scottishoid?), and two of Holger's companions speak in thick dialect. Over all, this is a classic that still holds up today, and a must-read for any fantasy aficionado.

Fluency adds little to the dense genre of first-contact scifi, with a story that betrays its premise and the broader potential of contact across world. Since the Roswell crash in 1947, the government has been concealing an immense secret: there is an alien space ship orbiting in the asteroid belt. Now in the near present, NASA has two shots to send a manned mission to the derelict ship before an asteroid impact destroys it.

Dr. Jane Holloway is a top linguist and is shot out in a primitive capsule to the big alien ship. They discover that it is still alive, and Jane makes contact with the alien Navigator that control the ship. What follows is a mess of mandatory action sequences involving slug and scorpion-like space pests, info dumps about a galactic community of pacifistic humanoids seeded by a vanished precursor race under attack from an insectile swarm, and a romance that I would describe as ham-handed, except then I'd need another adjective to describe the book over all. Jane and Berg are perfect complements, the linguist and the engineer, and they'd be perfect for each other except that they can't admit how perfect they'd be for each other. Walsh, the cautious ex-military man, is mostly defined as villainous by how much he doesn't love our heroine.

Holloway is a linguist, but she only manages to decipher open and close buttons on a door before the Navigator telepathically hands her the works. No one else seems to make much of an effort at wonder or investigation of a ship that has artificial gravity as the least of its tricks. The ship isn't the small worldlet of Rama or a densely packed opaque cultural artifact to be explored; it's a mundane vehicle populated by 70 years of rubber-mask "aliens."

On the upside, the book reads pretty easy, but I can't see any reason to read it. Hard pass.

The first rule of Harvard Business School is that you do not talk about Harvard Business School.

The second rule of Harvard Business School is that you do not talk about Harvard Business School.



Of course, because this is a serious book from a serious academic, we have to dress it up with a bunch of citations to Durkheim, Bourdieu, and Weber, as well as a methodological appendix on the "auto-flexive ethnographic method", but that's the heart of thesis right there. As a new associate professor at the Harvard Business School, Anteby undertook a study of the means by which 'morals' were inculcated in the faculty and students, and argues that it is a "normative silence" by which those morals are developed. By not talking about right and wrong, but by continual and routinized demonstrations of what is decent and proper, a certain kind of Harvard-certified grade A business manager is made.

Anteby describes Harvard Business School as a very special place (it is the one bit of cleverness in this book that each chapter is proceeded by a quote from a utopian novel), a community of perfect order and unity, with delicate specialization tuned towards turning out business administrators. Each class of 900 students is divided into 10 sections of 90, sitting in purpose-built amphitheaters. The famous HBS case method is orchestrated by behind the scene scripts, some timed down to the second, on how to teach each model. Class always finishes with applause.

In this auto-ethnography, the students are secondary to the professors. The Harvard Business School is a place apart from the world, with a high percentage of internal hires. Research is steered away from prior disciplines like economics or sociology, and towards the HBS's own standard of 'relevance', a protean measure under constant revision. The greatest honor is to contribute a new case study to the curriculum. In greater utopian oddity, Harvard Business School faculty are prohibited from pursuing outside grants. Research is funded by the school. Of course, faculty are expected to charge princely fees as speakers and consultants. To do anything less would be to let down the brand.

Not all is perfect. Tenure is more competitve than usual, heightened by the hidden curriculum nature of the place. One quote, which I'll reproduce in full, is a gem.

"Do you like to play Russian roulette?" A colleague once asked me. "To be here, you need to be a player. But while you usually have one chance out of six to get killed, the chances here are five out of six." She smiled. Her vivid imagery was meant to be helpful. "Only one person out of six will make tenure, so consider yourself dead on arrival. That way, being here will seem like a liberating experience!"

These are words more typical of special forces commandos, fighter pilots, or political prisoners on the way to liquidation.

As for the thesis of the book, Anteby argues that it is impossible to define and preach moral standards. The the value of normative silence is that it allows people to reach their own understanding of what is right and proper. And he may be right on this methodological point, intelligent people are resistant to preaching. Debate invites schism. Silence is often wisest.

Yet some intelligent people are ardent conformists, and the Harvard Business School is a highly normative place. In the layout of the buildings, the structure of the case discusses, the 'pastures' in which intellects can develop, there are many obvious norms about what Harvard considers proper business administration. And behind these norms are a set of moral assumptions about the nature of the world and one's place in it: Business exists to make a profit. Aggressive action without individual decision is best. The Harvard graduate is an elite, and deserves to be feted and in command.

Under many circumstances, I'd be inclined to give an academic book with a weak case study bolstered by too much theory three stars. Good scholarly work is hard. But it should also be incisive, offer at least one insight based in its thesis, theory, methods, and evidence. And this is not a case where failing to conclude leaves a gap for another scholar to fill in knowledge on riverine ecosystems, post-Soviet plumbing fixtures, or your choice of scholarly trivia. This is the Harvard Business School! This is where power goes to reproduce itself! And Anteby takes his opportunity to say nothing about the true values he's seen? When publishing in the wake of the Great Recession!?

Anteby got his tenure at Harvard, and in 2015 moved to Boston University, where he is now an associate professor. He may have done good work in the mean time. But for me, he'll always been somebody who had a chance to take a moral stand about what the most influential model for higher education in the 20th century really does, and decided to let out a stale flatulent rip of sociological theory instead.

Oh, and by the way, if this is your first night at Harvard Business School, you have to close a deal.

There is nothing so fantastically stupid than a mass of so-called 'smart people'. When the American economy collapsed in 2008, the real crisis had already hit a year earlier, in a hidden and unregulated market of extremely complex securities. Lewis follows as his protagonists a handful of hedge fund managers who spotted the warning signs back in 2005, and who made a lot of money as Wall Street titans like AIG and Bear Sterns imploded.

As expected, he's create at getting across the culture of these guys, the monomaniacal pursuit of detail and profit and unconventional approaches to value. He does a decent job of explaining CDOs, the complex financial instruments that sliced fraudulent bad mortgages from across America into supposedly 'AAA' rated bonds. When highly leveraged individuals (a strawberry picker with a $750,000 mortgage, a stripper with five houses) couldn't pay off their usurious adjustable rate mortgages and walked away, Wall Street absorbed billions of dollars of losses, and was bailed out by a bipartisan consensus. Sadly, I still have no idea how a CDS works, or why anyone would need one.

I'll admit a certain bias as a data scientist who works for a financial institution, though on nothing like this. We make loans to people who we genuinely believe will pay them off. The idea that bankers would make loans to people who they knew never would repay the money, and that other financial wizards would package them and sell the complex products in an unregulated market to such an extent that no one even knew where these things all were... we'll it's not just criminal, it's a moral sin. Everyone involved should have been thrown into the sun, and the fact that almost none of them were is a stunning indictment of our culture.

Hold still, let me get my mob.

I'll confess to a deep fondness for The Caves of Steel, a sociological novel wrapped in a light mystery. In the far future, an over-populated Earth is dominated by giant hive Cities, and the galaxy dominated by the 50 Spacer planets. When a prominent Spacer is killed on Earth, Detective Elijah Bailey is assigned the case, and an unusual partner in the form of a nearly perfect humanoid robot, R. Daneel Olivaw.

The mystery is really an excuse to explore the world of the Cities, where humans lived crammed together in vast communal blocks linked by moving pedestrian expressways, subsisting on food made mostly from varieties of yeast. Hidden political cadres of medievalists seek a romantic return to the soil, even though modern humans are psychologically incapable of living under an open sky. Meanwhile, Spacer renegades have their own plan to use Terrans to launch a new wave of colonization.

The extrapolation of a setting is some of Asimov's best work, and the mystery good enough to keep you reading.

As an American, I'll admit to knowing only the broadest strokes of Irish history. What I do know is that Ireland served as the testbed for British imperialism, with the locals suffering from genocidal policies including wars of extermination, absentee-landlord plantations, enslavement and forced emigration, and artificially induced famine. Ireland also served as the testbed for post-colonial wars of liberation, with a gloriously failed rising in 1916 (Ireland loves its glorious martyrs), and then a guerrilla war against the British, finally followed by an even more brutal civil war between those who accepted a peace treaty that left Ireland part of the British dominions, and those who held out for a fully independent republic.

It's a big story, and this book follows one small, but important part of it. Michael Collins, the essential man of Irish liberation, knew that no force Ireland could muster could stand against the weight of British arms. This was to be a political war, and the decisive weapon would be targeted assassinations. The Twelve Apostles, also called The Squad, were the instrument of that policy. A dozen men, lightly armed with pistols, who carried out a series of brazen daylight executions. According to this book, The Twelve Apostles sowed carefully targeted terror, taking down key British intelligence officers, Royal Irish Constables, and links in the network of sources and stoolies that have could landed the whole Irish revolutionary leadership in prison.

Of course, violence begets more violence. Michael Collins was himself killed in an ambush during the following Irish Civil War. Many of Twelve Apostles had troubled postwar careers, finding themselves on the wrong sides of politics, simply aimless, or worst, running their own secret police torture shops.

Coogan does an excellent job depicting the life of a violent revolutionary, though this book assumes a fair bit of background on Michael Collins and the Irish revolution. Doing a little research on the author, it seems he's fairly analogous to Stephen Ambrose, a popular writer somewhat disdained by 'real historians' for light sourcing and partisanship rather than properly rigorous objectivity; Coogan greatly prefers Michael Collins over Éamon de Valera, who is depicted as the adversary of Irish public life. But the one great and irreplaceable advantage Coogan has is that he actually interviewed surviving Apostles in the 60s and 70s. This is a great look at the intimacy and brutality of political warfare.

An ancient terror haunts this guilty land. An unspeakable horror perpetrated generation unto generation, ambition and the desire for dominance curdling into evil. It's Jim Crow. Oh, and also Cthulhu cultists.



Ruff's novel re-imagines a version of H.P Lovecraft's Mythos through the lens of Atticus Turner and family, who's ordinary lives publishing The Safe Negro's Travel Guide is upended when Atticus turns out to be the lineal descendant of a powerful sorcerer, and the current leading American sorcerer, Caleb Braithewait, plans to use Atticus to secure a new age of occult power.

Lovecraft Country is a linked series of short stories, as Turner and his relatives advance and confound Braithewait's plans, using their hard-won survival skills to vanquish ordinary racists and supernatural foes. It's quite good, and will soon be an HBO prestige drama. And yet, I have a few quibbles. First, I'm always concerned about a white writer's handling of such an integral part of the Black experience. I think Ruff does a solid job, and it's better that these sorts of stories are told than not, but I can't be 100% sure about the integrity of the artwork. Second, Lovecraft's whole thing was cosmic horror, the idea that as human we're not special, and soon our eon will be at end. And there's goodness in subverting Lovecraft's racism, and clear parallels between cosmic horror and a Jim Crow system which says very loudly that Black Lives Don't Matter, and This Land Is Not For You, yet Ruff doesn't quite click on this. In particular, the use of human ghosts as key plot points is, I think a mistake, and lessens the impact of the story.

Still very good. But not quite great.

From a 21st century vantage point, the moral struggles of the Second World War and the fight against Hitler seem obvious. He was a genocidal madman, all good people joined in opposing him. For those living at the time, it was far from simple. In 1933, Hitler was an authoritarian and eccentric European ruler. Anti-Semitism was mainstream. German-Americans were the single largest European ethnic group. A shifting alliance of native-born American fascist groups like the Silver Shirts, German-American organizations, and outright Nazis spies plotted campaigns of propaganda, terror, murder, and revolutionary violence, to culminate in an American Final Solution. Los Angeles, home to the major movie studios and vital defense installations, was a key target. The police were bought off or complicit, ex-Klansmen who saw the Nazis as allies. The only defense was Leon L. Lewis, a Jewish lawyer and Anti-Defamation League leader who became an amateur spymaster, running teams of agents to monitor and subvert the American Nazis from within.

On one level, the Nazis were really not good at security. Lewis, and his aide Joe Roos, managed to get agents into the inner circles of the Bund and the Silver Shirts again and again. They successfully instigated leadership fights between various figures in the covert organization and German diplomatic corps, and kept tabs on a host of subversive behavior. On the other hand, there were hundreds to thousands of activatable Nazi agents placed all through key industries, as well as corps of hardened SA style street fighters. The Nazis made several plays to get arms for murder and revolution. Whatever their scanty ability to actually carry out their plans, they certainly wanted to kill Jews.

Most bleakly, despite Lewis and Roos' hard work, law enforcement was hardly interested in Nazis up until Pearl Harbor. The police were actively on the side of the Nazis, and the FBI and House-Un-American Activities Committee was more concerned with Communists than Nazis. American Jews had few friends in power, though those friends (include then Colonel George Marshall) did their best. When war was declared, the FBI and military security apparatus used Roos' files to make wholesale arrests, on almost no information.

There's a way in which history repeats. The movie studio bosses were the tech tycoons of their day, the highest paid individuals in America. Many of them were Jewish, and they funded Lewis's efforts. Yet despite their own self-interest, the 'below-the-line' technical work of movie-making was rife with anti-Semiticism, and the Nazi diplomatic corps had a final cut to maintain 'neutrality' in movies. The business of Hollywood was business, not principles. Just like how today's Big Tech hides between 'free speech' while letting neo-Nazi propaganda run wild on their platforms. I'm still unsure how much of a threat Hollywood Nazis really were, but it's indisputable that a few brave men and women ably confounded them.