Counter-intelligence is the strangest, most paranoid of games. It is, in the words of James Angleton, a "wilderness of mirrors" where the line between source and target, fact and fiction, trust and betrayal shatter into a million shards. Martin's 1980 book discusses the two most important American counter-intelligence operators, William “King” Harvey and James Jesus Angleton, and their eventual self-destruction.

Angleton was the epitome of the spymaster, educated, aesthetic, austere, a man of infinitely secrets and layers of deception. Harvey was a hard-charging ex-FBI agent, an outsider with a drinking problem and a lot of guns. The original seed of destruction was Kim Philby, and the other moles of the Cambridge Five. Philby was the head of counter-intelligence at MI-6, and a candidate for head of MI-6 itself. He was also a KGB asset. Harvey prosecuted the case Philby, and in the wake Angleton swore a personal vow never to believe anybody.

Harvey followed his Philby break by overseeing a top-secret tunnel in Berlin that tapped into Soviet communications, as well as the covert war against Cuba, post-Bay of Pigs. The American James Bond, as he was dubbed, was a bull in a China shop, and he was forced to resign after a disastrous tour in Rome. But unlike others in the CIA, he was entirely willing to talking about the potential assassination of Castro by Mafia linked agents.

Angleton went the other way. The defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1961 provided a stable point upon which Angleton built an immense web of paranoia. According to Golitsyn, the KGB still had a highly placed mole in the CIA, and worse had a deliberate longterm disinformation strategy involving fake defectors. Every subsequent defector, no matter what they brought in to prove their bonafidas, could be assumed to be disinformation. The mole could be anyone, and in paranoia, Angleton burned bridges with other intelligence agencies and destroyed careers. In final retrospect, if there was mole, he could have done no more damage than Angleton actually did. Angleton was finally forced out in the wake of the Church hearings, where in retirement he used reporters are surrogates for his life of deception.

A fascinating history and biography, Wilderness of Mirrors shows that what's behind the lie is another lie.

Most of us have the same hazy ideas of Indians that have been drilled into us from preschool: Small bands of hunter-gathers, living lightly on an edenic pristine wilderness. Mann ably summarizes the past fifty years of archaeological scholarship to show that this picture is wrong in every particular. Pre-contact Indians were largely agrarian, settled in cities as big as any in Europe, had a rich religious tradition that left massive monumental sites, and conducted wars and politics with hegemonic fury. They met the initial groups of European explorers as equals and more than equals, despite their lack of metal tools or domesticated animals. A century later, they were almost all dead, taken by waves of disease that may have had mortality rates of over 95%. Think of a room of 20 people. Now think of a room with 19 corpses and one survivor. The Indian of popular imagination is a post-apocalyptic survivor, living in an landscape of ecological collapse where previously marginal species like buffalo and the passenger pigeon spread like wild.

The status of the Indian is a political hot potato, since every American state rests on an initial act of massive genocide. The idea of a continent untouched by human hands is fundamental to modern environmentalism. Mann speaks clearly and deliberately to these ends. The exact arrival of Indians to the Americans is uncertain. The Clovis culture of 12000 years ago is well documented, but they may not have been the first. Indian civilizations changed the land deliberately, creating a continent wide-orchard. They also suffered their own ecological collapses, particularly the Maya and the Cahokia mound builders seem to have had political systems that fractured under environmental strains. The Amazon river basis may have supported a flourishing urban culture that succumbed to the same waves of epidemics.

Any book with ambitions as grand as a complete history of the Indian people is bound to be incomplete. Mann lavishes chapters on the uniqueness of domesticated maize, but leaves its actual domestication a mystery. Comparisons to familiar examples from European history are sometimes useful, and sometimes miss the mark. The pueblo cultures of the American southwest are unfortunately slighted, along with the Pacific Northwest. And as always, some of the most interesting cultures left behind nothing in the way of written records, either from a lack of an alphabet, or deliberate destruction by colonizers. Still, Mann has provide a precious counter to popular understanding, and a view of the cultures of 1491 as active participants in their own destiny, soon to be struck down by a fluke of biology rather than any innate flaw.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was at one point the most important book in my life. When I was about 11, I reread the whole series monthly. My AIM screename was Zarkology1, after the great Prophet Zarquon and the exclamation 'Zark!'. So I'm only kidding a little when I say that for me, the books approach holy text.

Don't Panic by Neil Gaiman (that Neil Gaiman) is a very different approach to the story behind the story, and the career of Douglas Adams. Adams followed in the wake of a classic tradition of absurdist British humor, most notably PG Wodehouse and Monty Python (though his actual working relationship with the Pythons was minimal). At Cambridge, he was an anti-establishment figure floating around the Footlights comedy troupe. Afterwords, he drifted into radio at the BBC, where the idea for Hitchhiker finally landed. The radio show was a cult classic, the first book an international success, and then it was off to the races, with musical theater, TV adaptation, potential movie deals, and high-tech transmedia ventures.

Gaiman keeps it light and breezy, but reading between the lines, there are struggles. Adams' problems with deadlines was legendary, but where is the line between writer's block and chronic depression? The best of Hitchhiker is in the pauses and asides, the words not written, the perfect absurdity and humanity of the gestalt. Hitchhiker touched me, and it touched millions of people, and there's not much of the 'why' or 'how' except "well, Adams mixed Star Wars and Monty Python in a way that was perfect for the times, and totally beyond the ability of studio executives to understand."

It's been 40 years since the first book was published. I don't know much, except that I know I need to find my omnibus collection and reread them for the first time in a decade.

In the Vanisher's Palace is a stylish novella, without much below the surface. Yen is a failed scholar and healer's assistant in a harsh post-apocalyptic world. A race called the Vanishers bent the world with horrific diseases and departed, and in their wake society has curled on itself, with Yen's tiny village ruled by harsh Elders who discard the weak and useless. When Yen's mother calls a dragon to heal the sick child of the village head, Yen finds herself sacrificed to the same dragon.

But Yen isn't eaten. It turns out that the dragon Vu Con also has the shape of a beautiful woman, needs a tutor for her two children, and is a healer herself. But before love can blossom, Vu Con has to learn an important lesson about letting people make their own decisions, and Yen has to decide to care about her happiness.

On the plus side, the science-fantasy setting has just the right mood, with a lot of mystery and verve. But the romance, particularly Vu Con's side of it, never really worked for me. As a near-immortal with immense powers living in a palace of vanished post-humans, she was surprisingly mundane.

There are many bitter feuds and rivalries in history: Hatfields and McCoys, Yankees and Red Sox, Playstation vs Xbox vs Nintendo, Taylor Swift and Kanye. All of these are playground squabblings compared to the holy war between lexicographic prescriptivists, who believe a dictionary should describe how one should write, and lexicographic descriptivists, who believe that a dictionary should catalog how people actually use words. Perhaps the bitterest battle in this war is the 1961 Webster's Third New International Dictionary. David Foster Wallace decried the slipshod mediocrity of the Third in one of his essays written 40 years after the thing was published. Supreme Court Justice Antonio Scalia's official portrait has him resting his hand on the Second Edition, before the philistines ruined English.

The Story of Ain't is a cultural history of Webster's Third. "Ain't" was one word to get a definition, and served as the first shot fired over the role of the new dictionary. I get the sense of publisher muddling in the title. To tell the story, Skinner loops through the whole early 20th century culture of letters, as America shook off the lingering vestiges of an anglophile and Classics oriented sensibility towards words, and found a new jazzy vernacular, rooted in new media like radio and TV, and the new sciences and technologies of the transformative period bookended by the Jazz Age and the Space Age.

Skinner's book wanders at the start, eventually finding a protagonist in Webster editor Philip Gove, and antagonist in literary critic Dwight MacDonald. Along the way is the emergence of linguistics as a field, educational reform, political movements, the Second World War, and an attempted corporate take-over. The book is a little scattershot, but manages to make this story almost thrilling.

I guess I shouldn't have high expectations for popular science books from 1970. The Secret Life of the Forest is a decent ramble through North American forestry, with some charming popular science explanation of how plants work. But I wasn't aware how old it was when it was written, which explains the rather cavalier attitude towards the science of ecology and conservation. At it's best, this book has some delightful anecdotes about forests before the 20th century, but it fails to create any kind of coherent story, or even an outdated scientific rigor.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. There's an odd little girl with an oppressive homelife who can talk to animals, and she is whisked away to a secret school of magic to become a witch of great power. And there's a bullied boy who turns to science to make the friends he can't make in real life, and he'll either save the world or destroy it. And they're maybe destined for each other, or maybe not.

Anders plays the tropes of YA fiction, schoolhouse fantasy, and pre-apocalyptic scifi with verve and a kind of post-modern self-awareness. My favorite part was the first third, with how comprehensively terribly everything about Patricia and Laurence's families and schools was. But then they hit puberty, the narrative skips a decade, and we catch up with them in San Francisco. Patricia is now a witch, and Laurence is a techie working on an anti-gravity wormhole for an Elon Musk figure. They navigate their own fraught 20s and the possible end of the world. The standard four horseman are already reaping billions, and both magic and science have doomsday devices in the wings to put an exclamation mark on the human experiment.

There's nothing that wholly novel here, but Anders uses old standbys with style, and she has a talent for wry humor and bruising psychological realism. Sure, things don't tie up entirely neatly, but that's life, that's how it is. I'm not sure if this is a four or five star book, but I've read a lot of dross lately, so Anders gets a boost, lucky her.

Foxtrot in Kandahar is an astounding book, in that the author was so close to so many historical events, and somehow manages to draw the tritest and least introspective or insightful conclusions imaginable.

Evans was a CIA officer just off a tour as chief of mission in South America, when 9-11 happened. With a war on, Evans knew he had to get to Afghanistan. Since he had been in the Army a few decades back(officer and Ranger School, before going to the CIA), and spoke Farsi, in the right light he might look like an unconventional warfare expert, ready to parachute into a foreign country and overthrow its government like it's 1955.

Of course, what we really get is bureaucratic SNAFUs. All the mountaineering gear in the DC area has been brought up. The Pakistan CIA station, which has been doing most of the work in Afghanistan, disagrees with the Counter-Terrorism people in Langley. Evans' doesn't have the ability to communicate securely with headquarters, becuase he lacks the right crypto-gear. An Air Force Special Forces team might, but they don't have permission to go into Afghanistan, and et cetera.

This doesn't even get into the actual unconventional warfare part of the American invasion. The initial footprint in Afghanistan was very light, a handful of CIA officers and military Special Forces, with radios that let them call on the USAF. The fighters were almost all Afghani locals, who'd been doing something very much like this since 1979. It was all personal loyalties, local warlords with a few hundred fighters in battered Hiluxes.

Intelligence work is about information above all, and Evans is interested in Afghanistan not for its own sake, but because Al Qaeda may have left clues about its members and plots. And he does discover a plan to attack an American carrier in Singapore, and also blowup his entire team and their Afghani counterparts on Eid. But despite fighting beside these guys for months, Evans has almost no insight into them. They're willing to fight the Taliban and like American airpower, so they must be okay guys, right? I feel like there's something a little deeper there.

As the Afghanistan War turns 18, and the first soldiers born after 9-11 go through bootcamp, there's a time to reflect on this bleeding ulcer of a failed policy. Surely the attempts to go from Taliban control to centralized modern state under Hamid Karzai while also fighting in Iraq were disastrous, but have we learned anything from those disasters? Evans hasn't.

Tooze's The Wages of Destruction is the definitive book on the Nazi economy. It is as gripping as these kinds of books get, but at the end, still an economic history, and therefore rather dry and specialized reading.

Germany post-WW1 was a country of middling prosperity by per capita measures, lacking raw resources, and dealing with the legacy of war reparations and the immediate post-war hyper-inflation. Through the 20s, the German finance ministry steered a moderate course, maintaining a balance trade, and relying on American loans to pay off war reparations to France and Britain, which were then used to pay Allied war loans. The system worked up until 1929, when the Great Depression hit and global financial markets tanked. Hitler came to power in 1933, at the same time as Roosevelt took the dollar off the gold standard, which preventing some kind of coherent international response to the Nazis in the early 1930s.

Nazi ideology, as expressed in Mein Kampf and Hitler's "Second Book" had a coherent economic policy. German should be the center of a continental system, revitalized on the basis of lebensraum in the Eastern frontier. It was an explicit recreation of the American frontier mythos, with Poles and Russians replacing Indians, along with extreme antisemitism. Starting in 1936, Hitler launched an ambitious rearmament campaign, with the goal of a European war sometime in the 1940s.

The Nazi economy of the 1930 was overheated and generally weak, failing to raise German standards of living. It lasted only though a series of desperate improvisations in financial markets. But it did succeed in increasing German military spending from 1% of GDP to 20% of GDP. The army that took over Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, and finally conquered France, was by no means qualitatively superior to the allies, but they were boldly lead and very lucky, particular in the Battle of France. 1940 was the high water-mark of the Nazi empire, as the gambit of Operation Barbarossa failed to knock Russia out of the war, and Pearl Harbor brought in American resources firmly on the Allied side. The burden of production in labor, steel, coal, oil, was 4 to 1 or greater. Nazi defeat was inevitable.

But that didn't mean that they couldn't drag the war out, and kill as many people as possible in the process. Hitler's empire turned to mass enslavement to get labor and resources out of conquered territory. Lacking the ability to feed everyone, the Hunger Plan proposed mass starvation for millions, starting with the Jews. If there's a villain to this book, it's Speer. Tooze demolishes Speer's self-serving memoirs, revealing him as a vulture rather than organizational genius, someone who took credit for production changes other had started, and who 'armament miracle' was little more than delusion. Speer's talents, if any, were exporting Nazi brutality from the concentration camps to the ordinary shop floor. He was absolutely complicit in the Holocaust, and made others complicit.

The Nazi economy failed entirely by 1944, done in by inflation and the deployment of the nation-wrecking force of the Allied strategic bomber offensive, which in the last months of the war essentially severed the industrial areas of the Ruhr valley from the rest of Germany. The balance of powers, in the end, was as it was in the beginning. Germany against the world, and Germany simply not wealthy enough to defeat the entire world.

I was hoping for more stories of Nazi procurement fuckups, as in this amazing series on the Amerika bomber program and related inability to make an actual heavy bomber. According to some historians who I trust, there were lots of examples of vaunted Nazi engineering which simply didn't work: interleaved wheels on their heavy tanks made track repair a multi-hour nightmare, uniforms which looked great in photos but were too hot in summer and too cold in winter, resources diverted to super-heavy tanks, experimental rifles, and superweapons like the V-2 which lacked the ability to shape the direction of the war. Tooze glances at these, but doesn't get in to the metal shavings of machining a panzer drive train.

This is a great book. I'm glad I read it, and that's on sale nowish. I don't know who else should read it.

The two best books about powered armor are Starship Troopers and The Forever War. Armor makes a solid third in the trinity. Of course, it's not a perfect book, and I'm not sure that the unusual structure helps it.

The first bit is conventional enough. Felix is a scout, The Scout, a lethal instrument alienated from his fellow man, part of a beachhead on the planet Banshee, a frozen and wind-scoured wasteland inhabited by 8 feet tall "Ants". The mission is simple reconnaissance in force, but there are so many Ants. A fragmented consciousness, the Engine, lets Felix kill and survive. He's one of the sole survivors of the mission. And then he's back at it. Another drop, more Ants, more killing.

The unusual structure is that after meeting Felix, we switch the first-person perspective of Jack Crow, interstellar rogue and brawler. Crow gets embroiled in a pirate's plan to conquer an isolated scientific outpost. He takes along a strange relic, a suit of black power armor, and enraptures the outpost's staff with his notoriety. He and the outpost director, Holly Ware, read the combat-recorded memories off of the armor, experiencing Felix's war. And at the end, it all comes to a head.

This book has chaotic descriptions of battle, of powerful armor against hordes of alien bugs. It's killing without tactics or purpose, World War I like in its nihilism and the detachment of senior officers from the cannon-fodder. Felix's story is great. And Crow's story is just... there. Steakley must think Crow is a much more interesting character than he is, and there's a lot of telling about "the great Jack Crow" for relatively little showing. Still a good book, and one of my favorites, but definitely one with some warts.