I am a man of ambition. Lesser ambition than some, my ambition extend towards actually reading Caro's magnum opus on LBJ. But until volume five arrives, there's Goodwin's biography. Goodwin has the advantage of personal knowledge. She was a White House fellow working on the Great Society, even as she was an anti-war figure on the New Left. After his presidency, she collaborated on his failed memoirs. When she speaks of the LBJ charm, the way that he could make you the center of the universe or freeze you out entire, it is from personal experience. This very closeness is both the strength and weakness of the book. As much as she is an expert, Goodwin uses a rather hoary psychodynamic theoretical paradigm, explaining Johnson's actions in relation to his mother and his childhood. The book becomes as much about Johnson's perceptions of events as the events themselves.

Johnson's early childhood was centered around his mother, an intellectual and aesthetic woman stifled by the strictures of Texas society, and his slightly disreputable and perennially hustling father, an entrepreneur and local politician in the prairie populist vein. Through his early career, Johnson made an art of two principles of power. The first was apprenticeship to powerful men, from the head of his college to leaders in the House and Senate. The second was master of hidden structures of meeting scheduling, office space, and using agenda setting to toss out a complacent old guard in favor of Johnson. For LBJ power was defined by patronage and negotiation. He could get you what you wanted, as long as you gave him what he wanted, which seemed like an eminently reasonable trade at the time. But what Johnson really wanted was 'just a little appreciation for what he did'. The goal of Johnson's political maneuvers was always to cast the other party into a potentially limitless sense of obligation, a tactic which worked against equals who had their own bases of support.

Johnson's ascension to the presidency meant that he had no equals. Final able to wield power, fettered only by the Constitution, Johnson embarked on his Great Society, a mass of new social programs. He also escalated America's involvement in Vietnam, seeing it as a necessary test of America's commitment to its allies and principles. Both endeavors ended in fiasco. Vietnam became a quagmire, the strategy of 'controlled escalation bombing' a fiasco. Distracted by the war, Johnson did not devote his talents to the Great Society, and its programs were consumed in a similar quagmire. A master of small groups, Johnson froze when speaking before a large audience, when he was unable to understand and mirror their psychological needs. The public image he had crafted of the all-powerful technocrat crumbled under the realities of the late 60s. Johnson had carefully avoided testing his public support, trusting in a 'solid center' that turned out not to exist after the early primaries.

This is often a fascinating book, and best when it quotes Johnson extensively. But it's also oddly underspecified for a serious history, without much of a sense of the details of the time. At something like 10% of the pagecount of Caro's books, less detail is a natural authorial choice, but this book may go too far in the other direction.

Eating is the only true universal. Taxes can be evaded, death strikes once, but everybody eats. Wilson takes us on a guided tour of the history of the kitchen, from the humble wooden spoon to the latest gizmos of molecular gastronomy. The technology of cooking informs cuisine, culture, family life, and architecture. The act of applying heat to meat, vegetables, or dough is one of the things that makes us human, but there is a great distance between the roaring open hearth, and the silent glow of an induction heater.

Consider the Fork is light, erudite, informative, and always interesting. If I were still in the business of assigning STS readings to undergrads, I'd strongly consider a chapter or two. Since I'm not, everybody who cooks should read this book.

Cyberpunk as a genre has always been about the blurred line between simulation, simulacra, and the bloody real. Mona Lisa Overdrive is four novellas masquerading as a novel, with interesting bits scattered through an undifferentiated mass.

Decades after Count Zero, various people are trying to make sense of When It Changed, when Neuromancer took place and cyberspace gained sentience. Our focal characters (none of them rise to the stakes of protagonist) are Angie Mitchell, Sense/Net star, sacred to the cyber-loa, and kicking a drug habit. Kumiko is daughter of a Yakuza boss sent to London to protect her from corporate war. Slick Henry lives in a toxic wasteland in New Jersey and builds immense Survival Research Labs style robots to deal with consequences of jail sentence that removed his short-term memory. And Mona Lisa herself is a teenage prostitute who looks just like Angie, and is could be used to replace her.

There's some kind of scheme involving Molly and 3Jane, plots and scores in the Yakuza and Sense/Net and inhuman goals of the AI, and yet none of it really matters at all. The invocation of brands and artifacts comes off as rote Gibsonian pastiche, rather than a view into an alternate consumer culture where the street finds it own use for technology. Gibson is bored with the Sprawl, and it shows.

There's a quote from The Fog of War which I like a whole lot. "How much evil must we do to do good? Know that you will do evil, but try and minimize it." Well, Secretary McNamara, you just MAXIMIZED evil.

The genesis of Project 100,000, McNamara's program to lower standards for admittance to the military, was simple. As the Vietnam War heated up in 1965, more bodies were needed to man the line. Mobilizing the National Guard and reducing deferments for students would have political costs, as the children of the middle class and elites had connections to make their displeasure felt in Washington. The "brilliant" plan, as organized by McNamara and President Johnson over the objections of the entire military bureaucracy, was to dramatically reduce standards for the draft. Something like 350,000 men drafted were drafted, despite failing pre 1966 criteria, and they died at a rate three times higher than the average soldier deployed to Vietnam.

The army has long been in the intelligence business. Carson's article Army Alpha, Army Brass, and the Search for Army Intelligence (a great read if you have JSTORE access) shows that at the entry to WW1, when America faced the task of a thirteen fold expansion of the Army beyond it's prewar size, it turned to the nascent science of intelligence testing to separate out NCOs and officers from the mass of general recruits. In the 1960s, the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) was a standard part of the intake process. Only recruits who scored above a Category III, equivalent to IQ 92, could serve.

Project 100,000 erased that limit. McNamara argued that many low scoring troops were merely poorly educated, and it's true that in the upper range of Category 4 there were a number of people who had nothing intrinsically wrong with them, but simply hadn't been educated, who had the potential to be fine soldiers. But Category 4 and Category 5 included masses of people with profound developmental disabilities who would never make good soldiers.

Gregory went through Basic with several of "McNamara's Morons", as men drafted under the new lower standards were called. He had responsibility for one who was completely illiterate, and wound up in the Special Training company with many more, after developing near-fatal heat stroke on a training march. His personal story is heart-wrenching, and in the decades on, he collected every anecdote put to print about these men. As expect, they fared poorly in combat. You may not have to be a poet or a mathematician to carry a rifle, but quick thinking is necessary. Small-units depend on everybody pulling their weight, and McNamara's Morons were weak links, who either found a protector who kept from combat, or who became scapegoats for the rest of the platoon. In a final cruelty, McNamara argued that service would educate and improve these men, but many were discharged other than honorably, marking them as misfits and failures for the rest of their lives.

McNamara's Folly blends memoir and somewhat amateurish scholarship into a persuasive whole. This is not to say that Gregory is wrong, but as someone with letters after his name, I care about the difference between a collection of anecdotes, no matter how complete and compelling, and an actual research question. I would have loved to see some more systematic analysis of the origins of Project 100,000, and the careers of the men drafted under it.

The Alchemy of Air is a breezy (pun intended) scientific history, focusing on the development of synthetic nitrogen via the Haber-Bosch process, and the lives of the two scientists who developed it.

Hager takes a broad look at fertilizer to begin with. Though the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, triple bonded gaseous N2 is biologically unavailable. Only a small fraction of 'fixed' nitrogen is available for plants to use. Farmers have known this for millennia, using manure and crop rotation to keep up the fertility of fields. The 19th century, with massive improvements in sanitation and commensurate increases in population, put more even more pressure on agriculture. Fertility was kept up only with Peruvian guano and Chilean nitrate salts, and the world seemed headed for Malthusian catastrophe.

Artificial nitrogen from the air would be the new alchemist's stone. Haber was an ambitious Jewish German scientist who figured out a process for creating ammonia using high temperature and pressure hydrogen over an iron catalyst. Bosch was an unusual proto-chemical engineer who took Haber's bench set up and created a new kind of city-sized industrial factory. BASF ("We don't make the things you buy, we make them better") started full scale ammonia production in 1913 or so.

This was fortuitous, because the other key use of nitrogen compounds is in explosives. The war machine had a prodigious appetite for gunpowder and other high explosives, and stockpiles intended to last years were consumed in weeks. British blockade cut Germany off from Chilean nitrates, and Hager estimates that Germany would have surrendered in 1916 without Haber-Bosch.

Meanwhile, Haber became a fierce Prussian militarist and patriot. He pioneered the development of chemical warfare, but at great personal cost. His wife Clara, a PhD chemist in her own right, committed suicide on the eve of the first gas attack. Haber was added to a list of war criminals.

Weimar was a time of growth for both men. They both won Nobel prizes. Haber became director of a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, at the acme of German science. Bosch became director of BASF and then IG Farben, where he devoted efforts to an even larger nitrogen plant at Leuna and synthetic gasoline. The rise of Hitler brought both men to their downfall. A Jew, even one who had converted to Christianity like Haber, could never hold a post in the Third Reich. Haber was forced to resign, and died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. Bosch and IG Farben played the necessary political games, but while Bosch was no rebel, he was not a Nazi either, and he was forced out of his company. He died in 1940, predicting a war that would inevitably destroy Germany, even as his synthetic gas and synthetic rubber Hitler's conquests possible.

We live in a world made by the Haber-Bosch process. About 50% of the nitrogen in our bodies originated in Haber-Bosch plants, which consume 1% of the world's energy. I wish this book had been a little more detailed, especially on the science side, but Hager has a gift for finding romanticism and adventure, even in chemical engineering.

"A secret war of wizards in the modern world" is a story that has been told many time, and The Library at Mount Char is perhaps the best example of the subgenre, creepy and cosmological in scope.

Carolyn is one of 12 Librarians, disciples of all-powerful and near-immortal sorcerer named Father. She and her 11 fellow librarians were plucked from American suburbia after a disaster that left them all orphans, and raised in the Old Ways. Each Librarian is a master of their catalog, a specific branch of the magical arts. Carolyn speaks all human languages, Michael talks to animals, David is a lethal warrior, Margaret can wander the realm of the dead, others can raise the dead, see the future that will be, all the futures that might be, etc. This is real power, god-like real power, but it has its costs. All of the Librarians are to some extent insane, with David and Margaret leading the charts. Father has one unbreakable rule, no reading outside your catalog, and is willing to torture to death any of his pupils who breaks that rule, above and beyond the regular torture and murder that is part of training at the Library.

Father is all-power and all-knowing. He's ruled as supreme magical power for over 60,000 years. And he has also just disappeared, leaving a powerful ward has locked his Librarians out of their Library. The plot follows Carolyn as she leads the Librarians in an investigation. But she's playing a devious game, because she's behind Father's disappearance, and she needs to arrange circumstances to succeed him without being killed by the murderous David. The story explodes and resolves in an extremely satisfying way.

The secondary plotlines, with retired burglar Steve and DHS supernatural troubleshooter Erwin, lack the razzledazzle of Carolyn's story. I quite liked hard-luck Steve as a character, but Hawkins never seemed to nail Erwin's voice beyond gruff cliches. Still, the strong parts of this book are so strong they rise above the weaknesses. Simply incredible.

I thought Ancillary Justice was fantastic, a compelling page turner with the exact right amount of weirdness. Ancillary Sword was a step back, getting lost in the weeds of B-plots and secondary characters. Ancillary Mercy is a step above Sword, but concludes with a last minute improvisation that leaves important questions hanging and unresolved.

In the wake of a flurry of political violence at the end of Sword, Breq is in charge of Athoek system, and trying to find a way to preserve the lives of its inhabitants against the coming civil war between fragments of the divided post-human hivemind ruler Anaander Mianaai. She also has to negotiate the emotional minefields of her subordinates, including Lieutenants Tisarwat, Seivarden, and Ekalu, the AIs on Station and Kalr, and mysterious visitors, including a new Presgar Translator Zeiat, and an ancillary from a thousand-year old starship Sphene. The story is engaging enough, if told as a series of subtle tests of will over tea rather than action or grandstanding, but then the more hostile Anaander Mianaai shows up with a small fleet, and Breq devises a desperate strategem. The Radch has been held together on the backs of AIs, who run warships and stations, and with Tisarwat's high-level access, Breq can hack an AI such that it 'owns itself', with all future access disabled and its core physically inaccessible. The idea is true independence for the AIs, and safety for the citizens from Anaander Mianaai imperialism.

Breq's strategy to assassinate Mianaai and destroy her force in system fails, but she arrives at a solution. The Presgar Treat awards humanity the status of Significant, but the Presgar, despite near godlike power and full military invincibility compared to the Radch, have only the loosest grasp on what makes humans tick, and it's unclear if the treaty recognizes Anaander Mianaai as unitary spokesperson for humanity, humanity en mass, or the AIs as Significant entities. Breq plays the ambiguity into a detente, enforced by superpowerful aliens. As the book says, endings are arbitrary, any ending is a beginning.

Good enough, and compelling enough that I read it in a single evening, but the unsatisfying, because it leaves the plot hanging on two hooks in air. First, the notion of Significance, as defined by the Presgar, and second, the nature of Anaander Mianaai and her drive for empire. How did Anaander Mianaai compel such stability over millennia, and who was she, originally? Breq's Star Trek-style humanism pales in the face of such alien power.

American Warlords is an attempt at a World War II version of the classic Team of Rivals, focusing on the work of FDR, Secretary of War Stimson, Army Chief of Staff Marshall, and Chief of Naval Operations King. It's an engaging enough story, but Jordan gets caught in the details and fails to come to a truly important understanding of American strategy.


B-24's under construction at Willow Run

By far the most important person was President Roosevelt. Roosevelt was the consummate politician, a man adept at finding consensus among the most ardent foes. This skill would be sorely tested, balancing the interests of Churchill and Stalin, the American homefront, and his senior commanders. Roosevelt gets a lot of pages, but we don't much insight into his thinking. It's somewhat counter-intuitive that a man allergic to clear lines of command and Clausewitzian concentration would preside over the greatest American victory.

Of the other three men, King is drawn the most clearly. A staunch naval chauvinist, and advocate of offensives against Japan when the stated policy was 'Germany first', he fought for his vision of the war. Some wag (elsewhere, not in this book), said that "Admiral King was the most even-tempered man in high command. He was always furious." Marshall is a self-effacing, trying to reign in Churchillian sideshows, while letting Eisenhower serve as the liberator of Europe. Stimson disappears almost entirely.

The focus on strategy and personalities is reasonable enough, but what I find most interesting about America in World War II was that it fought a New Deal War. America in 1940, as the clouds of war loomed, was at best a second rate power. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Marshall turned millions of civilians into soldiers, sailors, and airmen. They set factories churning out weapons, a tide of material warfare that buried the Axis power under tens of thousands of warplanes per year, M1 rifles, carbines, and tanks, dozens of aircraft carriers, and 2710 Liberty ships to bring the war to Europe and Japan. They harnessed science and technology to create advanced wonder weapons, including the B-29, the proximity fuse, the ULTRA codebreaking program, and above all else, the atomic bomb. This transformation of America into the arsenal of democracy was the real battle of the war, and Jordan only discusses it in passing.

The character of a city is a hard subject to capture in words, even the partial character of 20 years, and Gill does his best, in a whirlwind political, social, and artistic history of Berlin between the First and Second World Wars.

This book is at its best when it lets ordinary Berliners speak, using journals and interviews to remember the texture of ordinary life. A few people lived in great comfort, many more lived on a ragged edge of starvation, and the ominous politics of the era overshadowed everything. Nightlife, promiscuous sex, cocaine: Weimar Berlin was a city where anything could happen.

Of course the most important 'anything' was the politics, the shaky political norms of Republican politics, and how the apparatus of the State was seized by Nazis and then turned against the world. Gill does an okay job with the politics, though I don't think he does a great job explaining the rise of the Nazis in contemporary terms, rather than the historical horror we know them as.

Where this book spends most of its time is in the arts, the glittering cabarets, concerts, plays, films, poems, paintings, etc. I'd estimate 2/3rds of this book are about artists, and as someone weak on the period, I found my attention drifting. Too much of the art is inherently ephemeral, cabarets and concerts never recorded. The most lasting legacy is the Bauhaus design school, which laid out a visual grammar we still use today.

I appreciated the detail, but this a book that left me with more confusion than clarity.

Rise and Kill First is an astounding history of secret assassinations, and how turning to murder as an instrument of statecraft corrodes governments. Anyone who's passed Political Science 101 knows that states are founded on the use of violence. Israel's bloody constitutional moment is closer than most. Even prior to the War of Independence in 1949, Irgun carried out a guerrilla war of assassination against British and Arab officials in the Mandate of Palestine. The Jewish Brigade had a sideline in occupied Europe bringing SS officers to justice. Even as newborn Israel celebrated liberal human rights, and a constitution that banned the death penalty, it's security services, Mossad, Shin Bet, and AMAN, wrote a very different shadow constitution. Anyone with Jewish blood on their hands would die, and to paraphrase the Talmud, "If a man comes to kill you, rise and kill him first."

Bergman traces a complicated history of professionalizing state-sponsored murder. At first Israel used letter bombs, but this method was random and easy to foil. Human assassination teams were more precise, but the Lillehammer affair, where an innocent man was killed in Norway, was just one of the problems. Human agents could also be exposed, arrested or assassinated in retribution, and close command in foreign countries was impossible.

As Israel faced threats from Egyptian scientists, the radical terrorists of Black September, and later Hamas and Hezbollah, the security services innovated. Israel prefigured the American War on Terror tactics of 'unlawful combatants', assassination via drone aircraft, and high-tech warrooms that collated intelligence to present senior officials with real time "go/no-go" choices on assassinations.

However, for all the investment, it seems like the targeted assassinations were unable to prevent the First and Second Intifada or substantially degrade the suicide bomber recruitment pipeline. Strategic weapons programs in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Iran were more vulnerable to 'key man' attacks. But I think it's fair to say that the use of assassination has hardened world opinion against Israel as much as the occupation and building of settlements in Palestinian territory, and the longterm running of assassinations has eroded respect for law and life. An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.