I read this book because it seemed like The Dosadi Experiment, which I had in paperback, was a sequel. Which is true, but I resent reading this book.

McKie is a Saboteur Extraordinary of the Bureau of Sabotage, a strange governmental body which has grown like a cross between a parasite and a vital hormonal gland in the galactic government, throwing sand in the works of a machinery of government that is too perfect. His vital mission this time is to sabotage the whipping to death of a Caleban at the hands of an evil and supremely rich woman. The Calebans gave everyone else the portals vital to interstellar civilization, and if this one dies, everyone who used a portal will die.

The Whipping Star focuses around communication with the Caleban, who clearly does not perceive space-time in the same way we do, with all the grace of a sophomore physics major in the depths of a DMT trip (trust me on this one). It's not a great premise, and someone with a more absurdist touch, like Harry Harrison, might have been able to pull it off. Frank Herbert misses any joy and wonder in the premise entirely, replacing it with a stale space opera zoo of aliens and a weirdly misogynistic antagonist.

The genesis of this book is in the early 90s, when the author was teaching at the Air Command Staff College, and had a variety of conversations with mid-career officers, senior faculty, and general officers, that revealed a great deal of confusion and unhappiness about the future of the USAF and flight officers. The thesis, as developed at RAND, is that the USAF has "lost sight of the bubble", the strategic theory of airpower, and has degenerated to an organization of careerist pilots unable to coherently justify their increasingly expensive existence to Congress or the American public. The corrective is a new theory of airpower, instituted from senior leadership on down to the most junior airman, which will reconstitute and advance the USAF as a premier instrument of American power. This book advances that theory, using historical research and aviation metaphors to bridge USAF and policy-making audiences.

As might be expected from a RAND publication, the argumentation is concise, clear, and deeply researched. Builder starts with the earlier days of airpower, and great figures like Billy Mitchell and Hap Arnold, who laid the groundwork for the conquering air forces of WW2. The theory as developed after WW1 was that airpower could become a decisive arm, flying over trenches to strike at the heart of the enemy (population and morale, the technological infrastructure of war), and ending wars without the bloody stalemates of the War to End All Wars. Though airpower played a major role in WW2, it was not the decisive arm that had been theorized. The new technology of the atomic bomb carried airpower to its logical extreme: wars of absolute destruction. However, the newly independent USAF had become fixated on its means, ever more advanced aircraft, rather than the ends of projecting power. Ballistic missiles began to substitute for ICBMs, and aerial bombardment proved ineffective in guerrilla warfare. The final section of this book is a mediation on the new global village caused by revolutions in ICT, and an emerging global insecurity caused by violence between factions and non-state actors, rather than an increasingly diminished nation-state. The final word is a restatement of purpose: The mission of the Air Force is the military control and exploitation of the aerospace continuum in support of the national interests.

So after 20 years, how does the book hold up? The futurism stuff is a little dated, but not totally wrong. Airpower has scored some major successes since The Icarus Syndrome was written, with NATO interventions in Bosnia and Libya adding to victory in Desert Storm. Conversely, air power alone has been insufficient to halt Islamic extremism, intervene in the Syrian Civil War, or deter Russian adventures in Georgia and Ukraine. The development of drones has been a major success, although the CIA and Army have extremely ambitious Predator/Reaper programs compared to the laggardly Air Force. I don't think the personnel and morale problems that prompted this book have been solved at all. Most tellingly, basic procurement remains a disaster, with the F-22 buy cut to only 187 airplanes, the Joint Strike Fighter over-budget and underperforming, USAF command trying and failing to kill the A-10, scandal and rebids for the KC-45 Tanker, and repeated allegations of incompetence and unprofessionalism in the nuclear forces. I'm trying to think of what's gone well for the USAF since the 90s, and it's really hard. The basic problem is one of 'why': Mitchell and Arnold knew exactly why they had to dominate the air: to avoid the slaughter of the trenches. Currently, with American dominance of air and space a given, its hard to justify why that capability must be maintained and expanded.

Everyone says Ted Chiang is really good.

Everyone is right.

This collection of his earliest work, including his Nebula winning first story "Babylon", a sci-fi retelling of the tower of Babylon, as well as the titular "Stores of Your Life"-basis for the film Arrival, demonstrate fluency with big ideas in the grandest traditions of science-fiction. Chiang is an exacting, almost clinical writer (one of these stories was published in Nature, a meditation on the role of humans in science when super-intelligent posthumans are racing towards the singularity). These stories are cold and brilliant, like arctic ice.

The only story less than exceptional is "Liking What You See", a multifaceted tale about a neural 'enhancement' that removes the glamour of beauty, and a political campaign to make its use mandatory in order to foster healthy body images and objective habits against the convert money of the cosmetic and advertising industries. It's an interesting premise that is dragged out for at least twice as long as it deserves.

That aside, Chiang is a master of the short form, and this is the best of the 1990s return to the new hard scifi.

The Annihilation Score is a transition for Stross's Laundry series, with new threats and a new protagonist, as Dr. Dominique "Mo" O'Brian steps in for Bob Howard. The events of The Rhesus Chart have their marriage in tatters, but there's no rest for the wicked. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN means that ordinary people are gaining access to intuitive/somatic magic: read superpowers, and the Laundry sets Mo up the head of a new special agency to control super-villains and super vigilantes.

The plot follows Mo in a madcap scramble to set up a new super-police agency, while a villain by the name of Dr. Freudstein enacts various nefarious plots, and Mo's bone violin (this machine kills demons) tries to drive her insane. Meanwhile, her marriage is on the rocks, she's not/dating a glamorous supercop, and operating at newfound heights of the British government.

It's good book, over all, and some of Stross's better writing, but I have mixed feelings. The A plot: Freudstein, the violin, betrayal at the highest levels and a invocation to destroy mankind, happened almost too fast, without enough time to blink. Even a talented leader can get bogged down in the day-to-day and miss the strategic implications, but day-to-day administrivia is kinda dull, even if it involves setting up a superhero team. The B plot, all of Bob's exes in one place, and Mo's fling, are also not executed particularly well. The novel can't really decide if the relationship is over because Bob and Mo have grown apart, because they're in a marriage killing career, or because their mutual supernatural WMDs want each other dead. I'm not saying that this book needed to be the final word, but Mo should know when and why a relationship falls apart, and be able to tell us, the reader. This is a character driven book, and we saw a lot of Dr. O'Brian, academic honcho, a fair amount of Agent CANDID, reluctant supernatural troubleshooter, and I think relatively little of Mo, a middle-aged woman with a troubled marriage and a career she doesn't care for.

Finally, I think the superhero theme broke the stylistic rules of the Laundry-verse. Every other book has been based around the idea that magic and hacking and spycraft are interrelated. The covert war is based on information, not firepower, and the introduction of explicit superheroes with thinly themed powers, as opposed to psuedo-scientific explanations of folklore, is a thematic departure for the series that I didn't much enjoy. It's a little too pat, even if K-syndrome gets superheroes eventually.

I'm being too harsh on it, I know. This is a more mature, character driven book, and is actually quite good in many ways, but the Laundry series I love has a hefty doze of Gonzo in it (maybe less so, now the CNG is upon them). Seriously, Nazi holdouts in parallel universes, James Bond villains, unicorns as a parasitic shellfish, the Eater of Souls, PHANGS: all Gonzo as hell. And there wasn't enough of that in The Annihilation Score.

Writing Down the Bones is writing advice disguised as a Zen manual, or possibly the other way around. Goldberg's project as a writing instructor is to unleash your voice as an author. To do this, you have to get yourself into a particular kind of mindspace where you're as close to the universe as possible, and then let the words bubble up. The rules of language, syntax, grammar, spelling, your inner editor, are all obstacles in finding your voice. Make writing your practice, practice daily (but not in a chore-like obligatory way), and the hot words will come. And once you have some hot words, the step is to cut away everything but, to leave only the powerful truth.

There are some things I like. Goldberg's argument is radically democratic, anyone can be a writer, even to the point of outsider art. Writing should be a healing process, away from the torment of writer's block.

My caveats are that the book consists of short anecdotal sections, and only about half of them really hit for me. There's a lot of redundancy and things falling short. The second caveat is that Goldberg's advice is really tilted towards certain kinds of writing; poems, memoirs, auto-biographical short stories. More heavily crafted or plotted forms may require more structure than Zen. But she's essentially right on two key points, writer's have to write, and good voice can make up for many flaws.

Fear is the establishment's answer to Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury. Where Wolff is a gossip rag arsonist who relied heavily on Steve Bannon's version of events, Bob Woodward is, well, he's Woodward. He took down Nixon and has written books on every subsequent president. Fear relies on hundreds of hours of transcribed interviews on deep background, and reading between the lines its easy to huess his sources are mostly "responsible adults" who have left the administration: Priebus, Porter, Cohn, Tillerson, Dowd, and Senator Lindsey Graham. The picture he paints of Trump is less salacious, but no less damning.

According to these men, who were once close to Trump and who have fallen from grace, the president is an idiot, a rage-filled child, a reckless gambler, a lazy slob addicted to cable news, a bullying narcissist, and an inveterate liar. If there is any fixed star in Trump's universe, it's that if you're not screwing someone, you're being screwed.

Woodward covers the first year or so of Trump's presidency, focusing on the intrigue around the oval office, and the seesawing attempts to find a strategy on Afghanistan, North Korea, and trade. The results are either wise men restraining the worst impulses of a mad king, or an administrative coup by the Deep State, depending on how you feel. The book opens with Gary Cohn stealing a memo off Trump's desk to prevent him from blowing up a vital US-Korea trade agreement, which is probably the most dramatic example, but again and again, his aides have to reign in Trump's emotionally driven decisions, ranging from declaring victory in Afghanistan and turning it over to Erik Prince and the mercenary army formerly known as Blackwater, starting a nuclear war with North Korea, or demolishing the post-1945 consensus on free trade, no matter the cost. Of course, these men are not some Obama-holdover Deep State. They're men Trump appointed, praised, and mostly refused to fire. Despite that idiotic anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, they are not the resistance inside the administration. They are Trump's instruments, and his dishonor stains them.

The revolving door outside the Oval Office is interesting, but Woodward doesn't have much to say about the things that really matter about Trump. How much racism comes from him, and how much from ethnonationalist ghouls like Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, and Stephen Miller? The Mueller investigation drives Trump crazy, but is there fire beneath all the smoke? What of the real harms that dismantling the 'administrative state' of EPA regulations, educational standards, and SNAP assistance brings? What about the judges? How about the dead of Hurricane Maria? The utter nonsense spewed at ongoing campaign rallies? What is up with Jared Kushner? Is there, contrary to all the evidence, any actual depth to the man?

The only humanizing touch is that Trump refuses to meet with the families of soldiers killed in his military adventures. I can understand that moral cowardice. I'm not sure how any ostensible patriot can square that cowardice with their support of the man.

Woodward's book doesn't reveal any deep truths. We all knew Trump was incompetent, incapable of empathy or foresight, the meanest creature to ever occupy the White House. What it does reveal, in chilling clinical detail, is how bad the situation really is.

Most of us are guilty of using the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid." The punchline conceals the horror of the last act of Jim Jones Peoples Temple, a mass suicide which claimed 918 lives (including the ambush of Congressman Leo Ryan's party) in the jungles of Guyana. This book traces how a boy from small town Indiana became a preacher, a prophet, and then engineered a mass suicide. It's a fascinating journey, and Guinn does it with as little judgement as possible.

The young Jim Jones was a boy apart. His mother was an ardent noncomformist who believed that her son was destined for the great things she never accomplished. His father was a gassed veteran of WW1, tragically weak. Jim's mother raised him to believe in radical socialism, and his own importance. His peers from around Lynn, Indiana remembered a strange boy, fascinated by itinerant preachers, holding funerals for dead animals, and yet oddly manipulative and cruel.

In his early 20s, Jim started his ministry in Indianapolis, focusing on the black minority. The Peoples Temple (the name comes from the former synagogue building that served as its first home) focused on pragmatic matters, helping parishioners deal with bills, the courts, and an uncaring white world. Jones also hit the gospel circuit as well, 'prophesying' with the techniques of cold reading, and graduating to 'healings' where confederates pretending to pass "tumors" (actually rotten chicken offal).

The contradiction was at the heart of Jones's career. On the one hand, he was sincere in his belief in integration and socialism at a time when these things were wildly unpopular in America. The Peoples Temple provided real services for people, and really integrated themselves. On the other hand, for Jones the means justified the end, and chicanery and even Christianity themselves were tools to be used to further his true ends.

As Jones moved from Indiana to California, those ends became less about the mission, and more about himself. Always energetic and unwilling to delegate, Jones became increasingly authoritarian and paranoid. He urged members to 'go communal', turning over their property to the Temple. As he preached abstinence, he began taking mistresses from the faithful, and abusing amphetamines and barbiturates. A series of defections from highly placed lieutenants, including the Stoerns (Tim was Jones lawyer, Grace the mother of one of his children) made Jones paranoid.

He'd long dreamed of promised land, outside American jurisdiction, but the custody fight over the Stoerns' child prompted an immediate exodus to Guyana. The Guyanese government thought a settlement of Americans could act as a buffer against expansionist Venezuela on their remote frontier. Jones thought that the settlement could serve as a socialist utopia.

At this point, Jones really was under attack, from muckraking journalists and the Concerned Relatives, but he saw himself as at the epicenter of a massive conspiracy, involving the CIA, FBI, and shadowy mercenaries. As the Peoples Temple struggled to carve fields and homes out of the jungle, Jones degenerated further, seeing enemies everywhere, his once inspirational sermons degenerating into rants broadcast throughout the complex on speakers, and staging terrifying 'White Nights', where he rehearsed his plan for mass suicide, a final act of revolutionary martyrdom.

Guinn does his best to write without passing judgement, but from my perspective, it's impossible to separate the good Jones from the bad Jones. The same energy and self-assurance required to integrate in Indiana in 1961 are the qualities that lead him to see enemies everywhere. The bravery to fight social convention was in this one case, a slippery slope that started with false miracles and ended with demanding mass death. Jones appeal to peoples' better natures, but he couldn't defeat the darkness within.

If there's an iconic figure of the 21st century, it's the technological entrepreneur. You know the type, the saavy, cool, cutting-edge, networked, leveraged, foresighted thought leader. The kind of person who makes a lot of money by not doing better than the competition, but by blazing whole new economic sectors. That figure is a kind of mediated chimera in the mold of the Original, the central subject of this book, one Stewart Brand.



Turner's book is an intellectual career of Brand, from itinerant avanta-garde son et luminere artist, to his major success of the Whole Earth Catalog, to the WELL community, and finally Brand's ascension to the sage of Wired, and the entire Bay Area techster lifestyle. It's a long and somewhat convoluted journey, interspersed with some pretty dense science and technology studies jargon, and with a few leaps of faith. It is also a masterpiece of scholarship, and a great example of what an STS book should do.

For Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, the computer had a singular, sinister vision. Computerization was the logic of dehumanization, of doomsday. Psychologically fragmented 'organization men' served as cogs in a horrific machine, which gobbled up nature and culture in its juggernaut like roll towards nuclear annihilation. The actual practice of computer engineering (intimately tied to defense via the needs of the SAGE air defense network and aerospace miniaturization) was actually rather open, interdisciplinary, and innovative, albeit behind barbed wire fences and security clearances. This was the culture that created Nobert Weiner's cybernetics and Claude Shannon's information theory, along with Buckminster Fuller's radical designs.

There's little in Brand's childhood that distinguished him as a future radical; A midwestern suburban youth, Stanford, Army ROTC, a brief stint in the Rangers, and a job as military photographer. But when he mustered out, with a deep feeling that 'this could not go on', he fell into the emergent counterculture. The first influence was the USCO media art collective, which combined experiments with light and sound with psychedelic drugs, but Brand made contacts everywhere. Turner distinguishes two major threads in 60s politics. The New Left were hardheaded organizers, working against racism and the Vietnam War with actions that confronted the American system. The New Communalism, which Brand became a part of, took an entirely different attitude towards social change.

For New Communalism, politics itself was the problem, and consciousness was the solution. By changing minds, individually and then en mass, the counterculture could simply float out of American society. Music, aesthetics, drugs, meditation, and a return to the land symbolized a chance to break free. Brand's genius was the Whole Earth Catalog, a sprawling publication that presented the building blocks of the New Communalism between its covers, juxtaposing books, homesteading essentials, and the latest electronics as 'tools for thinking more clearly'.

The Whole Earth Catalog was an outlandish success, winning awards and selling millions of copies. Xerox PARC stocked it's library by getting one of everything in the WEC. PARC has a much better claim on building the digital modernity than anyone in Turner's book, see Markoff's What The Dormouse Said for details. But as Brand's star ascended, the New Communalism collapsed, as thousands of communes failed under the gritty problems of subsistence farming, separating from the American economy, and predatory charismatic leaders and various kinds of bums.

Many members of the New Communalist movement went back to various square jobs, but they stayed in touch, a loose network around the Bay Area. Brand himself kept publishing and operated a small non-profit foundation focused on various artistic and technological ideas. In 1985, Brand organized the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, a message board server that linked together many of his friends and contacts in a personal computing-centric version of the New Communalism.

The personal computer and networking were the technologies that Brand had been waiting for his entire life, the tools that would enable a person to craft an entirely new identity in a world free from the obsolete governments and ideologies of the past. Brand managed a simultaneous double jump at this point. On one side, he managed to cash in, founding the Global Business Network consultancy firm, an exclusive, corporate-centric, and for-profit version of the WELL vision. For the radicals, he also helped organize the first hacker conference in 1984, bringing together the old idealists of the 1960s with the next generation of entrepreneurs and programmers, gathering hippies, ruthless capitalists along the lines of Bill Gates, and semi-criminal computer crackers going by arcane message board handles handles.

Turner's story closes out with Wired magazine, and the embrace of the new business friendly high-tech cyber utopianism by Newt Gingrich. His story ends just before the first dotcom crash, and the 21st century world of FAANGs, monopolistic platforms, app stores, the sharing economy, meme warfare, and all the other problems of the late 2010s.

Turner is up front about the seductive power of Brand's vision. These days, when PCs are pocket sized and John Berry Barlow's cyberspace frontier fenced in by tech titans, it's easy to sneer. But Brand imagined a better world, and with great humor and self-effacement, brought together the people who made it happen. Stewart Brand is not exactly a household name, yet he's indirectly responsible what makes my household different than my parent's household (and yes, my mom does have a paper copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog on a shelf somewhere). At the same time, the important parts of Brand's vision never real worked. Consciousness may have been raised temporarily, but it always fell back to earth. Most of the new communities failed almost instantaneously. In practice, these new pioneers were very male and very white, same as the last bunch. The web was commercialized, and the ungoverned spaces are not democratic forums, but nightmarish collective ids; our darkest desires for violence, drugs, and illicit pornography made real.

A few decades on, the legacy of digital utopianism is a clearly one of collapse into incoherence. But what saves this book is the grace of love. Turner loves his subject, he loves the possibilities, and that love shines through. There are more adjectives than a typical academic editor would allow, and that's something I love. Turner shows how it's possible to offer critique without being critical.

I love a heist! There's nothing like a moment when a complicated plan falls to pieces, and then bam! actually the plan falling to pieces was step 23 of Plan D, and now the crew is stealing even more than they thought. The Quantum Magician is so quickly paced it's like sleight of hand, with big flashy space opera ideas. The verve of the writing papers over some pretty bad structural cracks, but I had a great time.

Belisarius Arjona is slumming it as an art dealer on a world ruled by the Puppets, a post-human subclade. Bel is himself a post-human, a fallen member of Homo quantus, an experiment to produce a natural physicist capable of directly and intuitive understanding 11-dimensional wormhole physics. An officer of the Sub-Saharan Union offers him a job too rich to pass up, and too dangerous to take. He needs to smuggle 12 warships equipped with incredibly powerful drives and weapons through the Puppet wormhole and back into main space. The payment is a runabout with the same drive, a ship the other governments will pay anything to get their hands on. To do the job, Bel needs to assemble a team, an old flame, a former partner on his deathbed, an AI with delusions of sainthood, a renegade geneticist, a Puppet traitor, a foul-mouth space pilot who can only survive under 700 atmospheres of pressure, and an eccentric explosive expert.

That's a sizable crew, and there are a lot of moving parts. A truly great story about a con has a few simple rules. First, the job is never about the payoff, the real trick is stealing something worth more than money. Second, a great heist involves a perfect read and deception of both the social and physical terrain of the heist; think the end of Ocean's 11. For the first, Bel is stealing access to quantum reality and perhaps a return to H. quantus society, but I never quite bought that as a motivation. For the second, Künsken gestures at a setting divided between great powers and client states based on control of the Wormhole Axis, alien artifacts that allow long distance space travel, but I was perennial confused about how transit through the axis was regulated and on which side our characters were. The social terrain plays out over the group psychology of the Puppets, who were genetically engineered slaves designed to serve a set of masters who they now imprison, but the whole BDSM theology of the Puppets was gross, sticky, and nowhere near as interesting as the author believes.

But hey, sometimes you need popcorn, and the basic swiftness and likeability of the writing kept me with the story.

Just like John Paul Vann was the "single essential American in Vietnam", A Bright Shining Lie is the single essential general history of the Vietnam War. Sheehan ably blends the overall history of the war, which we know all too well, with the career of one of it's strangest figures: the renegade Lt. Colonel, counter-insurgency expert, early war Cassandra and late war Dr. Pangloss, civilian General, good friend and depraved predator, who was John Paul Vann.

Lt. Col Vann went to Vietnam in 1962 as an adviser to an ARVN division in the Mekong Delta. An ambitious man and skilled soldier, he had some initial successes creating joint plans with his South Vietnamese counterpart, he was unable to force ARVN to fight to a conclusion with the Viet Cong, or mitigate the fundamentally corrupt nature of the Diem government. After the catastrophic battle of Ap Bac, which saw the Viet Cong stand and fight against helicopters and APCs for the first time, Vann began to oppose the relentless optimism of General Harkins and the Kennedy administration. Vann leaked his honest opinions about the incipient defeat to the Saigon press corps, including the author and David Halberstam (The Making of a Quagmire, The Best the the Brightest). Opposing the American strategy and the entire Pentagon bureaucracy, he argued for direct American control over the Vietnamese government to root out corruption, win over the rural peasantry, and contain the use of firepower in favor of an Americanized version of People's War. In after action reports and strategic leaks, Vann sacrificed his career to the truth, earning the admiration of the press corps as the most honest American officer of the war.

But this sacrifice was worthless, and a sop to his friends in the media. Behind the charismatic and energetic officer was a traumatized boy from the slums of Norfolk, the fatherless son of an alcoholic prostitute. Vann managed to make a career in the military, just missing WW2 and serving in Korea, but whether it was symbolic revenge on his mother or other issues, Vann's voracious sexual appetites destroyed first his marriage and then his career when a 15 year old babysitter accused him of raping her. Vann was acquitted, but the charge alone was enough to sink his chances of promotion to general. If he couldn't be on top in the Army, he wanted out.

The war was in Vann's blood like malaria, and after a dissatisfying year on civvie street he went back to Vietnam as a civilian with USAID. Believing himself more or less invulnerable to harm, Vann took insane risks driving rural roads beset with landmines and VC checkpoints (an aid was captured and spent 7 years in a VC prison camp), took up with two Vietnamese girlfriends, and fought a slow war in the bureaucracy that bore some fruit with the establishment of CORDS as a centralized arm for pacification, as opposed to scattered programs run through the State Department, the military, the CIA, Saigon, etc. Corruption in South Vietnam remained unsolved. Making alliances with McNamara's Office of Systems Analysis and Daniel Ellsberg (The Pentagon Papers) Vann survived bureaucratic infighting and the Tet Offensive to rise ever higher in the US government's efforts in South Vietnam, talking a new line that argued that with the Viet Cong decimated in the Tet offensive, victory was now possible. He thought NVA regulars were nearly as alien to the average South Vietnamese peasant as American soldiers, and that the political war could be won.

Vann's pacification campaign was little better than what had gone before, but he achieved his greatest success during the 1972 Easter Offensive. A fixture in Vietnam, and the senior American in II Corps, Vann took charge of the defenses, commanding two ARVN divisions, a paratrooper brigade, and all the attached American aviation assets, from light helicopters to strategic bombers. Vann was a demon in defense, omnipresent in his OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopter. He personally delivered supplies to besieged firebases, evacuated American advisers attacked by tanks, called in 'danger close' B-52 strikes and then flew over the crater fields taking potshots at stunned survivors with an M-16. Only Vann could have held the brittle ARVN command system together for the Battle of Kon Tum, which saved South Vietnam from being split in two by NVA tank columns. He had no time to celebrate his achievement, as his helicopter flew into a copse of trees returning from a victory celebration, killing everyone aboard in a fiery crash. Like a real world Colonel Kurtz, Vann went into Vietnam and became great and monstrous, too much so to ever return to America. The attendees at his funeral, the most senior men in the military, attested to Vann's success against all odds, but the fall of Saigon in 1975 rendered his efforts moot.

A Bright Shining Lie is the book that started me down this strange path. 45 or so Vietnam War books later, it still holds up as the best in its comprehensive sweep of the war from the 1930s to 1972, and its depiction of one of the wiser men who fought it. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's digressive on Vann's personal life, Vietnamese history, and the things Sheehan witnessed as a reporter. But it's the kind of true tribute that only a friend can make, with flaws and grand dreams treated with equal respect. This is a great book.