Ed Rasimus has a perfect quote about fighter pilots, and that quote fits Robin Olds to a T. This book is Olds' memories, collected into publishable shape by his daughter and Rasimus, and it is one hell of a story.


Olds with his infamous Vietnam War mustache

“Flying fighters is simply an assignment, but being a fighter pilot isn’t. Being a fighter pilot is a state-of-mind. It’s an attitude toward your job, toward the mission, toward the way you live your life. You don’t have to fly fighters to be a fighter pilot. You’ve simply got to have the attitude. There are fighter pilots driving B-52s and fighter pilots hauling trash. They may not have the flash and glamour, but they are the best they can possibly be at the job they’ve got to do. There are pilots who fly fighters and there are fighter pilots. You guys want to be fighter pilots, not pilots flying fighters. Look for the difference.”

Olds was born to aviation nobility. His father was Army Air Forces Major General Robert Olds, and he grew up with WW1 aces over for dinner. Robin was accepted to West Point in 1940, and flight training shortly thereafter. He did everything possible to get into the war as soon as he could, making it over to Europe where he flew P-38s and P-51s, and shooting down 12 planes. Postwar, he transitioned to jets and married actual movie star Ella Raines (though the marriage was often unhappy). Raines used her influence to keep him out of Korea, but even with doldrums in the basement of the Pentagon, a football coach at West Point, and distant training commands, Olds was a fighter pilot to the bone.

In 1966 he was assigned command of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing, an F-4 unit based in Thailand that flew strikes into North Vietnam. Olds was an aggressive commander, leading from the front as often as he could. He's most famous for Operation Bolo, an elaborate decoy mission that disguised a flight of F-4s as unwieldly F-105 Thuds for an ambush of North Vietnamese MiGs. In Vietnam, Olds shot down four more planes and then started letting his wingmen take all the shots, because as the first American ace of the war, he knew he'd be called back home. Olds also fiddled with his official mission count to keep flying fighters in combat, flying a total of 152, compared the official tour of 100 combat missions north.

Post-war, Olds served as commandant of cadets at the Air Force academy, and inspector general, rounding out his 30 year tour with distinction. He always advocated for aggressive conventional tactics, dogfighting and attack skills, and real readiness rather than perfect paper record-keeping. Olds retired to Colorado and passed away in 2007. I read a lot of these memoirs, and Olds is better than most, covering WW2, Vietnam, and the battle of bureaucracy, as well as lots of insight into the mind and culture of fighter pilots.

Induction into the GRU, the elite Soviet military-intelligence agency, begins with a film strip of a traitorous agent being burned alive. They know how to hook someone's attention, and so does Suvorov, as he describes his journey from armor officer, to Spetsnaz operative, to GRU agent.

The earlier parts of the book, as tanker and special forces soldier, carry with them a lot of joy. As Suvorov enters The Aquarium, the story becomes much more bleak, in the vein of a Red John Le Carre. GRU agents, even if there are the elite of the elite, are divided into Vikings who run foreign agents, gathering intelligence and the accolades, and Borzois, who do the necessary leg work of arranging cars, checking dead drops, and smuggling items and people across borders. The life of a spy is one of constants tests of loyalty to the Soviet Union, and betrayals of friends and countrymen of less than impeccable secrecy. Suvorov defects because he fails to become a Viking, because the ladder of prestige he was climbing for his entire career runs out, and because he couldn't face failure back home. Better to face an uncertain future in the West than the crematorium.

It seems that Suvorov shaded some personal details, for example he defected with an unmentioned wife and child, but this is a stark and stunning depiction of the paranoia that spies live under, and the balance of terror of the Soviet system, with hidden knives pointing from the Party to the KGB to the GRU. One of my favorite moments was Suvorov realizing the revolution is always served by criminals and incompetents, who's treason is revealed the moment they're dead. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and their lackeys, all were traitors to the impossible ideal of absolute power.

I'm an airpower and Cold War aviation buff, and yet, like most people outside the ranks of missile operators, General Bernard 'Bennie' Schriever was totally unknown to me. Yet for those in the know, General Schriever is the father of the ICBM, the architect of the ultimate weapon. For the slightly more than 30-odd year between the deployment of the first nuclear ballistic missiles in 1959 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the world stood a few minutes away from midnight. Schriever's missiles put us all on that precipice, and also prevented us from going over.

Schriever was born in Germany, but came to the states in 1916 when he was six years old, crossing the Atlantic from neutral Holland weeks before America joined the war. He grew up in Texas, achieving some local renown as a golfer, and then joined the Army Air Corps in the depths of the Depression. In peacetime, he supervised a CCC camp and flew hazardous airmail routes, becoming a protege of 'Hap' Arnold. In the Second World War, Schriever saw duty in the Southwest Pacific, where he flew 10 combat missions and gained a reputation as a wizard of logistics and maintenance.

In the immediate postwar period, airpower was king, as epitomized by the Strategic Air Command's B-36 Peacemaker, a monstrous 10-engined bomber nicknamed 'aluminum overcast', and a rigorous culture instilled by Curtis LeMay that ensured that bombers would rain down atomic devastation on Russian cities. But bombers could be intercepted or destroyed on the ground. Schriever, on a mission to search out technological edges, realized that rockets mated to miniaturized hydrogen bombs, were the last weapon, the ultimate argument of kings. What followed was a bureaucratic and technological struggle to get the finicky missiles to work. Schriever's Thor program was designed using the new techniques of systems analysis as developed by Simon Ramo, which went against established aeronautics design techniques. Werner von Braun's Army team with the Redstone missile was an existential threat to the Thor. But Schriever won through, and his Thor, Atlas, and Minutemen missiles became one of the most secure legs of the nuclear triad.

So this is a pretty good book, but I'm frustrated, because I wish it were a great book. Sheehan is a reporter, and at the end of the day he's more interested in people as compared to things. The problem is that General Schriever is ultimately not that complex of a person, at least not when compared to John Paul Vann or Captain Arnheiter of the USS Vance. He definitely had a spark of originality and talent in seeing the missile project through, but Sheehan doesn't quite capture that, decades after the fact. And a great study of a technology, like The Soul of a New Machine or The Making of the Atomic Bomb or The Perfectionists, gets into the gritty details and makes the process of invention come alive. Instead, we get doughy and unoriginal paragraphs on Cold War geopolitics. By the topic, this book was made for me, and yet I didn't love it.

What if it turned out that Victorian spiritualists were right about the afterlife? That ghosts existed and we could communicate with them? In an alternate 1938, even death can't set a sun on the British Empire. The Summer Court rules from the afterlife, committees of Etonian spirits directing the business of Empire. Of course, there's an alternative to ectocapitalism and the business of Queen Victoria's Summer Court. The Soviet Union is ruled by a vast godlike intelligence, built around the soul of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Two two sides are engaged in a classic war of espionage, with a hot front in the Spanish Civil War, and in a reflection of the historical Cambridge Five, the British Secret Intelligence Service is hopelessly compromised by a mole.

Peter Bloom is that mole, a double agent who believes he's serving the interests of peace and the power of the Soviet Presence. Against him is Rachel White, one of the few women in the SIS. White is by far the more interesting character, full of pent up rage about her stalled career, sexism, and her invalid husband, a retired living weapon from the First World War. Unfortunately, Bloom is our viewpoint into the more unique world of the dead, a profoundly strange four-dimensional space overlaid with a facade of Victorian normalcy, and he's much less interesting, despite being the mole.

This book is at it's best exploring the consequences of a real afterlife, and the way that society changes when the real powers are all on the other side. Subtle nods to the real world are also a high-point, Kim Philby makes a guest appearance, and the British Prime Minister is Herbert Blanco West, speculative fiction author of The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Stalin is a Communist renegade, trying to develop a human network to destroy the Presence. The aetheric technology of transdimensional phones and ectoplasmic IT is unique.

Yet Bloom's character in particular never clicked for me, and his chapters were perennial flat notes. Great spy novels in the tradition of John Le Carre play on intimacy and betrayal. The relationship between a source and a handler is closer than marriage. Yet spies can't be seen as people; they're assets to be used, turned, and ultimate burnt for the cause. And knowing the Peter is the mole, and also seeing inside his head, eliminates the amazing tension that a more conventional Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy structure has.

The last act tries to wrap everything up, the origins of Peter's betrayals, the bigger picture of the afterlife, but it comes out of left field. Summerland is a good story, but it isn't as tightly wound as a great one.

Bridge of Spies is a thrilling true story of espionage and super-power diplomacy at one of the tensest moments of the Cold War, centered around a prisoner exchange in Berlin in 1962.

Willie Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, was a Soviet spy in the finest traditions of the Bolshevik 'illegals' (named in comparison to legals, who had diplomatic cover as 'cultural attaches' or similar). His mission was to rebuild a spy ring to match the immense A-bomb theft of Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. Fisher was undercover for years, but it unclear what, if anything he managed to uncover, before a drunken and incompetent subordinate defected to the West rather than face recall to Moscow. Undone by the weakest link in a human chain, Fisher was sentenced to decades in prison.

Meanwhile, America was pursuing its own patented brand of espionage. The U-2 flew at an altitude of 70,000 feet, above the range of anti-aircraft guns and interceptors. Aerial photos provided detailed evidence of the weapons backing Khrushchev's bellicose 'we will bury you' rhetoric, or rather, a detailed absence of evidence. In the late 1950s, everything pointed to an immense American advantage in bombers, bombs, and even rockets, with the Russian ICBM program a handful of balky liquid fueled rockets. The overflights enraged Khrushchev, but the CIA's voracious appetite for intelligence lead them to schedule one last overflight on May 1, 1960. This flight put Gary Powers in range of an S-75 Dvina SAM, and the shootdown killed hopes for disarmament and detente.

The two spies were sentenced to years in prison. Mostly through the entrepreneurial efforts of Power's father, and Fisher's defense lawyer Donovan, were the two sides able to broker a swap, throwing in a US PhD student who's thesis on East German economic was also declared to be espionage.

Giles keeps it fast, interesting, and manages to capture the spirit of the era.

I'm married to a bioarchaeologist, so while I'm useless with bones myself, I know that you can learn a lot about them. No Bone Unturned is a biography of Doug Owsley, Head of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute. This book tells the story of his career, repatriating the remains of Americans murdered in Guatemala, identifying the victims of mass crime scenes like the Waco Massacre and 9/11, correcting the historical record at Jamestown, and in the centerpiece of the book, going up against the government to study Kennewick Man, a 9000 year old skeleton unearthed on the banks of the Colombia River.

This book is a lot of fun to read, but it uncritically presents Owsley as a scientific hero in the face of obstructionism from the Army Corps of Engineers and the superstitions of the Colville tribes. And reality is much more complicated. Kennewick Man is a unique scientific treasure, but he's also a person. At the time, Owsley believed based on skull morphology that Kennewick Man and the similarly aged Spirit Cave Mummy did not resemble contemporary Native Americans. This was evidence that human migration to the Americas did not solely occur over the Bearing Land Bridge.

Except of course, skull morphology isn't scientific. Subsequent DNA tests showed that Kennewick Man and the Spirit Cave Mummy are closely related to current Native American populations. The long lawsuit may have enabled scientific study of the bones, but Owsley's adversarial tactics feel like a strategic loss. Tribes have to be partners in American archaeological work, and despite protestations that Owsley's career has been full of respect for them, I didn't see it here. That, plus changes in scientific knowledge in the 17 year since, make this a book that has not aged well.

Wolff is one of the acknowledged masters of American short fiction, an award winning author and professor of creative writing, so it is unlikely that his memoir of Vietnam would be anything but good. And it is very good.

Wolff went to war because he had run out of options in civilian life, but out of options in a genteel kind of 1960s way. He was expelled from an elite boarding school in his final semester, signed up a as merchant sailor and then missed his boat, and the Army always needed bodies. Even as a youth, he harbored ambitions of being a writer, and the authors he admired most, especially Norman Mailer and Hemingway, had all served. His grifter father's dereliction during the Second World War provided another example. War would make him a man, one way or another.

Wolff thrived in military life, going from basic to paratrooper training to officer candidate school. He trained as an artilleryman and was mediocre at it, finishing last in his class. In one of the best lines of the book, he describes how he was kept on because OCS at Fort Sill ended with humorous skits and songs, and he was the only one in his training company who could write and organize a play. The Army made him an officer to literally produce a farce. Then it was off to language school to learn Vietnamese, living as a civilian in Washington DC for a year, while undergoing an intense romance with a madwoman named Vera, and finally Vietnam.

Wolff's war was an odd one. He was assigned as an advisor to an ARVN artillery unit outside My Tho, in the Delta. Through 1967 as the war heated up, My Tho existed in a charmed circle of peace. Wolff and his single American comrade, Sergeant Benet, an African-American lifer, set up a comfortable nest trading counterfeit VC items to a nearby American unit for steaks, liquor, and electronics. The artillery unit rarely patrolled. Of course, it was still war, with death by mine, sniper, or accident, but it was as safe a war as one could get.

The Tet Offensive changed everything. Wolff's artillery unit attacked My Tho, punishing guerrillas and civilians alike. The fear, and the massive devastation changed everything. What had once been an oasis of peace was now a charnal house. The American war machine could not save, it could only destroy.

Wolff is a master of short form fiction, and this book excels in brief literary sketches of encounters between Wolff and the illusions of mastery and heroism. Here's Wolff deciding to save a puppy an ARVN sergeant is going to make into stew. Here's Wolff letting a clumsy new Captain wreck a shantytown with helicopter downdraft. Here's Wolff meeting people in Washington DC, San Francisco, and Vietnam, and realizing that above all else, he doesn't want to die in a combat zone.

Wolff lacks the raw intensity of A Rumor of War, Where The Rivers Ran Backwards, or even Tim O'Brien's work. This is war as filtered though the MFA workshop. It's very well crafted, but it's also craft.

This is a book that I can't evaluate fairly. When I was a kid, I read my copies till they fell apart. It's loopy, cynical, absurd, solipsistic humor is at the base in my worldview. But you know what, it still rocks. The sentences are poetry and perfect British humor. The galaxy is wonderfully dysfunctional; Earth's destruction (and construction) hilariously pointless.

Do you get a little frisson of pleasure from the way serifs draw your eyes across the page? Does improper kerning make you irritable? Do you vandalize notices made in Comic Sans? If so, this book might be for you.

Butterick's argument is that typography matters. Good typography, defined as the visual component of the written word, conserves the reader's attention, helps your work stand out, and is an art worth practicing in and of itself. The problem is that the world is full of bad typography, from moronic defaults in word processing programs, to holdovers in design from newsprint and typewriters. With just a little of effort, you can do much better. The book itself is proof that this works: freely available on the web, it is one of the most minimalist but elegant sites I've seen. I stayed up way too late hitting the next page for the joy of seeing the layout.

Much of Butterick's advice is eminently practical. Learn to use the style settings on your word processor, which even in Microsoft Word are powerful enough to do almost anything. Focus on the body text first, and use white space more. 11 point fonts with 20 point line spaces and a narrower column size make for a much better reading experience than 12 points double spaced as wide as it can go, let alone abominations like exotic fonts, Arial, and BOLD UNDERLINED CAPS. His resumes are a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, in much of my life as an academic I'm constrained to other people's formatting, but I will try and follow his advice. (by the way, scientific journals can eat a dick. This is not 1970, no one reads paper copies, optimize for screen and printer and legibility, not fitting as many words as possible in 4 columns of tiny type).

Butterick does constantly up-sell his custom fonts, which is a little annoying. A guy's got to eat, and apparently people are not paying for a free webbook. I'm actually not that opposed to system defaults, unless you're a graphic designer, in which case your skill should be knowing better options than Helvetica. Typography demands sensitivity to context, and one thing that seems clear is that the 80-20 rule applies here: Doing a little will make your typography much better, getting that last little bit requires literally hand-tuning a document. System fonts are like jeans or a dark suit. They signal something like "I am wearing clothes." Putting in the money and effort to get bespoke fonts may give you a subliminal bump in credibility, but also seems like playing the business card scene from American Psycho straight.

As an aside, Butterick's resume is fascinating. He switched from math to design at Harvard, specialized in typography, got a law degree, wrote a custom web typesetting tool in a LISP variant, and a couple of books on typography.

The beginning of Monster was so confusing that I had to go back and reread Traitor (which was perfect). Having gotten re-familiarized with the setting and characters, it was back to the matter at hand. Monster is a flawed book, a fine fantasy adventure that lacks the ticking clockwork heart of Traitor.

Baru is now the The Agonist, one of the handful of Cryptarchs who secretly rule the Falcrest Empire, a conspiracy bound together by mutual crimes. Baru's goal is to destroy the Empire from within and liberate her home, and to do that she's lead a province into rebellion, betrayed the rebellion, and ordered the execution of the woman she loved. Tain Hu was supposed to be a lever to use on Baru, but she cut that lever off to give herself greater freedom of action. Baru's planned ascension is interrupted by orders from Cryptarchs with greater power, a quest to find the hidden enemy power of the Cancrioth, and by some blowback. A Falcresti admiral who Baru used in her plot wants revenge for the dead sailors, and Tain Shir, Hu's cousin and a failed student of Baru's mentor Farrier, wants to teach Baru a lesson about spending other people's lives like coins.

So it's off chasing the Cancrioth, the conspiracy behind the Mbo federation, while being chased by a mad admiral, on a ship populated with other secret rulers, including a Mbo Prince, the head of Falcresti intelligence, and two frenemy Cryptarchs. Baru spends the journey mostly drunk and moping, with occasional flashes of brilliance. But tension is introduced by artificially keeping characters from meeting and confronting each other honestly.

What I loved most about the first book was the terrifying iron discipline of Falcrest, the deliberate application of violence, training, finance, and sin to remake the world in their image of utopia. Monster goes broader, showing a deep split between those who believe heredity is destiny, and those who believe training is destiny. And the blowback is in some sense welcome. Baru has to face the shattering consequences of her action. The Mbo offer a whole different perspective, a world where human connections form a kind of magic that link everyone together. And behind it all is the Cancrioth, potential immortality through blasphemous altered biology.

This is really a 3.5 star book, but I'm rounding up because I like the series, and sentence to sentence Dickinson is still fantastic. Second books are hard, and I'm hopeful that he brings it back in the home stretch.