The workings of science are almost entirely naturalized. For us, it seems natural that scientists discover facts about the natural universe, and that they do so by formulating hypotheses and designing experiments to test those hypotheses. But to someone in the in the 15th century, this process was entirely alien.

Wootton aims to discuss the scientific revolution, the period between Tycho's Nova of 1572 and the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687, where science became an accepted mode of knowledge. But the real objective is a broadside against a school of scholarship which has wrecked proper history of science, namely David Bloor's Strong Programme, and an undue relativism in history of science, with it's origins in Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift theory of scientific revolutions.

This book is at its best in discussing the world of knowledge prior to the scientific revolution. I was entirely unaware of the controversy about the location of the sphere of land and the sphere of water in Aristotelian physics, or the belief that the oceans were literally above dry land, as preserved in the phrase 'high seas'. There's a lot of good linguistic explanation of the origins and usages of words like experiment, fact, and discovery. Wootton's argument is that the discovery and exploitation of the New World provided the initial crack in the armor of scholastic Aristotelian knowledge, since the Americas were so obviously there and the ancients had said nothing about them. An interesting graph of sales of a popular Ptolemaic astronomy textbook shows a dip in sales in the 1570s, since a nova cannot be explained in a universe of divine spheres, and then a collapse with Galileo's discover of the moons of Jupiter and phases of Venus around 1608. The old knowledge was dead.

But how did the new knowledge arise? Here, Wootton is sadly less detailed, talking a little about the various uses of Torricelli's experiment. And of course, the printing press played a key role in bringing down the price of books and allowing precise copies of complex technical diagrams, something scribes were hopeless at reproducing accurately. But where there should be evidence, there is mostly invective against postmodern relativists.

Now I'll admit that I'm part of the science and technology studies tradition Wootton rails against. He's right that the Strong Programme is often poorly used, and that relativism misses the key ability of science to accurately describe the natural world. Yet, even a sophisticated realism has trouble getting out of the recursive trap that 'successful science accurately describes the natural world, which we know because of successful science, which has been shown to accurately describe the natural world, etc". There were experimenters prior to Galileo, but as Wootton discusses, their discoveries died, because they did not exist in a social context which allowed for scientific discovery.

A Memory Called Empire is a multidimensional psychological thriller that tackles heavy themes, but gestures at politics rather than getting deeply involved with them. Ambassador Mahit Dzmare is a young woman dispatched to the Teixcalaan capitol to replace her predecessor, who has died under unclear circumstances. She has a difficult mission ahead, unraveling the deals her predecessor made, while preserving the independence of her home Lsel Station, and dealing with sabotage and terrorism. Mahit's advantage is that the Stationers have a form of memory augmentation, and Mahit has her predecessor in her head. However the memory imago is 15 years out of date, and worse, is malfunctioning, leaving Mahit lost in a fog.

The best parts of the book is the interplay between Mahit and her Teixcalaan assigned companion, Three Seagrass. They're two xenophiles approaching each other from opposite sides, and their relationship is wonderfully drawn. Martine knows that empire as phenomenon is about cultural hegemony, more than fleets and roads and armies. Teixcalaan culture is full of layers and allusions and grand stories.

But empire is also about force, and as this story hinges on the succession of the dying emperor, military invasions, alien threats, and the safety of Lsel Station, I never got the sense that there was any deeper economic or political reality to the situation beyond the needs of the plot. Compared to Dune or the Vorkosigan books, the setting lacked the weight of history. Now, the fact that I'm comparing a debut novel to all-time classics is noteworthy, but for a book which is otherwise so sophisticated, the shallowness of the history and technology is a letdown. Fortunately, the choices made are vague enough that future books might be able to fill in the details.

Hastings's goal with this book was to depict the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people caught up in the maelstrom, to show the horror of industrialized total war. There have been shelves of books written about Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, or great battles like D-Day and Midway. But these were exceptional people, and exceptional moments. What of the rest of us?

Hastings demolishes any legend of a 'good war'. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan fought to ensure genocidal dominance over their hemispheres. The Soviet Union was a brutal totalitarian state that opportunistically hoped that the capitalists would weaken each other before Stalin's own war in 1943 or so, before Nazi invasion preempted that strategy. Churchill fought to secure a fading British Empire, with its own brutality, racism, and incompetence. France surrendered, and a solid majority of French citizens collaborated with the Nazi regime. American didn't want to fight the war till Pearl Harbor. And the war certainly wasn't about stopping the Holocaust.

As a broad and synthetic work, Inferno doesn't delve deeply into any particular moment. The chapters are organized chronologically and thematically. Hasting pushes a few broad points. Russians did most of the fighting and dying. The US and British forces had material supremacy, which compensated for a weakness in close quarters combat. And most people were scared, bored, hungry, and confused. The war was not glorious, and the world suffered immensely.

There are some elements that I disagree with. Hastings believes Nazi soldiers were categorically superior to Allied ones, and his argument that sailors could not be brave in the same way as soldiers is not one I'd care to repeat near a Navy veteran. For all that, this is a stark and stunning work of military history.

Westside is an imaginative fantasy mystery, in the vein of Gaiman or Meiville. Gilda Carr is a private detective in a New York City split in two. East Manhattan is much like historical Manhattan of the roaring 20s, but the West Side has been taken by shadowy powers. People disappear on dark streets, architecture and technology corrode, and great forests grow in the parks while gangs of feral boys play at soldiers beneath.

Gilda specializes in small mysteries, the little things that drive you mad. Her case is to retrieve a woman's missing glove, but the situation spirals rapidly out of control, and Gilda finds herself embroiled in an conspiracy of bootleggers, corrupt cops, her dead father's madness, and the darkness eating at the heart of her city.

It's a fun ride, with a lot of verve and character, even if the prohibition slang sometimes gets caught in Akers' mouth, or the story outruns the plot. There's plenty of grit, and a little glamour, and if this isn't quite a masterpiece, it has more maturity and confidence than some similar books I could mention.

An absolute doorstopper of a history, World of our Fathers is both wide-ranging and oddly narrow. Howe wrote this book about the Yiddish culture of New York's East Side from 1880 to 1920. The world is literally that of his parents, who were Jewish immigrants themselves, in my case it's the world of my great grandparents.

The harsh pogroms of Czar Alexander III provided an impetus for millions of Jews to leave the Pale of Settlement. Immigrants endured an often horrific voyage in steerage class steamships, were hurriedly processed at Ellis Island, and almost invariably wound up working in a tailor's shop on the East Side. The crowded tenements and furious sweatshop pace were a far cry from the sedate and ordered world of the shtetl, but the Jews thrived, creating a Yiddish speaking society with newspapers, union organizers, theater, and literature.

The World of Our Fathers looks like a broad social history, but it gets narrow and deep with dives into union organizing, journalism, and literary criticism. These three areas are where Howe spent his career (he was a lifelong organizer with the DSA before it was cool, as well as the founding editor of Dissent), and these intensely detailed chapters make a somewhat ponderous book even more unwieldy.

And finally, there is an inevitable melancholy about the project. In Europe, a Jew had no choice to be a Jew. There was literally nothing between religious observation and atheist socialist agitator. In America, a secular land, as individuals and collectively, Jews had to make a choice as to how much of their culture they were going to preserve. Harsh quotas on immigration starting in 1921 cut the East Side off from the old world, a distance made infinite by the catastrophic losses of the Holocaust. The neighborhoods changed, as children left for the suburbs and new waves of immigrants came in. In the contest between Yiddish and English, assimilation and identity, America won almost completely. Thought I was astounded to learn that Yiddish newspaper Forward still exists, with a print edition running through January 2019!.

40 years on, the Yiddish world is even more distant. The debate has never really ended, with American Jewish identity contested between the poles of Hasidic insularity, AIPAC's ride-or-die Zionism, and the street level radicalism of Never Again Action. This book is a glimpse at a common origin, and the garden from whence modern American Judaism came.

Savage Wars of Peace is a decent, if unsystematic study of American military interventions prior to 1941, wedded to an ideology that has aged like a burn-pit outside Bagram Air Base.

I'll tackle the first bit. America has a long history of deploying force overseas, in gunboat diplomacy and putative expeditions stretching back to the wars against the Barbary Corsairs: "...to the shores of Tripoli", as the Marine corps hymn goes. As Toll's magisterial Six Frigates discusses, these early wars were at the pivot of a debate about the power of the Federal government and America's role in the world. The 18th century was marked by constant, if limited use of the Navy and Marines to open Japan, Korea, and China to American trade, and to punish various groups in Malaysia and the Caribbean who had decided that plundering American merchants was better than trading with them.

The Spanish-American War marked a distinct change in American policy, with the Philippines and Puerto Rico now directly ruled colonies, Cuba a protectorate, and a newly more assertive posture worldwide. A combination of Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism, and Woodrow Wilson's moralism, summed up in the statement that 'America should teach Latin Americans to elect good men', resulted in repeated interventions in Haiti and Nicaragua, as well as a protracted counter-insurgency in the Philippines, Pershing's putative expedition against Pancho Villa, which nearly resulted in an actual shooting war with Mexico, and the gunboat operations of the China patrol. Generally, small groups of American Marines outfought their local opponents with superior training and armaments. Boot takes a universally uncritical view of the American role in all these operations, arguing that American intervention was broadly popular because Americans provided hygiene and displaced local corrupt strongmen. I'm sure a historian who bothered to read what the locals involved thought would consider otherwise.

The final chapter is a brief skip through the latter half of the 20th century. Boot's take is that Vietnam was lost because Westmoreland's war of attrition destroyed American morale at home, and that the COIN side of the Combined Action Patrol (see Bing West's The Village) and Phoenix Program (Herrington's Stalking The Vietcong) showed that the war could be won. If America had the will to intervene as decisively in 1975 as it did in 1972, there'd still be a South Vietnam. This is a conclusion that I'm skeptical of. I think America would have had to intervene again in 1978, 81, etc. There's a brief skip through Desert Storm and Clinton's operations of the 90s.

This pure history isn't a bad one, per se, as a military history of forgotten American interventions. My problems are twofold, first Boot agrees completely with Kipling's 'white man's burden' thesis of history, without managing to capture any of the actual zeitgest of period, what I consider to be the highest aim of history. Second, this book includes nothing on the US Army and the Indian Wars, certainly the most protracted and decisive of American Small Wars. The relationship between the genocide of American Indians, the Federal government, and historiography is a complex one, but to write an entire book on Small Wars without discussing Custer or Geronimo is a curious choice-perhaps because it's impossible to fit genocide into Boot's theoretical framework that imperialism is both authentically American and generally good for all concerned.

And that theoretical framework is where this book stinks. The book was written in that halcyon 'End of History' prior to 9/11, and published immediately afterwards, before the true nature of the quagmire of Afghanistan and the fiasco of Iraq had sunk in to public perception. Assessing the total cost of the War of Terror and its children is foolhardy, but the total cost cannot be considered anything less than high. Around $45 billion per year, as the Afghanistan War becomes old enough vote, according to the Pentagon's numbers. Perhaps $5.9 TRILLION, according to the Crawford Report.

If these are Small Wars, I shudder to think of what a big one would look like. And that doesn't even include the human costs to American soldiers, and to especially the Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemeni (among many others) on the receiving end of "American liberty".

Since publishing this book, Boot has gone on to a successful career as a chickenhawk Washington Post columnist and perpetually owned twitter figure. He lacks the truly sublime idiocy of a Thomas Friedman or David Brooks, but he's still out there, saying America should bomb some more people, and getting wrecked on Twitter. I picked this book up for a dollar at a used book sale, I almost decided to toss it away unread when I saw Boot's name on. And I persisted in reading just so I could write a very sarcastic review.

Death's End is the thrilling conclusion to the trilogy that began with The Three Body Problem. Da Liu finally lets his imagination soar, and it goes to some truly thrilling places: a new golden age built on deterrence between humans and Trisolarians, a brief and vicious occupation, higher and lower dimensional spaces, fables containing hidden wisdom, and the fate of universe built on the terrifying logic of the dark forest.

Death's End protagonist is Cheng Xin, a young woman and scientist who plays a key role in many events of the book. Cheng is part of mission that sends a probe to the Trisolarians, then the sole person responsible for the red button of nuclear deterrence, and the key vote on the experimental technologies that might make the difference for the human race. Repeatedly, Cheng chooses the softer 'humanitarian' option, and her choice is followed by mega-death, though I am unsure of her ultimate accountability. The universe of Death's End is fundamentally hostile to life, and anything as weak and planetary as humanity. This is a universe of lethal killers, who warp the laws of physics as a weapon.

The key technology of the book is a space-warping drive, which can be used as a lightspeed starship drive, and defensively to wrap an entire solar system in an artificial event horizon, a two way shield by which a species can both protect itself from cosmological hunters, but also prevents any expansion into the galaxy. I'm torn about Cheng as a protagonist, but she's a step up from Luo Ji in terms of characterization, if not up to the very real pain of Ye Wenjie.

It's a cool book, but it's only loosely connected to the people and themes of the prior books in the series. The whole series has pacing issues, with even more cosmological stuff thrown in almost as a coda. Grand space opera is harder than it looks, but I wish Liu had gotten to the firework factory sooner, with space folding and pocket universes and that grand weirdness.

Good management is good management. Cargo cult gibberish is cargo cult gibberish. And the intersection of the two is Scrum, a management philosophy that promises orders of magnitude improvements everywhere.

Some parts of scrum are obvious. Spend time doing things that are valuable to the customer. Delivery that value quickly and incrementally. Don't get bogged down in monumental efforts tied to thousands of pages of documentation that no one has actually read, or actually understands. The basic unit of action is a small, 5-7 person, cross-functional team, capable of moving a project from conception to done. Happy is contagious, and happy teams are effective teams.

But the cargo cult elements of scrum are in the jargon, which obscure the hard points of writing code. Story points, daily-stand ups, and sprint cycles are all well and good, but if you haven't figured out what you're doing and why, it doesn't matter. Small teams can self-organize, but what about coordinating big organizations and big projects? And while cross-functionality seems very important, most conventional businesses are organized in top-down, 'disciplinary' silos (sales, IT, development, finance, etc), so how do product owners and scrum masters interact with the conventional management hierarchy. And of course the big questions remain largely unanswered. How does a team figure out what objectives and capabilities are important, and how do you do a proper sprint retrospective to capture what went right?

And finally, some of the examples Sutherland uses are not quite right. There's a lot of pointing to Boyd's OODA loop, which Sutherland says he learned as a RF-4 pilot in Vietnam, except John Boyd only developed the OODA loop after his stint as Commander of 56th Combat Support Group in 1973. And Sutherland points to Valve as a company which has successfully implemented scrum, which may be true, except that despite sitting on a literal neverending pile of money in the form the Steam store, Valve hasn't released a significant game of its own since 2013. Rich Geldritch, a disgruntled former manager, alleges Valve is a morass of abusive management and inefficiency.

This book is enthusiastic, but cheering 'hip hip hooray being great!' is a far cry from actually being great.

Russian is a language fit for many epithets of despair, with one of the darkest being a phrase that translates to 'no future'. Gessen tracks the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin through the lives of several extraordinary Russians, extraordinary in the sense that they're gifted with sensitivity and insight into their own lives--though one of her subjects, Zhanna Nemtsova, daughter of murdered opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, would be exceptional in any time.

Gessen's first subject is the twilight of Communism. In her history, the Soviet Union was a society prohibited from knowing itself, except through the stale dogmatism of Marxist-Leninist thought. Rather than the flourishing self-knowledge produced by open media, fair elections, and robust social sciences, the Soviet Union was locked in a totalitarian dyad, between the central authorities of the state, who had the apparatus of terror at their control, and a semi-quiescent population, which took signals from the center to enforce conformity. The ultimate signal was that violence would be used to preserve the status quo, and a combination of Gorbachev's wavering through perestroika and the unwillingness of any political figure to give direct orders to the army and KGB to initiate a crackdown meant that the USSR dissolved, not quite bloodlessly, but without an expected civil war or systematic massacres.

Of course, the promised realities of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism failed to realize for many people. While material measures of quality of life went up, expectations went up even faster, and many Russians missed the surety of the old system. Yeltsin boozed his ways through the 90s, and then selected a little known KGB officer from St. Petersburg as he successor: Vladimir Putin.

Gessen covered Putin's ascent in The Man Without a Face, and this book is more about the consequences. The old Soviet nomenklatura had never really gone anywhere, and Putin brought them to heal. Putin recast the government in the mold of a mafia family, with himself as the patriarch. Oil profits buoyed consumer confidence, which allowed him to dispense benefices.

Meanwhile, Putin amped up a culture war in the name of traditional Russian and Eurasian values. The actual influence of anti-modern philosopher Alexander Dugin is hard to evaluate, but Putin used his language to declare war against homosexuality, and then actual war against Georgia and Ukraine. The most heartbreaking parts of a very sad book concern Lyosha, an openly gay professor of gender studies, who is forced to flee to America after several gay friends are viciously beaten as pedophiles.

Gessen has her own agenda, of course, and her psychoanalytic perspective on the Russian character is sui generis, but it also captures the weird contradictions of the New Right Populist Authoritarianism that more purely materialistic leave fuzzy. Even far outside Russia, it seems like the future is being swept under by a torrent of bitter debris from the failure of neoliberalism.

One Man is a fast moving fantasy gangster novel. Kyrioc used to be a noble heir, but after a disastrous quest to prove his worth, he's been disfigured, and lives under an assumed name in a slum. When his neighbor stumbles into a criminal deal, and her daughter gets kidnapped, Kyrioc has to get her back by killing everyone who stands in his path.

This is a world of weird magic, with a city built among the skeletons of gigantic dead gods, and usual gifts. And it's fine enough. Lots of action, lots of cool bits. But it doesn't have the verve of great books in this genre, the gonzo new weird of Perdido Street Station, the high-octane magic of Gladstone's Craft series, the characterization of The Lies of Locke Lamora, or even the gritty noir attitude of Low Town.

One Man/ is complicated rather than complex, using multiple points of view to disguise what's a pretty simple variant of the Taken basic plot, where a killer has to go back in to save an innocent. Good enough if you're looking for new fantasy, but nothing that elevates it to great.