The Good Shepherd is an incredibly taut novella about an anti-submarine action in the North Atlantic during World War 2. Lieutenant Commander Krause is in command of a small flotilla, guarding 37 small merchantmen against a Nazi U-boat wolfpack. Over the course of 48 hours, he must defend his command against slash attacks from a deceptive and elusive foe. The book is tightly focused on Krause, on the responsibility of command and the need to make instant decisions with poor information in the strange game of cat-and-mouse. One of Forester's best books, this is well worth a read.

The name alone was enough to sell me on this collection. And it's pretty much exactly what it says on the cover, a collection of slipstreamish scifi from a American-Cuban perspective. One story is set on a space station, two concern a neural cybernetic implant, but the main thrust is people, their passions, and their souls, in a world much like our but a little more vivid. Hernandez plays with the stereotypes of Cubans and the culture of machismo, while also having his characters be physicists, mathematicians, investigative reporters.

Pressfield is best known as the author of some very well regarded historical novels about
Sparta. This book of writing advice is focused on the psychology of the labor of writing. If you are a true Artist (caps intended), with a Great Work inside you, it will take real, painful effort to get it out. There's a fear inside us, preventing us from achieving our great work, which Pressfield deems Resistance.

True artists face their Resistance every day, and win. You can no more ultimately conquer Resistance than you can death, but every word written is another victory. Pressfield's recipe for beating resistance is turning professional. The world is full of amateur hobbyists, but the professional faces up to resistance every day and does the work that needs to be done. A professional carves out that space, both psychological and physical, that enables them to work. And if you're working, really working, emotional satisfaction will follow. As the Bhagavad Gita teaches, we're entitled only to our labor, not the fruits of our labor.

It's interesting to compare Pressfield to Cameron's The Artist's Way. The two books are more similar than different. Both seek to tap an authentic artist's self to conquer the false demons of the ego. But where Cameron follows the radical presentness of Zen, Pressfield argues for transcendent inspiration, in the framework of the Greek Muses. The cool professional is a different take from the enlightened master, but the content and style of punchy chapters is similar. With my military history orientation, I prefer Pressfield's take.

Of course, those seeking the mechanics of writing should look elsewhere.

Every time I think I've reached the end of the fractal of fuckedupedness that is the Vietnam War, I find something new. The Ravens is an oral history of the Steve Canyon program, a secret program of Forward Air Controllers that flew missions in Laos in support of the CIA backed Hmong Army of General Vang Pao.

What comes through first and foremost is the immense courage of The Ravens. These men flew Cessnas (literally, the Cessna O-1 Bird Dog) against a sophisticated air defense network of 14.5mm machine guns and 23mm cannons. In a 6 month tour, 90% of Ravens would be hit by ground fire, 60% forced to crash land, and 30% would be killed in action. Flying long hours under intense pressure, the Ravens went a little bit crazy, and Robbins does an wonderful job describing the hectic ground life at the secret airbase of Long Tieng, with drinking parties, Madame Lulu's brothel, and pet bears. Though the work was dangerous and exhausting, Ravens universally loved the ability to fight as hard as they could, without the burden of REMF oversight.

The on-the-ground story is put in a broader context, with overviews of Neutralist agreements in Laos, and high-level diplomacy with Kissinger and B-52 strikes. A great book on a lesser known aspect of the war.

Ambrose made his reputation on Eisenhower. This hagiography reveals the paradoxes of supreme command. While Eisenhower was vital to victory, he never commanded troops in battle. Nominally an apolitical soldier, his main task was maintaining the alliance against Nazi Germany, charting a middle course between domineering personalities like Montgomery, Patton, de Gaulle, and Churchill. The role of the supreme commander involved deciding when and where the battle should be fought, not when, and preparing the logistics, intelligence, and command structure necessary to win.

In one sense, Eisenhower's ultimate triumph is assured by history. He conquered. The road there was far from smooth. Eisenhower's first subcommander in North Africa, General Fredendall, proved incompetent. The Italian campaign turned into a grinding attritional slog that missed opportunities for comprehensive victory. Even in Western Europe, the final lines could have been drawn to better favor the Americans.

As a commander, Eisenhower's greatest virtues were his optimism and his universalism. The one thing he would not stand were subordinates who acted in national interest, rather than the interests of the alliance. Yet a good manager is self-effacing, and this book is best when it draws from British Chief of Staff General Alan Brooke' memoirs, which salaciously depicted Brooke's personal assessment of key figures.

50 years on, Ambrose's early work has become the core conventional wisdom of Eisenhower's historical legacy. You probably should read them.

Hornfischer excels at smaller, more intimate history, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors being a shining example of what books can do. So how does his style translate to the massive undertaking that was the Allied victory in the Pacific?

Well, Hornfischer cheats. He focuses on three main characters, Admiral Spruance, who's Fifth Fleet was the decisive naval arm, Draper Kauffman, a naval officer who organized Underwater Demolition Teams to prepare the beach for invasion, and Paul W. Tibbetts, who dropped the first atomic bomb. Secondary characters, Marines, pilots, and Japanese soldiers and civilians, round out the history, providing a personal touch on great events.

The meat of the book focuses on the invasion of Saipan, a grinding campaign to force tenacious defenders out of a network of caves and bunkers. Saipan also served as the catalyst for the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, where skilled American pilots in F6F Hellcats tore the guts out of the IJN's naval aviation wing. From then on, kamikaze attacks were the best that the IJN could mount, but these desperate measures could still exact a terribly high cost.

Saipan dominates the book, getting over 20 chapters to something like 2 pages on Iwo Jima, and a similar slighting of the invasion of Okinawa. The big show was the planned invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall. Causalities were expected to be immense, exceeding over 100,000 deaths on the Allied side, and millions on the Japanese side. Chemical weapons were expected to be used. It would have been horrific.

Here, Hornfischer launches into his second major theme of the book, justifying the use of the atomic bomb. This is a subject of unending historical debate, and Hornfischer hews close to conventional wisdom. While Hiroshima and Nagasaki may not have been strictly military targets, the object was the dysfunctional psychology around Emperor Hirohito. Despite a hopeless military position, including blockade and regular firebombing attacks, Japan was unwilling to surrender. The overwhelming force of the bombs provided an impetus to end the war. It was atrocious, yes, but a final atrocity in a decade of horrors.

So with the caveats that this book is really about Saipan, with a long digression on the ethics of the atom bomb, it is still really excellent. Hornfischer is top notch as a storyteller, humanizing a powerful military facing a determined opponent. Well worth the read!

I wanted to like this book, but rather than develop characters, a plot, or setting, Delany appears to throw a bunch of interesting ideas into a blender and set to frappe. Delany can do military sci-fi well, witness the ferocious creativity of Babel-17. He is a master of unconventional bodies and sexes, as in "Aye, and Gomorrah...". But in Triton, a fundamentally unlikeable main character wanders through an interplanetary war without witnessing any of the machinations of power. Triton society places an emphasis on the diversity of sex and gender, yet total gender and sexual reassignment is a state provided out-patient surgery that is apparently easier than deciding what to wear to dinner. While some of the fragments are interesting, the book itself is a uncomfortable lump of uncooked ideas, without the redeeming literary qualities of Delany's other works.

The New Economics is a series of flashcards, carrying telegraphic versions of Deming's Big Ideas. Deming, of course, was an American economist who helped trained the Japanese in a new style of quality management that arguably lead to decades of Japanese dominance in high technology. His ideas lay behind the Toyota Production System, and the maligned TPS reports of Office Space. He also passed away in 1993, just as Japan entered its lost decade. The New Economics was his last book.

The center of his ideas holds up. Think of a company as a system, with management's role being to organize the system for quality. Understanding that there is natural variation in a system, and don't go chasing randomness. Treat workers as humans beings and approach their psychology as high-morale team members, rather than creating self-defeating 'meritocratic' ranking systems.

But this book is scattered, organized anecdotally rather than thematically. It's one thing to proclaim that 'the firm is a system', but Deming lacks the theoretical tools to describe how systems self-organize and can be governed. It's a little unfair to argue that a dead man should be current with the latest research, but this book would be so much better in conversation with the Sante Fe Institute (see Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour, John Boyd's OODA loop (Richard's Certain to Win, or even the intersection of epistemology and ecology (Miller et al. 2006. Epistemological Pluralism: Reorganizing Interdisciplinary Research, particularly the figure on the adaptive cycle from Reorganization, Growth, Conservation, and Release).

Deming is still a name to conjure with, but there are likely better books on the area.

The Hold Life Has is an absolute classic of ethnography. Allen traveled to the remote Andean village of Sonqo (possibly now rendered as Soncco), north east of Cuzco, and lived there for quite a while in 1975. The updated Second Edition describes changes that Allen observed returning in the 1990s and 2000s.

The altiplano around Sonqo is a harsh environment, and Allen works through the cosmology and rituals that sustain life in this place. There is a hierarchy of spirits, embodied by features on the landscape from great peaks to local hills and gullies, and the spirits must be appeased with offerings of coca. Life is based on reciprocity, flows of energy, and interdependent binaries. There are great stories here, about ritual, conflict, and the importance of the living ayullu community.

And there's also tragedy in the poverty and the suffering. About the only thing that grows well on the altiplano are potatoes, and potato farming and herding doesn't bring in much cash. The people of Sonqo survived the conquest of the Inca, centuries of colonial domination by haciendas, and various land reform policies, but they couldn't maintain their way of life in the face of consumer goods and development aid. Fertilizer and homes more lavish than one room huts destroyed the traditional farming practices of the people. Children fled to bigger cities, to live as misti (mestizos) rather than runa (Indians). The war on drugs made coca leaves scarce, and the social forms of chewing the ritual offerings of k'intu hard to maintain.

I've spent some time in Peru, most of it on the tourist trails and in a small city in the south. The Peru I know is a lot like anywhere else, with the most notable difference being that the plumbing isn't up to first world standards. But there's this vision that one day, the Inca will return, and those who they recognize as living like they did will be saved, and the rest of the mistis destroyed. I think few Peruvians would survive this apocalypse. But the word 'Sonqo' translates as heart, and the altiplano will always be the heart of Peru. This classic ethnography is a great glimpse of that heart.

Early San Francisco was a profoundly strange city. The Gold Rush exploded a sleepy port into an expensive haven of vice and villainy, designed to separate miners and sailors from their cash with booze, prostitution, and blunt objects. The dense area of houses of ill-repute, named the Barbary Coast, was a real-life version of that Simpsons song about New Orleans. Asbury's book is from 1933, and takes pretty much every lurid newspaper article from the time at face value. There are some interesting anecdotes about such characters as Dirty Tom McAlear, who would eat or drink anything for a few cents and hadn't had a bath in fifteen years, to wars between proprietors of vice and the vigilant Vigilance Committee, or the various ruses used to shanghai sailors onto new ships, but overall this book is just long, early 20th century scandalizing about admittedly very bad vice, without much of an organizing framework.