Circe is a wonder, a joy. We're all familiar with the story of Odysseus, that most cunning of men, as battled a cruel fate ordained by jealous gods and various evil monsters, only to come home and find his house overtaken by suitors, but what of the women?

Circe was one of the lesser Greek immortals, daughter of Helios and Perse, and Miller imagines her a strange and lonely child, growing up in the cruel and wondrous age of mythology. The episode in the Odyssey is a key moment, but just one in a lifetime that stretches far beyond any mortal's. Circe finds magic, abuses it, is exiled, and then comes into her own power and acceptance. I read this in one gulp, a single glorious rush of words.

Four Favorite Tools is a dead tree (well, dead pixel) version of the Cool Tools podcast, where Claudia Dawson, Mark Frauenfelder, and Kevin Kelly ask people adjacent to the Maker movement about tools they like. This version has about 150 people talking about the things they love in two pages apiece, with nice color photos. There's everything from the Standard Peavey (an iron spike for moving logs) on the simple end, to an Amray 1830 Scanning Electron Microscope on the high end, with everything from integrated development environments to kitchen tools in between. It's interesting to see specific products many people love, like Scrivener or little mesh bags, and where diversity shines. Lots of people love cameras, cargo bikes, and transcription apps, but everyone has their favorite. For $2, if you're looking for gift ideas, you could do a lot worse.

Gordis explores the relationship between American and Israeli Jews through the metaphor of a marriage on the brink of divorce, arguing that both sides need each other. The evidence is primarily historical, based on a reading of pro and anti-Zionist statements from the 1880s through the 1930s.

Some parts of the thesis are fairly incontrovertible. Zionism was a major and fraught question in the Jewish community before the foundation of Israel in 1948. And while American Jews have chosen to primarily assimilate, with the notable exception of Haredi communities, Israel is a proudly, even defiantly Jewish ethnostate, where Hebrew is spoken and Jewish supremacy is enshrined in special law.

I believe the origins of the divide, and I don't expect any one person to have the answer to ending it in a short book. Israel may be a vibrant Jewish community, but unless I learn Hebrew it's a foreign land and a foreign people. Israelis may be thoroughly sick of being hectored by American Jews, but the refusal of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to treat Conservative and Reform Judaism as worthwhile contributions to the faith rankles. The ongoing war crimes and genocide of the Palestinian occupation rankles, and the idea that because I am Jewish I am supposed to stay silent in defense of Israeli security is deeply personally offensive.

Where it is reasonable to expect a short book to have insight is on some more recent events. Gordis talks a lot about long-dead pre-independence Zionists and the triumph of the Six Day War, but he has almost nothing to say about the politics of the Israeli War for Independence, and the choices in state-building made thereafter. Events since 1982 and the occupation of Lebanon seem to have passed in a gray blur, for all that the book mentions them. Americans are unwilling to live with their own counter-insurgencies. Is it any surprise that we decline to live another country's?

Gordis' criticism that contemporary American Judaism is practically moribund is spot on, at least in my personal assessment of too many years of Hebrew school leading to a Bar Mitzvah. And while Israel may be more vigorously alive, it is increasingly isolated diplomatically. Both sides can point to history for examples of disaster. The First and Second Temple were sacked and destroyed. The European country with the most assimilated Jews lead their mass murder.

This book is interesting as a history, offer true, if trite insights into contemporary politics, and has no solutions. The marriage metaphor is often invoked, but it's also wrong on a basic level, because a marriage is a choice of consenting adults. A better metaphor is one of brothers. American and Israeli Jews, as a group, are descendants of a European Jewish tradition which was destroyed in the Holocaust. Orphaned, the two brothers grew up, and they grew in different directions. So what binds them, except for blood?

Another review described this book as Starship Troopers meets The Love Boat, and that's about right. Ran Colville is a new staff officer on The Empress of Earth, a 6000 person luxury starship. His job is managing trouble with the passengers, and with the kinds of people who go on interstellar voyages, that means a lot of trouble. There's a war brewing between two planets, passenger have personal issues, and Ran has to save the day. The story clumps along in a series of loosely connected vignettes, until at the end there's a hijacking attempt, and Ran leads a heroic rescue of his ship. Some decent gunplay, lousy characterization, downright awkward scifi sex (protip, the phrase 'swollen labia' should never be used in an erotic context). There are hints of a kind of callously cruel universe here, but the setting is little more than old stereotypes.

I'm coming around to solidly meh on Drake. If anybody knows which of his books are actually good, might read them, but otherwise, too many good books out there.

As a book on guerrilla warfare, there are definitely better texts. Thayer combines Clauswitz, Mao, and his own experiences as a liaison officer in WW2 to arrive at a hesitant mix of platitudes about the need to offer something to civilian populations, judge the political 'temperature of the waters', and relentlessly pursue guerrilla forces. He's not wrong, but the topic has been treated in more depth by others. Like so many others, Thayer is unable to square the circle of what causes modern liberal technocratic citizens are be willing to die for, and the institutional position of unconventional warfare vis-a-vis balances of power in the US government.

That said, as a historical artifact his book is fascinating. It was written in 1963, at the fulcrum of the Vietnam War, and for all the criticism above, Thayer is definitely asking the right questions about what America should be doing in the region. So what was this career officer, diplomat, and expert in unconventional warfare doing at this crucial period in history? Hiding out in Majorca to avoid a Senate investigation into allegations of homosexual behavior and Communist leanings.

Oh, that's why we totally screwed up in Vietnam.

Is it possible to have a book about transformation, and yet somehow miss the transformation? Dower's Embracing Defeat is a monumental work, that somehow feels like it misses the essence of Japan's re-invention in the wake of the war.

Dower's work is organized thematically, first psychologically, with the shock of defeat, then materially with starvation and the black market, the culturally, then politically with the new constitution, censorship, and war crimes tribunals, and finally with laying the foundation for the rise of Japan in the 1960s.

It's really an incredible story. The Japanese, who prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were prepared to die with bamboo spears in their hands against the full might of the Allied forces, surrendered and accepted occupation almost completely, letting MacArthur's army of occupation remake their country from top to bottom with almost no overt violence. It wasn't easy, of course. A psychological depression overtook many. Prostitution became a leading industry. Black marketeers thrived, while ordinary people starved or suffered at the hands of gangsters. The 'democratic' transition was imposed by above. American censorship was comprehensive, with the leading topic being the existence of American censorship, an Orwellian mess that stifled open society, even as the arts underwent a small renaissance. The war crimes trials, which sentenced seven Class A war criminals to death while protecting Emperor Hirohito, were a colonialist farce.

The problem with this primarily thematic organization is that the temporality of the occupation gets compressed. There are very real differences between the periods of real famine and deprivation immediately in the wake of surrender, the normalization around 1948, the pushback against the Left and embrace of old militarists as the Korean War turned hot, and the formal ending of the occupation. Dower's book has lots of detail about the resilience of a whole people, but fails to find a thesis.

Just a delightful meringue of a scifi novella! Ana works for a big box store that sells Scandinavian furniture that people assemble at home, and has a labyrinthine layout of odd little showrooms. Sometimes, portals open between these stores, and similar stores in parallel universes. When Ana's ex Jules volunteers to look for a missing customer, Ana follows along, finding out that there are more wonders in this cosmos than dreamed of in your easy-to-follow ideographic instructions. This novel works as weird scifi, and also Queer romance, as Ana has to deal with the consequences of her flawed relationship with the trans/nonbinary Jules, and figure out if they can still be friends while surviving the carnivorous hazards of other universes.

The nitpicky literature person in me says that Jules is really the protagonist of the book, and that Ana is just drawn along in her wake, but she's a decent PoV.

Growing up in Los Angeles and skiing in Mammoth, I knew Mulholland as the name of a road, and the Owens Valley as desolate stretch of wilderness along the 395. But that's at the remove of 80 years. Mulholland was once a power, the unquestioned king of water in Los Angeles, and the Ownes Valley home to hardscrabble but successful ranchers and farmers.

To grow, Los Angeles needed water. Mulholland and former Los Angeles major Fred Eaton hatched a plan to buy up water rights in the Owen's Valley, and transport water to Los Angeles with an ambitious 235 mile gravity fed aqueduct. Mulholland was the chief engineer, Eaton the financier, but the partnership broke down as Eaton demanded an extortionate $1 million for a valley well-suited to be a reservoir. Mulholland's crew braved desert temperature extremes, cave-ins, and guerrilla war from the locals to build and maintain the aqueduct. Meanwhile, a cabal of Los Angeles based speculators used their insider knowledge to profit immensely from new development in the San Fernando valley. Mulholland himself didn't profit from speculation, but those around him did.

Mulholland's reputation was destroyed by the 1928 failure of the Saint Francis dam. The reservoir broke suddenly in the middle of the night, killing hundreds, an the ambitious prosecutor Asa Keyes aimed to show that Mulholland's incompetence was the root fault. And certainly, as chief engineer, he bore ultimate responsibility, but Davis argues the dam collapse was due to an ancient landslide unexplained by contemporary geological theories. Mulholland would have need to be prescient, more than prudent, to prevent the collapse.

Rivers in the Desert is a fast moving history, and illuminates some of the character of the age. But I'm a fan of engineering biographies, and this book falls short of the sublime of McCullough's The Path Between the Seas, and is oddly silent on the California Water Wars. I'd probably read Cadillac Desert on that subject. But within these limits, Davis does a great job.

Working Futures is serious speculative fiction, the product of a deliberate foresight exercise to imagine the future of work. And thanks to generous support from The Charles Koch Foundation and The Hewlett Foundation, you can grab a copy for $3, which is a deal. As with all collections of this nature, the quality varies, in this case from solid to great. It's a stronger collection overall than Microsoft's 2015 Future Visions, though Microsoft had a lot more name brand talent.

Standout stories are "The Chaperone" by Andrew Dana Hudson, which imagines a customer service rep handling people who get too close to their AI assistants. The details of her life as a climate refugee outside Atlanta, and the ominous power of the tech giant Alpha against the empowered radical socialist bureaucrats of a newly empowered regulatory state have a realistic density reminiscent of Bruce Sterling at his best. "Generation Gap" by Holly Schofield tries to bridge the incommensurate gaps between a dying man of our generation, and the cryptic hustling entrepreneur who has hired him to contextualize early 21st century ephemera that hasn't been digitized.

The rest of the stories float through a world of algorithmic injustice, subcontracting out new forms of emotional labor, and bourgeoisie lifestyles without bourgeoisie stability, without ever really achieving a sharp point. They're not bad, per se, but in this critical futurist's eye, they lack the boldness of authenticity. Still better than the median story in Clarkesworld these days.

A battlefield hospital is like the sucking drain of a war. Sooner or later, everything come through there. Glasser was a doctor at Zama, a hospital in Japan that treated those injured in Vietnam too badly to be patched up in country, and not injured enough to die. The hospitals saw something like 8000 patients a month, closer to 11000 during the Tet Offensive.

But this isn't really Glasser's story, it's the stories of the men he treated, and how they wound up in his hospital. The overall feel is a lot like Michael Herr's Dispatches, though this book came out sooner, in 1971 while the war was still a going concern. Glasser has a fair amount of literary talent, but part of me wishes this had been more focused on his own world of the wards. Perhaps the second greatest illusion of war (after the idea that they can be really be won), is that death, if it comes, and it's not coming for you, is going to be clean, honorable, even cool. Except that by the odds, you're more likely to be shattered, blasted, burned, to suffer in agony for hours or days or years, before wounds finally do you in. The book only reaches that authenticity in the last story, about a severely burned soldier and the doctor who cares for him.