The closest thing to a god on Earth is the captain of a naval ship. He has destructive firepower at his fingertips, and immense authority over and responsibility for the lives of men in his command. But what if god is mad? This is the premise of Herman Wouk's great novel The Caine Mutiny. This is the non-fiction version.

Marcus Aurelius Arnheiter was a Lt. Commander in command of the destroyer escort USS Vance, stationed off the coast of South Vietnam in 1967. The Vance had a tedious mission as part of Operation Market Time, inspecting coastal traffic to block Viet Cong weapons smuggling. Over the course of 99 days in command, Arnheiter's eccentric and authoritarian leadership drove the ship to the brink of mutiny. He was summarily removed from command. But Arnheiter did not go quietly. He alleged a conspiracy against him by his officers and the senior admirals of the Navy. Powerful allies, including Congressman Jacob Javits and US Navy Captain Richard Alexander, pressed his case in the court of public opinion. In 1968, Arnheiter's story had everything. For the Right, he was a captain who had been removed from command for trying to fight the war properly, rather than by LBJ's book. For the Left, he was the little man crushed by an impersonal bureaucracy. Sheehan wrote a few stories on the affair, and requested time to do a deeper dive. As it turned out, the media had simply repeated Arnheiter's allegations without even the basic step of checking them against the crew's recollections, and behind the facade of the brave naval officer there was a deep well of madness and fabrications.

From his first moments in command, Arnheiter had trouble with his basic duties and boundaries. He appropriated something like $1000 of the crew's $1500 recreation fund to buy a speedboat, which he planned to use to go trawling for trouble while on patrol. He demanded the officers steal a silver coffee set from a hotel for him. Standards of mess and dress went past 'martinet' to ridiculous, as he demanded dress whites be on hand in case an admiral inspected the Vance, abused officers and sailors for minor infractions, and forbid tiny traditional pleasures. Engine room snipes finished their hot and exhausting four hour shifts with a cigarette smoked on the fantail, but the image of crew in oil-spotted dungarees drove Arnheiter mad. He banned enlisted men from smoking and drinking coffee on the bridge, and forced officers to use a cup and saucer instead of mug. Meals became marathon sessions of Arnheiter blathering on about naval traditions, interspersed with the officers being forced to give short, impromptu speeches on subjects such as the proper use of a finger bowl and proper etiquette in an opera box. Arnheiter used top priority channels to order himself a special white toilet seat. Sunday services were dropped for obligatory and very Protestant 'moral guidance lectures' by Arnheiter, alienating Catholics on board. With the crew on short water rations, he forced everyone to go through multiple uniforms a day to meet his grooming standards, while taking 20 minute showers. Military life often involves danger and suffering, and it a basic principle of command that the senior officer share in those hazards rather than using rank to insulate himself.

Personal peccadilloes aides, Arnheiter was also a reckless and irresponsible naval officer. The Vance ran on cranky diesel engines, which Arnheiter abused and took no interest in the condition of, causing mechanical casualties which he did not report. In a rush to get into combat, Arnheiter pulled his ship off station into a restricted zone to do his own shore bombardment, exaggerated blasting a few dunes into destruction of a bunker complex, and then sent transmissions to operations command with a false position. In these cases, if the Navy had relied on the Vance being in a certain place to conduct an urgent mission, to rescue the crew of a downed helicopter or intercept a high-value target, the Vance would not have been able to respond. Arnheiter became so lost in narrating one of these pointless free-fires on the Vietnamese coast he nearly wrecked the ship. In another incident, while towing the ship's whaleboat, Arnheiter increased speed to the point the whaleboat nearly swamped, which would have drowned the men aboard. Arnheiter would leave loaded guns lying about the bridge, where a bad roll could have caused a weapon to fall and discharge. Morale deteriorated towards the point where one sailor, drunk during an impromptu BBQ on an island, started shouting he would kill Arnheiter. Another sailor covering a boarding action of a Vietnamese junk, found himself pointing his shotgun at Arnheiter, thinking in his exhaustion he could end all their torment with a single round of buckshot.

In the end, Arnheiter's ambition was his undoing. He wrote his own commendation for a Silver Star and forced his officers to endorse it. They included a sealed letter, indicating that the citation was fraudulent. The squadron commander, recognizing Arnheiter's distinctive writing style, gave much more credence to a report by a roving Navy chaplain that morale on the Vance was dangerously poor, and Arnheiter was removed from command.

A great naval officer often has a touch of romance. The heroes of the early frigate days of the Navy were proud and prickly men, to the point of death. Arnheiter was obsessed with great commanders, Nelson and MacArthur. But he was also dangerously unmoored from reality, an imaginative man unable to distinguish his fantasies from the hard facts. One might ask how Arnheiter achieved command, and according to Sheehan's investigations the system worked, and the personnel board recommended against giving Arnheiter a ship. Only personal intervention by his friend Captain Alexander in 1964 moved Arnheiter to the ranks of 'recommended for command', and Alexander never revealed why he did that.

The Arnheiter Affair is a forgotten incident, overshadowed by the great drama of the war, but this is still a fast and fascinating book on command and how it collapses.

A really good coming of age story, set in the stark brutality of the Eastern Front. Six months into the Siege of Lenigrad, 17-year old Lev Beniov is regretting the surge of heroism that lead him to stay behind to defend the city. When he's caught by the NKVD looting the body of a Nazi pilot, he's given a task in lieu of execution: Retrieve a dozen eggs for the wedding of an NKVD colonel's daughter, or be executed. Teamed up with Lev is Kolya, an alleged deserter from the Red Army, a student of literature, and a kind of Communist Casanova, a counter-point to the shy and retiring Lev, son of an executed poet and young man of little talents, romantic or otherwise.

Lev and Kolya face off with Leningrad cannibals, and venture across enemy lines in search of a chicken that hasn't yet been eaten. They meet up with prostitutes and partisans, wind up captured by Nazis, and it's up to Lev to save them all in a tense show down with an Einsatzgruppen for their lives (and one dozen eggs). Beautiful written and richly textured with historical details, City of Thieves is a fantastic meditation on growing up, life, and the things that make life worth living, even in the midst of the greatest series of atrocities in human history.

The Mirage Factory is a history of the birth of Los Angeles, from roughly 1900 to 1930, as seen through the biographies of three key people, each of whom built great things only to end in disgrace. William Mulholland brought water to the city, to the eternal damnation of the Owen's Valley. D.W. Griffith invented the grammar of the motion picture, and then failed to follow the industry he pioneered. Aimee Semple McPherson combined Pentecostal preaching with the new technology of radio to create a new kind of broadcast, but her later life was embroiled in scandal.

Krist knows how to keep the story moving (this is the third of his urban histories), and if he skews more towards the salacious, there's plenty of quality gossip in early Hollywood. This is the third book I've read in a month with William Mulholland as a major character, and Krist breaks little new ground, hewing close to conventional accounts of the Owen's Valley water wars and the San Franciquito dam collapse. He has a genuine love of early cinema, and the chapters of D.W. Griffith are much better done.

Early cinema was scandalous, a D-rated non-art. Griffith figured out how to make the camera his own, which as an avowed Southerner and son of a Confederate colonel, he used his skills to make The Birth of a Nation. This was a high-water mark. Griffith's epic film style blew out budgets and produced a turgid epic about the evil of violence just as American entered the first World War. His fussy Victorian sentimentality didn't match the emerging tastes of Jazz Age audiences, and after successive failures as an independent director, he crawled into a bottle and drank himself to death over decades, making his last film in 1931.

Sister Aimee Semple McPherson is by far the most complex character. A devout pentecostal preacher, she damped down the hellfire and brimstone and took to the airwaves, broadcasting to an audience of thousands from her Angelus Temple. But her personal life was increasingly chaotic, as she's rumored to have carried on an affair with her chief radio engineer, and otherwise act in an ungodly manner. In 1926, she disappeared for six weeks while visiting the beach. She reappeared, claiming to have been kidnapped to Mexico and held prisoner. Investigations were inconclusive, unable to either find kidnappers or prove that McPherson carried out the hoax. Her ministry continued, though not at it's previous level, until her death in 1944 of a Seconal overdose. Her Foursquare church still exists, with millions of members and 50,000 congregations worldwide. Though perusing her Wikipedia page, I see there are internal church controversies not mentioned.

This is a popular history, and though strongly sourced, it has the feel of gossip pressed until authoritative, rather than original history. From what else I know of Mulholland, the stories here are sensational and on the shallow side, rather than getting at deep issues. But that's LA, a city who's best monument is a sign for a real estate development left up.

If anything, even better and more absurd than the first Hitchhiker's Guide. Dinners that want to be eaten; dead for tax purposes; the Total Perspective Vortex; Golgarinch Ark B; and a melancholy ending.

Gideon the Ninth is rollicking stylish gothic space opera, a snarky tale of swordswoman and necromancers. We meet Gideon about to make her escape from the House of the Ninth, a planetary sepulchral. She's stopped from getting on her shuttle offworld and a new life in the Legions of the Undying Emperor by Harrowhark, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, powerful necromancer, stone cold bitch, and Gideon's nemesis. There's a once in 10,000 year opportunity to join the Lyctors, the elite champions of the Emperor. Houses 2 through 9 are sending their champions, and that means that Gideon and Harrowhark have to work together.

The challenge to achieving the rank of Lyctor is hidden somewhere in a vast crumbling palace full of locked doors and deadly experiments. And when someone or something begin murdering the applicants, the stakes are raised very very high. This books works as both gothic space opera and also gen-Z sarcasm. Gideon has a ton of foulmouthed wit and charm, laying down swordstrokes and burns with equal aplomb. There's a raw authenticity to the best frenemy relationship between Gideon and Harrowhawk, who despise each other and are the most important people in each other's lives. The murder island setting makes the 'what-if high school but scifi?' YA-dystopia tropes come alive. Gideon is also very much into women, though describing this as a lesbian book is a bit of a stretch; lots of lust, but no love.

I've got a couple of quibbles. The cast of characters isn't that big, but the fact that the necromancers and cavaliers of each house are referred to at various points by first name, last name, nick name, and occasionally title meant that about half of them swirled as faceless opposition, rather than real characters. The resolution of the murder mystery is a bit of an out-of-context ass pull, rather than something a reader could conceivably figure out. But verve and joy count for a lot, and Gideon the Ninth is the best new speculative fiction I've read in months.

*** UPDATE for 2024 ***
Due to some personal health issues, I was recovering with audiobooks, and got about a third of the way through the audiobook, which is excellent, before running out of credits and finishing on Kindle. Everything I said previously still applies. More thoughtfully, the first act on Drearburgh is incredible. The last scene, the epic knock-down drag out fight, is also fantastic. But the middle drags, especially before the murders start, and the revelation that the sickly Dulcinea is actually the Lyctor Cytherea is impossible to guess from the evidence provided. But again, style counts for a lot.

On one level, this is a textbook about how to design a game. On another level, this a work of love by someone who clearly understands why games are fun, and how to manage the tricky business of coordinating all the people required to build one. Jesse Schell breaks games down into their individual components, and explains how those can work together to reinforce an experience of fun. The book is full of practical, folksy wisdom on managing artists, programmers, playtesters, and clients. A charming, conversational book full of hard advice and useful ideas. A good read for anybody who loves games, and essential for somebody who plans to design one.

Reality is certainly broken. Leave aside the big problems like climate change, peak oil, political instability, and economic collapse, on a day to day basis, people are feeling alienated from their jobs, their communities, their very lives, and are fleeing into virtual worlds. Jane McGonigal makes the claim that this is not as bad as it appears, that in fact, games might save the world. Unfortunately, the book falls into the what I might call the Malcolm Gladwell (sorry, Malcolm) trap of thinking that an interesting idea and a bunch of anecdotes somehow adds up to a well-supported thesis.

McGonigal breaks the book into three sections. The first is about why we game. She brings into two unusual emotions, fiero, which is triumphant pride in victory, and naches the pleasure of helping someone else become accomplished to explain we find games fun. Games provide ample opportunities to experience these otherwise rare emotions. Games also help us bond, socially, in that they can be a shared interest, but also help us feel like part of a larger project. Just walking around World of Warcraft feels like being part of a community. The second and third part focus on Alternate Reality Games (ARG), which can be used to get people to help with everything from household chores (Chore Wars) to urban decay (Groundcrew.us). Another side of games is developing long term thinking, whether it be a World Without Oil, or SUPERSTRUCT.

Now, I'm going to be a little critical. One important question that McGonigal drops are if forms of community fostered actually as meaningful as 'traditional communities'. It's one thing if people are replacing watching Jerry Springer with gaming, it's another if it's replacing the traditional institutions of cohesion. My D&D group are some of my closest friends on campus, but it's not because we play D&D, it's because we sit around the table for four hours a week and talk, face to face (and as my players will tell you, I'm the worst for letting table talk interrupt the game.) I can't say that the virtual communities I've belong to have felt event a little bit as real.

On a related note, can games create valuable behavior? There are certainly lessons to be learned from game design about making boring tasks like work and school more interesting and intrinsically rewarding, but a fundamental facet of games is the freedom to leave. Can games replace other forms of organization with the going gets tough, or boring? Bruce Sterling said something like, "Good luck getting these twitterhead neterati to pay attention to anything long enough to govern it," in relation to the recent uprising in the Middle East. The same likely applies to game. Chapter 11, on the Engagement Economy, is one of the better ones in the book, but really deserves somebody with an economics PhD to flesh it out. Translating value between the game and the cash economy will be a perennial problem for serious game designers, and is one that McGonigal sidesteps.

Finally, there is the idea that games can reprogram us, to be be nicer, more collaborative, or wiser. Certainly, gamers have created immense things, after Wikipedia, most of the the large wikis on the web are about videogames, but questions of external value still apply. Futurism is hard work, and while you can say "crowd-sourced many-eyes good-results", I'm not sure if these kind of open scenario exercises actually inspire true reflection or wisdom, or merely reinforce pre-existing biases.

I wanted to like this book. Games are important, as the ever increasing number of game players demonstrates, but we need to have a clearer conception of what they can and cannot do. Uncritical cheerleading doesn't help; the topic deserves a better book.

The Anarchy is a masterful, comprehensive, and ultimately frustrating account of how the British East India Company conquered India between the 1757 Battle of Plassey and it's apex at 1803. At it's height, the EIC army was twice the size of the British Army (this during the Napoleonic Wars), and ruled a territory significantly more prosperous and populated than Western Europe. The EIC was in some senses an extension of contemporary standard practice, the EIC was not the first joint stock company nor the first European colonial conquest, but the EIC was unique in it's multinational reach, its corporate sovereignty, its massive bailouts as perhaps the first 'too big to fail' entity, and the brutality of it's operations.

The EIC had been operating since 1600, founded by Elizabethan buccaneers like Sir Francis Drake, and a relatively minor player compared to the Portuguese and Dutch East India Companies. European tensions in the form of the Seven Years War, and the slow decay of the Mughal Empire in India, saw a series of battles that culminated at Plassey, where the brutally efficient Clive defeated the simply brutal Siraj ud-Daulah and took direct control of the rich Bengal provinces. Over the next 40 years, a swirling series of wars between Mughals, Marathas, and Afghans provided further opportunities for the EIC to expand their territories and finally crush all opposition.

The sources and writing are masterful. The frustrating part is that while Dalrymple points to the EIC as a prototype for modern corporate forms, he has little to say about how they managed to conquer India. In one sense, the situation was basically asymmetric. It was British ships anchored off Calcutta, not Mughal ships in the Thames; and who would sail halfway around the world to trade with barbaric and impoverished shepherds anyway? (That's the British, the barbarians there). European military technology, which centered on musket line infantry firing in files, was superior to Mughal armies based around heavy armored cavalry, but it was hardly a situation like Pizarro's gunpowder and steel against New World nations lacking metalworking. Most of the EIC soldiers were sepoys, Indians trained to fight European style, and Indian potentates were quick to adapt European tactics, with French mercenaries serving as a particular nemesis of the EIC. Indian princes were a distinct mixed bunch as commanders, perhaps a third solid, a third interested more in the arts than warfare, and a third absolute incompetents. The EIC was hardly free of problems. Warren Hastings, for decades the most powerful company man in India, fought a duel against his nominal British government overseer and was later impeached for his troubles.

The ultimate reason the company succeed may simply come down to finance. An EIC sepoy was paid three to four times what a Mughal equivalent would get, and that is if the local was paid at all. The EIC made strong pacts with local bankers, and paid its debts on time and in full. Perhaps the greatest irony is that Indian merchants were fully complicit in the conquest, and in draining the wealth of the subcontinent to Europe. Even as General Cornwallis (yes, that Cornwallis) instituted a series of racist laws to prevent the rise of local elites similar to those who had defeated him in North America, enough Indians saw the EIC as no worse than previous overlords to enable their conquest.

Night's Black Agents is Bourne meets True Blood. You a group of renegade soldiers, ex-spies, freelance analysts, and general spooks who have stumble upon a terrible specter haunting 21st century Europe: Vampires! Using your skills and networks, you have to send these bloodsuckers back to the grave for good.

There's a lot to like about this game. The GMing advice and conspyramid (conspiracy+pyramid) foe structure, with escalating levels of henchmen and shell organizations, is tuned for spies vs bloodsuckers, but brilliant and portable. The chapter on vampires summarizes tons of folklore, you decide what is true in your game. And the rules support multiple play styles, from high octane Stakes to the shadowy betrayal of Mirror to the psychological annihilation of Burn and the powerlessness of Dust.

This is my first time reading through the GUMSHOE system, and I am both impressed and a little confused. Roleplaying game systems are about managing the flow of information and the consequences of uncertainty. In GUMSHOE, clues are almost automatically revealed. No rolling perception to spot the shell casing, intimidate to coerce an uncommunicative witness, knowledge to retrieve an obscure fact. Characters have a pool of points, and they spend these for clues. A similar point spend mechanic is at play in the action sequences, with a d6+k vs N system. As long as players spend at least one point, they're guaranteed success on easy tests, and higher spends mean that exceptional characters can definitely make a critical check, at the cost of having nothing in reserve for the future.

I haven't played it yet, but it seems workable. I'm not a fan of attritional mechanics, and GUMSHOE is nothing but attrition, but it works. 8 years on from publication, it feels less sophisticated than the fiction-first fail forward-approach of games running on a pbtA or BitD-style fail forward engine. In a world of espionage, which is based around double-edged truths, secrets, revelations, and a fatal web of blowback, the GUMSHOE approach of 'yeah, it works' doesn't seem to model the source fiction. And finally, the layout is painfully old-school, triple columns and arbitrary section breaks that make using this book as a reference confusing. I'm still not sure how many points an agent starts with in a pool, which I guess is the same as the rating, but for such a key point of the system, I shouldn't have to guess. The combat sections are similarly confusing.

I'm sure that Ken Hite could run an amazing campaign of Night's Black Agents, but his decades of Suppressed Transmissions columns are the source for paranormal weirdness. Even after this book, I'm less sure I could do the same.

Becoming a mother is something that many women will do, and also one of the most profoundly transformative things that a woman can do. And it is shrouded in mystique, overlapping layers of folk wisdom from the world's deep cultural heritage, a surprisingly shallow pool of scientific advice (pregnant women are understudied for reasons relating to institutional sexism and the extra IRB review layers in place to protect them), and a million morally charged 'proper motherhood' lifestyle consultants.

Garbes uses her own pregnancy as a lens to understand the motherhood-industrial complex. The way that her body changed, the ways in which she was supported and let down by her medical partners, and the fraught experience of her friends. Garbes has a day job as a journalist, which helps her make sense of the latest research about the physiological changes of pregnancy, and the importance of emotional support.

The feminist lens is used to frame the subjectivity and multiplicity of pregnancy. There are few universes, except that this is a moment of supreme change. There will be joy, and sorrow, and expectations that cannot possibly be met, but the mother's needs should be central to the journey.