The Conquering Tide covers the middle of the war in the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to the capture of Guam. It is, if anything, stronger than the first book in the series. Toll moves confidently around the theater, capturing battles and personalities from the highest levels of command to the ordinary sailors and marines.

Three exceptional sections elevate the book: First, an early study of the British coastwatchers in the Solomon Islands, who's radio reports of Japanese movements gave the embattled Cactus Air Force the tactical edge is needed to survive. Second, the legendary first patrol of submarine commander 'Mush' Morton. American submarines sank more Japanese shipping over the course of the war than existed on December 7, 1941, strangling the Japanese Empire. And third, the epilogue, a study of the increasingly desperate censorship on the Japanese home front, as the civilians read propagandized reports of 'strategic victories' closer to the Home Islands, and prepared for the coming gotterdammerung of the strategic bombing campaign.

As Yamamoto predicted prior to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would run wild for six months, and then the increasing power of American industry would tell. This book is the story of the building of those muscles. The Guadalcanal campaign was a desperate measure for both sides, at the very fringes of their respective logistic capabilities. The remote airfield threatened sea lanes between the United States and Australia. Marines seized the airfield in an uncontested landing, but the constant IJN night attacks meant that American resupply efforts were scanty. Similarly, American airpower meant that any IJN supply run had to be completed in one night from their distant base at Rabaul. Sharp cruiser and destroyer actions sunk many American ships in the waters of Ironbottom Sound, but Japanese troops on the island were reduced to starvation rations of 500 calories per day. The aviators at Henderson field had the defender's advantage, and months of attrition warfare finished off the professional core of naval aviators who'd attacked Pearl Harbor. Japanese air power would only pose a threat through the desperate measure of kamikaze attacks in the future. In what would be characteristic of the war, while America pilots and marines suffered and died, their commanders recognized that well-supplied troops fought better, and that pilots had a useful combat career of four weeks before combat fatigue rendered them ineffective. Japan believed that the warrior samurai spirit could triumph over any difficulty, and that victory or death were the only options. Exhausted pilots became easy prey, starving troops died in frontal attacks, and the feud-ridden Japanese command structure couldn't adapt to changing circumstances.

The second major story is the new technologies pioneered by the American navy. The Essex class fleet carrier, the F6F Hellcat fighter, and a host of landing ships upended prewar ideas of strategy. Japan had planned for a mutually reinforcing system of bases in outlying island chains. The massive 5th Fleet had the logistic capabilities to move anywhere in theater, obliterate land-based airpower, and put Marines ashore on defend beaches. Island-hopping strategy bypassed Japanese strong points, making defensive preparations moot and leaving elite troops stranded to slowly starve.

Toll's history doesn't break much new ground, and with so much to cover, it must perforce leave some details out. Hornfischer's Neptune's Inferno is a similarly sized book on the naval actions around Guadalcanal alone. But for a synoptic view of the Pacific Theater, nothing comes close.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a high concept epistolary love story. Red and Blue are mirror-images, history hopping agent provocateurs subtly shaping the tangled threads of the multiverse for their cosmological ideologies. Red for the mechanist Agency, Blue for the biological Garden. An exchange of letters begins as taunts, and blossoms into love, and than a dangerous defection.

The framing is perfect scifi rigamarol, dancing through sketches of other realities with verb and style. The love story between the two... well, I almost missed the point where it switched from taunts to flirting to proclamations of undying love. Let's just say that it's more mood than characterization.

And oddly enough, I much prefer Blue to Red. This book was written by Gladstone (The Craft Series) and El-Mohtar, who I hadn't heard of, but who crushed the 2016-2017 short story awards with "Seasons of Glass and Iron." I wonder who wrote who...

After King Leopold's Ghost, I'm willing to give anything by Hochschild a spin. Spain in Our Hearts is not quite worth it. The Spanish Civil War, and in particular the involvement of the International Brigades, is a subject where the moral issues seem to overwhelm historical objectivity. This was the first fight against fascism! And yet the Republicans were abandoned by the Western Democracies. The USSR was the Republic's most reliable supporter, and Stalinist commissars held key positions, enacting their own purges against Republican fighters deemed insufficiently loyal to the party line. The war was gloriously fought, gloriously doomed, and gloriously recorded by Frank Capa and Ernest Hemingway.

Hochschild knew several veterans of the Lincoln Brigades as a young reporter in San Francisco, and a kind of sappy nostalgia suffuses the whole book. When General Franco and a handful of officers attempted a coup in 1936, they captured roughly a third of the Republic. But Franco got key strategic support, high-tech airplanes and tanks from Nazi Germany, thousands of soldiers from Fascist Italy, and oil on credit from Texaco.

The Republic got the sweepings of international leftists, men with ideals but little training or discipline. The Republic's gold reserves were sent to Russia, where they were spent by Stalin on Soviet arms for the Republic, starting with the dregs of Tsarist arms warehouses. Other equipment was blockaded by France or sunk at sea by Nationalist submarines. The International Brigades fought like shock troops, suffering three times the casualty rate of Republican Spanish units, but they were forced back repeatedly, as Franco's arms isolated and blockaded various regions, before finally crushing the Republic. Deemed 'premature anti-fascists' by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, veterans faced lifelong suspicion.

Hoschchild blends together recently published diaries from soldiers, but most readers would be better served by either the primary sources, Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, or from a military history angle, possible Beevor's The Battle for Spain

This is the first Discworld book I've read since Sir Terry's death. Like the best of his novels, it's a chewy center of humanistic philosophy surrounded by a chocolaty shell of fantasy adventure. The Monks of History have the power to shift time, moving it around to preserve the existence of some kind of timeline. It's vital work, since a mad scientist with a glass clock shattered history once before, and the Auditors, anti-life demons that record all of space and time, are trying to rebuild it and bring about a permanent End of Time. And only Lu-Tze, his apprentice Lobsang Ludd, and Susan granddaughter of DEATH, stand in the way of the apocalypse.

Come for the gentle jokes about kung-fu movies, mountaintop enlightenment, and the Five Horsemen of the apocalyse, stay for the troubles of living in a body, and the basic divide of the dark behind the eyes that is 'Me' and light of the universe in front of it.

Small Gods is a treasure, a masterpiece of humanistic philosophy. The theocracy of Om is an aberration on this disc, a harsh empire of unyielding fundamentalists. The massive hierarchy of the Church and Inquisition has stamped out all opposition to Om, and also all true faith, leaving nothing but an immense shell of hypocrisy. And on the Disc, where belief is like air to gods, this means that the Great God Om is sadly diminished, diminished down to a single believer, the Novice Brutha.

Brutha and Om, incarnate in the form of a tortoise, are swept up in a war orchestrated by the head of the inquisition, Vorbis, a man of means without ends. Om is pitted against Ephebe, a city-state of philosophers, guarded by a deadly labyrinth. Brutha isn't much of a thinker, but he has an incredible memory, one that Vorbis can use to defeat Ephebe. And so a novice is drawn into a game of politics, philosophy, and long arguments with his Greatly Diminished God over the nature of morality, religion, commandments, and priests.

It's simply my favorite Discworld book, one that's helped me immensely, and is always a joy to return to.

The Light Brigade is stylish military scifi, which I think is mostly cynical cladding over a sentimental core. Dietz wanted to be a hero, be a paladin, avenge the 2 million dead of Sao Paulo, taken in the Blink. He signs up for a corporate army, pulse-rifle wielding shock troopers fighting anarchists, liberals, and above all else Martian socialists, for an opaque chain of command.

What distinguishes Dietz is his method of tactical deployment, beamed from place to place as light. Sometimes it leads to strategic surprise, sometimes it leads to ugly teleporter accidents. More worryingly, Dietz has become unstuck in time. Every deployment has him fighting a battle different from the briefing, and returning to a squad Dietz only partially remembers. The corporate overlords are a censorious bunch, banning calendars and external references. It seems that most soldiers deploy properly, only a few like Dietz are part of the atemporal Light Brigade of the title.

It's a riff on a lot of things, mostly The Forever War, and the sentence to sentence styling is quite good, even if at longer structural scales the novel is soliphistic and kind of trite. The circular ouroborus ending is both a neat bit of sleight of hand, and ultimately unsatisfying. The effect is its own cause is it's own effect ad infinitum. The Light Brigade is well crafted, but not very weighty.

Quartered Safe Out Here is one the of the quintessential infantry memoirs, a tale of six months with Nine Section in Burma in 1944 and 1945. Fraser, of course has won lasting popularity as the author of the Flashman series, and he brings all his literary weight to this memoir. It's really about the ten or so men of Nine Section, grousing Cumbrian bandits in the finest tradition of their Boarder Riever ancestors. The rolling Cumbrian dialect, the complaints and arguments, the stand-tos and patrols and attacks, all come through.

Memory is a fickle thing, and tentpoles of fervent adrenaline in assaults on bunkers and desperate night actions and interspersed with long periods where nothing much happens, or nothing that could have stood out to be remembered 50 years later. And as with the Burma Campaign as a whole, it was the last brave show of the British Empire, where an army composed of Gurkhas and Sikhs and innumerable other Indian ethnicity, with madcap East African convoy drivers, and regiments from some specific English county, slugged it out with the cream of the Japanese army in the trackless jungle hills. There's glory, and humor, and jungle sores and malaria and dusty marches.

I could have done with fewer complaints about modern society having gone to the dogs, but Fraser is entitled to his pint and his grousing, because the story is incredible. Just a fantastic book.

Scythe is a stylish YA dystopia, with cool ideas hampered by pedestrian execution in the small things. In the future, human immortality has been achieved, and governance handed over to the Thunderhead, an almost all powerful AI. The last enclave of the old ways are the Scythes, a cadre of killers with a mandate to gleam 250 people per year.

Citra and Rowan are teenagers from the rather aimless mainstream culture with a little bit of moral fiber, which catches the attention of Scythe Faraday (all Scythes name themselves after a historical figure). They're chosen as apprentices, and learn the practical and ethical dimensions of gleaning. How to kill with weapons, hands, poison, and who to kill. Faraday picks his targets based on pre-immortality statistics, with a kind of gentle irony. Curie chooses people who have lost a desire for life and have become stagnant. Faraday and Curie are exemplars of monastic virtue, making death personal. Against them is contrasted Scythe Goddard and his small coterie of 'innovators'. Goddard gleans in mass murders, bloody rampages every few months. He uses the natural fascination with Scythes to put himself in the center of a cult of hedonistic celebrity.

And of course, Citra and Rowan walk right into this mess. It's usual for a single master to take two apprentices, and Citra and Rowan are told that only one of them will become a Scythe, and the first thing they'll do is glean the loser. But they really like each other, and they're decent people. And after a misadventure, Rowan wins up working with Goddard, with a whole situation about corruption in the Scythes and the future of this civilization.

Scythe is a fun book, if about as subtle as a punch to the face. It's also very much a YA novel, with the semi-formed characters and pedestrian notions of good and evil that that implies, but it's a fun read and good enough to sell me on the sequels.

This is the stronger of Grau's books on the Soviet-Afghan War by far. Based on hundreds of interviews with former mujahideen in the mid 1990s, it is an invaluble account of how asymmetric warfare looks from the guerrilla's side.

When the mujahideen had it good, they had it very good indeed. Soviet convoy tactics were laughable, and skilled fighters were able to pick trucks off with ease, while avoiding the counterfire of armored escorts. Afghan Army outposts were basically supply depots, with guards that were cowardly and unwilling to fight. Conversely, when things went poorly, they went very poorly very quickly. Soviet airborne forces were a minority in battle, but they were supremely effective. Heavy artillery and aircraft pounded anyone exposed. The mujahideen logistics system and command structure never went beyond 'ramshackle'. This was both a weakness and a strength. While the mujahideen were unable to press an operational advantage, they were also impossible to decapitate. New leaders always rose to replace casualties. The Soviets, following the adage that the guerrilla swims like a fish in the sea of the people, attempted to drain the sea. Aerial bombardment and massive mining operations turned millions of Afghans into refugees, and lead directly to the Taliban, 9/11, the American invasion, and Afghanistan today.

The Other Side of the Mountain is focused solely on tactics, and probably should be read with a broader history of the region. But for what it does, it is the best book I've read!

Oh, and one more thing.

The Word for World is Forest is a tightly plotted novella, pitting genocidal Terran humans against a species of gentle forest dwelling hominids. Athshe/New Tahiti is a world covered in trees, where a few thousand Terrans use slavery to clear cut the forest and ship lumber back to a nearly lifeless Terra.

One of our viewpoints is Captain Davidson, a parody of the macho imperialist, a man of crude appetites who sees the local "creechies" as little more than animals to be exterminated. His rape and murder of one of the females, inspires the other major viewpoint, Selver, to lead his people in a war against the humans. The anti-imperialist plot (written in the twilight of the Vietnam War) is well done, but Le Guin is not a military fetishist.

Her true interests lie with Selver and the Athsheans. Their society is one that has almost eliminated violence, cultivating the ability to have waking-dreams. Le Guin clearly means something deep by this, but her gestures at the grandness of world-time and dream-time didn't quite connect for me. What works is the idea of Selver as a god, as he brings the idea of war and systematic murder into Athshean, and one line, a perfect epigram, "If a suicide kills everyone else, than the murderer kills himself."