Every Spy a Prince is an authorized biography version of Israel's secretive intelligence services, blending a public overview of the structure of this shadow world with a greatest hits version of its intelligence coups, and also some journalist criticism of the intelligence community.

The intelligence community in Israel has been traditionally protected by a veil of censorship unheard of in a democracy. The four key agencies at the time were Mossad, the foreign intelligence service; Aman, the military intelligence service; Shin Bet, in charge of domestic counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism; and Lekem, a scientific intelligence agency that also managed the nuclear program. Lekem has since been dissolved and its duties parceled out across the ministries. The identities of the heads of these agencies were not allowed to be published, as just the tip of secrecy.

The early Mossad was strongly influenced by the extremist militant group Irgun. The first few decades of intelligence work saw a series of massive human intelligence wins. Israeli intelligence got the first non-Soviet copy of Kruschev's denunciation of Stalin, convinced an Iraqi pilot to defect with a then state-of-the art MiG-21, and captured Eichmann in Argentina. Day to day, the intelligence community did pretty well. Spying is a difficult game, and while agents were blown due to bad luck or sloppy tradecraft, with fatal consequences for those in Arab countries, on the whole the Israeli secret services punched above their weight.

Conversely, the 70s and 80s saw a series of alarming failures. Aman missed preparations for the Yom Kippur War, confidently assuming the Arab states would never attack. Mossad fumbled the Lillehammer assassination, killing an innocent man in Norway instead of a member of Black September. After years of ruling the occupied Palestinians through informers, Shin Bet was caught off-guard by the first intifada. And Lekem ran Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who's spying threatened the key relationship with the United States.

Raviv and Melman close by arguing that the harsh censorship reign is absurd given that the chief of Shin Bet can throw a wild birthday bash attended by gossip columnists. The also raise warnings about the existence of a shadow foreign policy run by ex-intelligence arms merchants. While Mossad has long served as a shadow foreign ministry in countries which cannot officially acknowledge Israel, ex-Mossad agents are only vaguely controlled by the state, and their misdeeds in training and supplying dictators and gangsters reflects badly on Israelis everywhere.

Every Spy A Prince is a little scattershot, and being published in 1990, it now a historical artifact itself. Rise and Kill First by Bergman is the 21st century update. The spycraft stories are still engaging, and its a good read.

This review was supposed to go up on H-Net, but has been mired in limbo for several months. Since their reviews are covered under Creative Commons, and I'm the author, and I prefer Goodreads, I'm posting here. Expect more words than usual.

It is cliché to say that the current era is an information age. The objects, processes, and consequences of digital computing are omnipresent, built into everything from toys to weapons to domestic appliances. While the prefix cyber- signifies this vision of digital modernity, the field of cybernetics is a marginalized fringe, rather than a mainstream science of information. Ronald R. Kline traces the intellectual and social trajectories of cybernetics and information from their linked origins in 1948 to the present. Two geniuses of applied mathematics, Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon, formalized an insight that information could be mathematically described in a form like the entropy equation, a standard measure of disorder in a physical system that related to the thermodynamic capacity for work. Moreover, human being and machines could be described as interacting components of a larger system with emergent characteristics not merely capturable in the performance of machines or the decisions of men. From this insight, Weiner, Shannon, and luminaries in the biological, psychological, and social sciences hoped that a new interdisciplinary language would arise uniting multiple fields of study and providing a scientifically rigorous description of the contours of Second World War II life. But cybernetics never rose above the status of analogy for a range of scientific phenomena and faded as a field. Through a detailed reading of the personal correspondence of involved scholars, proceedings of interdisciplinary conferences, and the popular press, Kline provides an invaluable account of how scientists and humanists came to understand the potential and pitfalls of increasing interconnectedness between humans and machines and the polymorphic meaning of the word “information.”

Arguments over the true father of information are a feature of histories celebrating both Weiner and Shannon. The first chapter works around this priority dispute by describing the near-simultaneous origins of Weiner’s and Shannon’s ideas from their World War II work, and contacts among a common circle of collaborators. Weiner developed an automated anti-aircraft sight at the MIT Radiation Laboratory that could calculate lead and direct the gun to ensure a hit as a human operator tracked a target. For Weiner, information was represented by a time-series of measurements, and as those messages became more random less information was transmitted. Imagine an oscillating dial settling on a value, and one captures the essence of Weiner's thinking on information and entropy. Weiner’s 1948 book Cybernetics was an extension of the insight that men and machines could be described in terms of information and feedback loops. Shannon’s work, also published in 1948 in a two-part article “A Mathematical Theory of Information”, described information as positive entropy: as the receiver becomes more certain of what to expect next from a transmitted signal, the less information they receive. Though the underlying mathematics were similar, two theories of information were inverses of each other. For Weiner a steady signal transmitted maximum confidence and maximum information; for Shannon, a steady signal sent nothing new, and transmitted zero information. Though Weiner has been largely written out of the official history of information theory, Kline notes that Shannon visited Weiner several times at MIT in 1941 and 1942 and, according to Weiner’s collaborator Julian Bigelow, they discussed the statistical basis of information. Combined with Shannon’s acknowledgment to Weiner in his article, this suggests a greater degree of similar thinking between the two men than the later divergence between cybernetics and information theory indicates.

The second chapter follows ten interdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation from 1946 to 1953 on cybernetics. The premise of cybernetics was that “the nervous system was deemed to work like a feedback-control mechanism, the brain like a digital computer, and society like a communication system” (pg. 45). Behind these analogies was the idea of negative feedback, a system which maintains a set level by correcting deviations from its outputs. Thermostats are a familiar use of negative feedback, a device which turns on a furnace when a room is cold, and turns off the furnace when the room reaches a comfortable temperature. The Macy conference attendees hoped that complex behavior such as biological and social phenomena, could be treated scientifically by cybernetic models. Despite significant support over seven years from the Macy Foundation, the conferences failed to develop their analogies and ideas into a research program. Data from the social sciences was too messy to fit into cybernetics equations and models, and personal feud between Weiner and conference chair Warren McCulloch over laboratory support at MIT interfered with the intellectual project.

While the scientific side of cybernetics floundered, the ideas gained increasing relevance in the public sphere. The third chapter explores an explosion of cultural interests in cybernetics in the early Cold War. Weiner’s book Cybernetics became a campus favorite and attracted glowing reviews from the press. Weiner’s 1950 book The Human Uses of Human Beings, a non-mathematic treatment of his theories, attracted further popular attention to the potential of "thinking" machines. The course of cybernetics quickly ran away from Weiner, as his books were advertised alongside science-fiction novels like Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952). Weiner’s name was even appropriated without permission by L. Ron Hubbard to promote the pseudo-scientific cult Dianetics, a precursor to Scientology. What scientific progress there was in the cybernetics was by applied military projects for guided missiles and radar systems, rather than the interdisciplinary vision of the Macy conferences. Weiner was leery of military domination of science, even as he was taking military funding for his work on a glove that translated sound into vibration for the deaf, and publicly distanced himself from military work in a letter to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. While cybernetics became strongly associated with thinking computers and automated factories in the public eye, for academics it remained a diffuse program of mathematical models in the social and biological sciences which had not yet produced novel results or integrated disciplines across the social and natural science.

The contrast between cybernetics and information theory in the years after 1955, as presented in the fourth chapter, became even more stark., Kline’s analysis of the papers and conferences organized under the aegis of the Institute of Radio Engineers Professional Group on Information Theory (PGIT) shows that this group cited Shannon’s definition of information over Weiner’s. Although the first PGIT conferences were highly interdisciplinary, featuring papers on automata and the social sciences along with communication engineering, by 1959 their focus had narrowed to the emerging technology of digital computers and the technical details of analog signal processing as applied to radar and telephones. By the 1960s, scholars cited either Weiner or Shannon, but rarely both. The academic community split between cyberneticists pronouncing sweeping theories, and information theorists working on discrete technical problems. Participants in the information theory conferences eventually separated their work entirely from the ordinary semantic definition of "information" as conveyed meaning to focus on analog signal processing and the storage and manipulation of digital data.

The fifth chapter and sixth chapter return to cybernetics as science, by examining the influence of cybernetics in the origins of artificial intelligence and the work of six behavioral scientists from 1954 to 1959: Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, Roman Jakobson, Talcott Parsons, and Gregory Bateson. These researchers used concepts from cybernetics and information theory to mathematically model human behavior and social interactions. Information theory had applications in psychology and linguistics, measuring the thresholds of humans to distinguish phonemes, the basic unit of speech, in a noisy environment. Miller’s adage that human working memory consists of seven items, plus or minus two (now a commonplace observation linked to the length of telephone numbers) has its origins in this research. Although cybernetic thinking influenced research agendas and the formation of new interdisciplinary centers, its outcomes were distinct from the visions of a universal science that had surrounded the movement in the early 1950s.
No discussion of cybernetics is not complete without its avatar, the cyborg. Kline analyzes the 1960 articles of Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, a pair of doctors working in aerospace medicine, who coined the term cyborg to describe their ideal astronaut, a symbiont of human intelligence and machine durability capable of operating in the vacuum of outer space. The original cyborg, a cybernetic organism that could consciously adapt to its environments, has since come to mean any implantation of mechanical or electrical components in a living organism. For Clynes and Kline, the cyborg went beyond a solution to the immediate problem of space exploration to mark a spiritual leap in mankind’s self-directed evolution. For reasons of practicality, the Air Force rejected the cyborg in favor of life support capsules, but the idea lives on. Through science-fiction fantasies and Donna Haraway’s ironic criticism of the military-industrial complex, the cyborg has become an evocative symbol, standing for both inhuman perfectibility and the indivisible tangle of social and technological systems in ordinary life.

The seventh chapter follows cybernetics through its decline in the 1960s and 1970s. The biologists and social scientists that had given the initial series of Macy conferences on cybernetics their deeply interdisciplinary character returned to their original fields, and cybernetics was abandoned to researchers in computers and electronics with heterodox inclinations. Cybernetics found a home in the Soviet Union, where feedback-control mechanisms had a natural alliance with the Communist command economy. Out of concerns of a ‘cybernetics gap’, the Central Intelligence Agency sponsored the founding of the American Society for Cybernetics in 1964, the year of Nobert Weiner’s death. The organizers of the ASC and a separate Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Group for Systems Science and Cybernetics attempted to recast cybernetics as a modern science capable of solving social problems but had little success in the tumultuous late 60s. The dreamers and visionaries of the counterculture actively co-opted the terminology of cybernetics, embarking on a legitimacy exchange that gave a gloss of respectability to their vision of a liberated technological utopia, while leaving the scientific project of cybernetics disordered and discredited.

Chapter eight returns to the meanings of information beyond the technical non-semantic definition arrived at by the information theorists, the relationship between information in and of itself, information technology, and the information age. The term information technology originated in the management jargon of the 1960s, and evolved from referring to statistical techniques for managing business processes such as operations research, to referring to a slew of new devices for storing, communicating, and analyzing digitized data. Information technology gained credence as an ever-expanding budget item, another necessary expense for managers looking to root out inefficiency and coordinate global businesses. The term information age has a separate genealogy, one rooted in futurism and critique published in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Daniel Bell and Marshall McLuhan. This rhetoric of radical transformation was picked up by government economists in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other advanced countries, but in the absence of agreed upon definition of information in a social sense, the idea of an information age become an empty label to denote recent decades, without capturing the magnitude or consequences of the immense investment in information technology.

The Cybernetics Moment closes by reading Stewart Brand’s journalism on cybernetics and computers as how a case study in how an influential believer in the liberatory potential of Weiner's cybernetics became an information age guru. Brand wrote about the birth of the ARPANET in Rolling Stone as “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums” (1972) and interviewed Margeret Mead and Gregory Bateson in 1976 about their time at the Macy conferences on cybernetics. Brand was perhaps the last person to attempt to organize a social movement around cybernetic principles with his Whole Earth Movement. But Bateson's death and the rise of the commercial possibilities associated with the personal computer lead Brand to instead evangelize the liberating power of information at the MIT Media Lab. Despite the failure of cybernetics to provide answers or even progress on its major premises, the questions raised then remain provocative even today: that something about ourselves can be seen in devices that adjust to their surroundings; that information is a fundamental part of the universe on par with energy and matter; and that there might be a spiritual component to computers.

The Cybernetics Moment is an in-depth study of the field of cybernetics. It is historical account of how researchers clarify the questions and boundaries of a field which offers an explanation for the success of information theory and the relative lack of success for cybernetics in terms of legitimacy exchange. Finally, for scholars studying the social implications of computing, algorithms, and automation, this is a thorough review of the first formulations of those questions and how they were dealt with at the dawn of the information age.

Flags of Our Fathers hits firmly in the historiographic tradition of 'Boomers writing about their Greatest Generation parents', as James Bradley literally writes about his father John Bradley, Navy Corpsman and one of the six people in the famous flag raising photo on Iwo Jima. This book began in silence, the elder Bradley said almost nothing about his service or his role in the photo to his family, and exceeds the mold in a serious evaluation of the wounds of war.

Bradley follows the six people in the photo, his father James Bradley, Sergeant Michael Strank, Harlon Block, Franklin Sousley, Ira Hayes, Harold Schultz, and Rene Gagnon, from their Great Depression childhoods, through enlistment and training, and then into the Battle of Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima was a nightmare. The entire island was riddled with fighting positions connected by a network of tunnels. Bombardment from sea and air did nothing to the bug in defenders. They would have to be pried out by Marines with rifles, grenades, and flamethrowers, at horrendous casualties. The five week was responsible for 26000 American causalities and a third of the Medals of Honors earned by the Marines Corps in the war. It was a frightful slaughter.

The Photograph is famous, but in a grim irony, entirely unmemorable at the time. The flag was raised on Mount Suribachi four days after the initial landings. Marines who had spent three days in grueling combat climbed the mountain without contact, and set up a smaller flag without photographers present. Bradley and a platoon of Easy Company was sent up with a larger flag later in the day. While simply being on Iwo Jima was heroic, the moment that the flag was raised was one of quietude. The Photograph was taken by Joe Rosenthal as a lucky snap, and became an instant icon.

Three of the six men in the photograph were already dead, killed in action, but the others were whisked off the island and became publicity figures for the 7th War Bond Drive. The survivors handled the publicity in different ways. Rene Gagnon never managed to capitalize on it in the way he thought he should, and died at 54 of a heart attack. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, had a tragic descent into alcoholism which Bradley reads as driven by untreated PTSD. John Bradley tried very hard to forget the war, building a life as a funeral director and pillar of the community in northern Wisconsin. When reporters called, his children were instructed to say he was fishing in Canada.

Flags of our Fathers is a solid social and personal history of a key moment in the war, with some moving antiwar rhetoric.

The gods smile on some people.

Linda Baer / Nyugen Thi Loan (I'll use her American name going forward, since it's on the cover), was born in a small village in North Vietnam in 1947. Her early life was marked by tragedy, her father was killed by the Viet Minh, her mother remarried a wealthy but distant and abusive doctor of Chinese medicine, and the whole family moved to South Vietnam in 1954. Cut off from his community, her stepfather's practice decline and the whole family was reduced to penury.

Despite the hard times, Baer writes engagingly about the small joys of childhood in the countryside, with lots of animals, moments of good food against a general background of near starvation, and a few valuable friendships. As a girl and a non-biological child, Linda wasn't allowed to go to school, and as a teenager she started working in Saigon as a maid. These few years are one continuous period of 'how are you still alive?', and I'm genuinely astounded that a 14 year old girl frequently sleeping rough on the streets of Saigon wasn't victimized worse than she was. At this point, she seems about as street smart as small dog wearing a sweater.

In 1963, when she was 16, Linda had one of her first major strokes of luck. She met a woman named Lynn who wanted help to run a meat stand. This was stable work, and Lynn's all female household was safe from predatory male employers who were starting to take an interest in Linda. Lynn had an eye on the main score, and as Americans entered the country in increasing numbers in 1964 and 1965, helped Linda learn English and started a club. By the time she was 18, Linda was an experienced manager and bar girl, well-versed in spending time with Americans while drinking Saigon Tea, expensive faux-whiskey with the profits split between the girl and the bar owner.

Of course, it was still war. Linda was arrested several times for being in the wrong apartment without her papers and on suspicion of being a prostitute (which she wasn't). Friends and relatives died from random and omnipresent violence. She was engaged by her stepfather to a worm of a man. Even worse, she was raped and bore a child. And while she was pretty capable at being a bar girl and playing the black market, at some point the dance would end and she'd be left with nothing.

The last stroke of luck was a chance meeting with Don Baer, an American Air Force officer. The two of them fell in love, and when Don's tour ended and he was rotated stateside, he returned and they got married. The two of them went to the United States, then returned to Vietnam on unspecified civilian business in 1973. In a final stroke of luck, they were supposed to be on a C-5 flight out of Saigon, which they missed due to traffic. That plane crashed, killing over a hundred people, mostly Vietnamese orphans being evacuated.

Linda and family returned to the states, where she earned a GED and a degree in cosmetology, opened a beauty salon, has been married for 46 years, and wrote this book and a sequel.

SPQR is a deeply researched, very readable popular history of Roman citizenship, focusing on how a unremarkable Iron Age village became the center of a world-straddling empire. Beard begins with the career of Cicero at the end of the Republic, before diving into the murky world of myth and archeology in the repeatedly built over Rome. She reads the key characteristic of Romanness as a kind of open citizenship. While the boundaries between classes and especially free and slave were stark, freed slaves automatically became Roman citizens (without any of the bureaucratic fuss of modern states). Roman myth cast their founders as exiles and outsiders, a far cry from divine descent to a particular place that is the most common origin myth.

Evidence for the Roman kings and earliest days of the Republic is scarce, but by the time of Cicero, we have a body of literature that has no peer until Renaissance Florence. Cicero's career and letters detail rhetoric ploys and political debates we still have. Yet his Republic was a fragile place, teetering towards autocratic rule by army commanders. Roman Republican traditions, which had been strong centuries earlier, had been reduced to tattered fragments by a tumultuous century of constant warfare, including brutal internal purges against the Grachii brothers, and the bloody 'Social War' against Rome's Italian allies and tributary cities, which saw the metropole grant citizenship to all Italians.

Beard skillful moves between the well-documented lives of elites like Cicero and Pliny the Younger to more ordinary lives based on archeological evidence and what text survives. Roman life could be brutal for the lower orders, especially women and slaves, but there was a flourishing urban middle class between the Senatorial and Imperial elite and the masses.

The book trails off in the Imperial period, with relatively little analysis of the Augustine emperors, and almost nothing after the Crisis of the Third Century. I can think of fewer better single volume overviews of Roman history.

How to Lead is a collection of short (5-10 page) interviews with executives, politicians, and a handful of artists and athletes about how they became so successful, conducted by private equity pioneer and billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein. As such, there's a lot of people and lot of repetition of biographical beats (highly successful people tend to move from high to high), and not much analysis. While Rubenstein is a peer to these interviewees, he shies away from hard questions, letting his subjects present their version of a 'best of' story. The closest he comes to pressing a point is asking Colin Powell about his speech to the UN which provided the pretext for the 2003 invasion. Powell deflects blame to the CIA.

I got this book for free from work, and it's fine in short bites. You can probably find an anecdote you like somewhere in there. But for any kind of systematic thought about leadership, you'll need another book.

Twilight of the Gods closes out Toll's trilogy on the Pacific War with brutal 18 months of the war. With the comprehensive defeat of Japanese airpower at the Battle of the Phillipine Sea and invasion of Saipan, the war entered a terrible stage of attrition. Japan's defeat was inevitable, but the confused decision making apparatus in Tokyo was incapable of recognizing the fact, and that Roosevelt's 'unconditional surrender' terms were the best deal obtainable. Instead, Imperial Japan embarked on a strategy of attrition, of gyokusai (literally "shattered jewels") attacks with kamikaze suicide craft, and intricate systems of underground defenses. Perhaps the defenders could exact such an intolerable cost that America would sue for peace, rather than send men to die on more forsaken Pacific islands. Perhaps another miracle would step in to save Japan, as it had in history.

To get to Tokyo, the Allied military had to seize three final islands. Recapturing the Philippines was an obsession for General MacArthur, but Admirals Nimitz and King agreed that Leyte and Luzon offered more favorable circumstance than Formosa, where mountains would impede mass attacks. The landing at Leyte saw one last throw of the dice by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which came within the barest margin of success. Admiral Halsey, in command of the US 3rd Fleet, was lured away in pursuit of the Japanese carriers, now neutered with the skilled pilots of the Kido Butai mostly dead. This left the San Bernadino straits open for a surface dash by a heavy fleet built around the superbattleship Yamato, an attack which was only parried due to the heroism of Admiral Sprague's Taffy 3 escort group. Bold torpedo attacks and a moment of irresolution by Admiral Takeo Kurita saved the cargo fleet and troops on shore when the Yamato and its escorts turned back, its mission unfulfilled.

The Phillipines still had to be taken, of course, but the islands were big enough for MacArthur to launch sweeping flanking attacks with the aid of further amphibious landings. Manila was a foretaste of what was to come. The Japanese fortified the Intramuros old town and unleashed an orgy of violence on the civilian population. Intramuros was comprehensively destroyed in urban warfare at immense human cost.

Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the battles to come, would be even worse. Those islands were small enough that the Japanese army could fortify every bit of high ground, creating a system of interlocking bunkers and tunnels essentially immune to bombardment. These islands were taken in a series of grinding frontal attacks with heavy casualties on the American side, and total annihilations on the Japanese side. For the Navy, constant kamikaze attacks introduced a new form of dread. It required minimal flying skills to dive at a ship, at least compared to the intricacies of a torpedo attack, and every defense had to be perfect. Japanese sources consistently over-estimated the success of kamikazes, and while they rarely sunk larger ships, a successful attack could kill dozens or hundreds of sailors. Carriers packed full of aviation fuel and munitions were especially vulnerable, and the Third/Fifth Fleet (the number switched when Halsey or Spruance took command) had to send units back for massive repairs.

The end of the war is inseparable from the B-29 strategic bombing campaign and the choice to use the atomic bomb. The initial stratospheric raids with the B-29 were ineffective, with the poorly understood jetstream scattering bombs. USAAF staff had concluded Japanese cities were extremely vulnerable to fire, and in a series of maximum effort blows, Curtis Le May's bombers burnt down six cities in as many raids, completely exhausting the stock of incendiary bombs in the theater. Aerial mining and a series of raids by the fleet carriers dealt further blows to the faltering Japanese war economy. The US submarine fleet was essentially withdrawn due to lack of targets. The first invasion, codenamed CORONET, was scheduled for November 1, 1945. All involved expected it to be Okinawa on a much more massive scale. In Toll's estimation, there was no explicit decision to use the atomic bomb. It had been built, and it might end the war. American principles, such as President Truman, were involved with the Potsdam conference and the fate of Europe. One of Truman's overriding concerns was ending the war without massive Soviet involvement, which would strengthen their postwar position in the Far East. And while he would grow into the office, in the first few months Truman lacked the self-confidence to fundamentally alter FDR's plans, even if he had disagreed with using the atomic bomb.

Toll delves deeply into the confusing issue around the Japanese surrender. The key barrier was that the formula of unconditional surrender might include the end of the monarchy, and the emperor had a divine status. Militarist leaders who had lead Japan to war had their own lives at stake, and many of them either committed suicide or were executed for war crimes by postwar tribunals, but the future status of the Emperor appeared to be the key issue. In the months prior to the invasion, Japan sent out tentative peace feelers through neutral countries, but they pinned their hopes on a Soviet-mediated peace, and Stalin and Molotov deliberated delayed negotiations in favor of a Soviet military resolution in Manchuria. Worse, the consensus style of Japanese decision making at the upper echelons of power was incapable of reacting quickly, or breaking deadlocks. The central council broke evenly on surrender versus national suicide in the face of American power, and in the end only the personal intervention of Hirohito resolved the deadlock in favor of peace, though by then it was too late for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As always, Toll is a master of naval history. His careful step through the chronology illuminates the pressure that decision-makers were under, and the brutality of the end of the war. This chronology is aided by deep dives into specific topics: press censorship, pilot training, the Japanese home front. In some details, this final volume is a step back in terms of the precision of the writing. Toll has some favored phrases (blue tail pipes, violet dawn, Admiral Turner's drinking) that are overused. And his description of land battle lacks the comprehensive quality of his writing on war at sea. But hey, the whole trilogy is over 1500 pages, and on a subject nearly as vast as the sea itself. As a whole, this is a new standard for excellence in military history.

The First Anglo-Afghan is one of the most astonishing military catastrophes in history. Dalrymple combines his compulsively readable style with a deep understanding of the period and translations of new Afghan sources to create a truly great book.


Remnants of an Army, depicting the William Brydon, "sole survivor" of the retreat from Kabul

British foreign policy in the late 1830s was oriented around protecting India, and using a combination of diplomacy, bribes, and military force to get Indian princes to support the policies of the British East India company. The long term threat to British security was Russian adventurism, and when Russian envoy Jan Prosper Witkiewicz, an exiled Polish noble working for the Tsar who also went by the name Vitkevich showed up in Afghanistan, the sahibs in London and Calcutta feared of a Russian-Persian-Afghan alliance which would encircle and dismember their possession in India.

Afghanistan was the weakest member of this potential alliance. In the first tragedy, the British had a man in Kabul, Alexander Burnes, and Burnes had good relationships with the King of Kabul, Dost Mohammed. However, Burnes was a low-born Scot, and his was overridden by more senior officials, particularly William Hay Macnaghten. Macnaghten's plan was to depost Dost Mohammed and install the previous king, Shaj Shuja, on the throne of Kabul. The initial invasion, by a large force of EIC infantry and roughly three times the number of fighters in camp followers was fiasco of ambush and marches without adequate water, saved only from the first disaster by the Battle of Ghazni, where Afghan defenders failed to brick up one gate of fortress which was seized by assault. After Ghazni, the English conquered Kabul, installed Shah Shuja, and eventually captured Dost Mohammed.

Having conquered Kabul, the British set out in an occupation that makes the 20th and 21st century ones look like brilliant strategic displays by comparison. Macnaghten alienated tribal elites repeatedly. He ignored advice from Burnes and Shah Shuja. He set up a cantonment that was indefensible, and then scattered supplies away from his troops. When the Afghans finally rose in rebellion, with the initiating spark being Burnes' womanizing habits, Macnaghten lead an insensate response that saw the British shot to pieces in their cantonment and all their supplies captured. While negotiating surrender with Dost Mohammed's son Akbar Khan, Macnaghten tried some moronic intrigues and was beheaded for his trouble. The remaining garrison had to fight their way to Jalalabad through miles of mountain passes in a freezing blizzard. The destruction of the English army was near total. Shah Shuja was assassinated while outside his fortress, trying to proclaim his royal authority. Dost Mohammed was released from captivity in India and returned to power.

The Afghans did not profit from their victory. The British organized a second Army of Retribution, which invaded the country, used superior firepower to drive off the politically disorganized locals, and torched everything within reach, including Kabul. Afghanistan was permanently wounded.

This is a great book. With the American Afghan War old enough to vote, history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. Hamid Karzai is oddly enough of the same subtribe as Shah Shuja. The Taliban has invoked the legacy of Dost Mohammed and standing up to the Ferengi invaders. And while the story has been told again and again from an English perspective, Dalrymple's brave research trip in 2010 and use of non-English sources show the war from all perspectives.

Tyrant is a bigger book than Monster, and a definite step in the right direction. Monster was claustrophobic, the primary plot occurring inside a maimed Baru's head, and on a series of ships and islands crammed with fellow spies and agents, pursued by implacable hunters and in pursuit of an ancient and elusive enemy in the form of the Cancrioth.

Tyrant starts much the same way, but Baru rapidly levers open space to gain freedom of action to do what she does best, spin dizzying plots where you choose the best move for your opponents to make. Her enemies, the cryptarch judge Durance and the multifactioned leaders of the Cancrioth, a sect of sorcerers who worship uranium and pass down tumors, are hardly pushovers in the same way that the dukes of Aurdwynn were in the first book. Baru has to solve a lot of problems with limited resources, weaving deals between factions with various apocalyptic weapons while trying to minimize collateral damage and keeping up her goal of destroying Falcrest.

Tyrant is long, but solid, and leaves Baru in a truly interesting place in the heart of imperial power. Being two parts of the same journey, Monster and Tyrant are really best served as one book, (and one which could be a good deal shorter), but more time in this world is always appreciated.

It is a pleasure to read an interesting academic book on babies. Small is an actual professor (well, was, emeritus now) of anthropology at Cornell, and this book is a popular gloss on ethnopediatrics, the anthropological subfield focusing on childrearing.

The first two chapters are a quick survey of the underlying theoretical perspectives. From an evolutionary perspective, humans are intelligent bipedal apes, and this basic biology informs the limits of what can pass through the birth canal. Human babies are notably helpless compared to other primates, effectively born 3 months premature in terms of basic motor skills. The other theory is one of cultural relativism. All cultures differ, no culture is inherently superior, and other cultures have useful things to teach us.

The next three chapters are focused on areas of obvious concern for new parents: sleeping, crying, and nursing. Here, Small skips among various ethnographies, showing how other cultures, especially traditional hunter-gatherers or pastoralists raise there young. The repeated impression is that the mother-baby dyad is close, and maintained by constant closeness: co-sleeping face-to-face, carrying in a sling, and breast feeding at very frequent intervals.

These traditional practices are in contrast to American childrearing, which is WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, but also just plain odd). Medicalized western births, starting with early separations at the hospital, and continuing on through a system of quiet and isolated nurseries and regimented feeding and sleep training systems, seem to produce mostly negative outcomes, from colicky babies, to failures to breastfeed, to child mortality far in excess of other developed nations.

Small has a clear agenda against medicalized births here, from the title which is a riff on the famous feminist health book "Our Bodies, Ourselves", to her selection of ethnographic case studies. In the decades since this book has been published medical practice has move towards Small's arguments. For our upcoming birth, Kaiser will place the baby on the mother immediately after delivery (barring a clear medical emergency). Breastfeeding is, if not well supported, better supported.

This is a fascinating book, but I wish Small had included more from other developed nations. We are unlikely to adapt !Kung childrearing practices, but perhaps the Netherlands or Japan has some cultural practices that better fit working motherhood under capitalism. Still, I can see this book being revolutionary when published, and it's aged very well.