I'd previously read Coogan's The Twelve Apostles, which introduced me to Michael Collins as a genius of political warfare and the prototype for a century of anti-imperialist guerilla warfare and assassination. I was hoping this book would provide a better picture of the man and his actions, but the title is misleading.

Instead, O'Connor writes a general history of the Irish revolt with a bent towards the literary and culture aspects. O'Connor was a dean of Irish letters, and as a child of the first free generation, had the benefit of knowing many of the principle actors. The basic thrust of O'Conner's thesis is that as the imperial project tottered in the 19th century, a group of Irish visionaries combined nationalism and Gaelic culture with a variety of political and military threads. This lead to the abortive 1916 Easter Rising, which has little effect except the siege and destruction of Dublin landmarks and scores of glorious martyrs (and how the Irish love their glorious martyrs). Collins was an adjutant in the rising, promoted when the principle leaders were executed by the British. With furious intelligence and efficiency, he located the weak point of Empire in the system of informers used to monitor the Irish, and put out those eyes with a series of calculated assassinations.

There was more to the revolution of course, with a widespread guerilla war of flying columns in the countryside, a cultural movement to support the revolt, and the partial diplomatic victory of independence in the Commonwealth. This partial victory was the basis for the subsequent Irish Civil War, and Collins was shot and killed by one of his own in a rural ambush.

O'Connor has some good stories, but this is a few trees, not a forest, and the one labeled 'Michael Collins' is a scanty shrubbery. I do credit the book for introducing me to Countess Markievicz, a feminist and Irish rebel with the solid fashion advice, "Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver."

The Charisma Machine is a hard-hitting deconstruction of the One Laptop Per Child project, conducted through the brutally unfair techniques of writing down what proponents of the OLPC program, primarily Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab claimed it would do, and then looking at what children in the developing world actually did with the machines.


OLPCs at a primary school in Kigali, Rwanda in 2009, from Wikimedia

The goals of the program were quite ambitious, hundreds of millions of laptops for the world's poorest children, running open source software, made of durable and easy to replace parts. The laptops would inculcate these children into MIT's remix-reprogram-remake hacker culture, recreating the idyllic childhoods of the current technological elite, where an early childhood spent getting programs to run in BASIC turned into successful engineering careers. The OLPC project served to link a doable project of designing, building, and distributing low-cost laptops, with ongoing global concerns about education, nostalgia for the garage start-ups of the early PC days, and glossy TED talk futurism. All of this was backed up with the constructionist educational theory of Seymour Papert, where the computer was the perfect tool to learn to think with, in concert with elegant but limited programming languages like Logo. In Ames' theoretical framework (which I'll return to), this made the XO hardware a charismatic machine, capable of activating transnational networks to save the children.

Negroponte and other OLPC boosters had visions of tough laptops literally being dropped out of airplanes and used by eager children, but real world use required on-the-ground partners. Ames did her fieldwork in Caacupé, Paraguay, a district capital in a developing nation, where the NGO Paraguay Educa was heavily invested in making the OLPC project a success. Paraguay Educa installed wifi at test schools and provided teacher training and after school activities. They were thoughtful and well-resourced. They had the best of intentions.

But the friction of the real world is a far cry from the ideals of the program. The first bit of friction was that the OLPC was a profoundly limited machine, with 256 MB of RAM and 1 GB of Flash memory. Processor specs are roughly equivalent to a 2000-era PC, with the miniscule storage going back to 1995. In 2005, when the XO was proposed, the specs were bad. In the web-centric world of 2010, when Ames' primary fieldwork was conducted, the specs were crippling. Users complained that the OLPC took long minutes to book up, and the battery life was barely an hour when it was on. Even though Paraguay has good electrical infrastructure for a developing country, there were not enough outlets in homes and classrooms to enable long-term use of the OLPC by all students. Her description of a classroom exercising involving the Tux Paint app, which decays into a fiasco of tech support woes, is all too familiar. More friction was added as students removed apps to store more music or video content, and automatic OS updates deleted student projects. Rather than inspiring ownership, the broader context inspired a sense that these were someone else’s machines.

By Ames's calculation from Paraguay Educa stats, roughly 1/6th of XO's became unusably broken within a short time, with screens a particular problem. Beyond that, her ethnographic survey showed that fully one half of students in the program did not use their XO's beyond the minimal mandated activities, preferring to focus on non-digital activities like soccer, socializing, or helping around the house. Of the one third of program participants who were active users, the most common activities were playing music (Daddy Yankee was particularly popular at the time), watching cartoons, and playing emulated games via WINE, including Mario. Students became most adept not at the constructionist programming tools, but at pushing the limits of the hardware to make the OLPC a multimedia toy. My favorite part was her description of OLPC principle Walter Bender’s visit to Paraguay, and how a carefully stage-managed performance was used to cast him in the role of the technocratic patron. It was a display worthy of Secretary McNamara touring a strategic hamlet to demonstrate progress against Viet Cong infiltration.

A handful of students did become adept users, and Ames follows these exemplars in detail. But a closer looks reveals that these students had exceptionally supportive parents, and generally came from the upper reaches of Paraguayan society. Breaking into the ranks of international hackers requires English proficiency to learn a real programming language like Python, which in a country like Paraguay already means being part of a cosmopolitan elite. If the OLPCs had any effect, it was rendering the computer a little less of a novelty for participants. Perhaps now, nearly a decade on, some of Ames’ respondents are entering the workforce with a sense of how to use basic office programs, google for help on a technical problem, and generally not freeze when confronted with new technology. I’m skeptical any are programmers today. Measured against its original goals, OLPC met almost none of them.

The fieldwork is dedicated and detailed. As a researcher, Ames has a remarkable talent for objectivity. The simple facts are damning enough. If this book has a flaw, it’s in the STS theoretical paradigm, which takes up the first chapter. Ames blends Weber’s charismatic authority with Jasanoff’s sociotechnical imaginaries and Latour Actor-Network Theory to argue for the OLPC itself being charismatic. And there is a sense in which certain technologies (hyperloop, deep learning, blockchain!) warp discourse around them, when there are much less sexy realities (trains, linear regression, SQL) which actually solve those problems. This is very much an STS dissertation, which means that it has to push STS theory in a new direction. It’s just that, if I may get on a soapbox as somebody with an STS PhD for a moment, the gap between the objective of STS as a field, to think critically about the relationship between humans and technology, and the rigor and usability of major paradigms in the field is so deep that the best use of most of the theories is being buried in a hole in a desert.

The heavy STS theory is a shame, because Ames uncovered a far better theoretical paradigm in nostalgic design, in this case the tendency of the OLPC leadership to create something for their idealized childhood rather than the actual lived experience of children in the developing world. A second theoretical lens is the role of psychological theories in educational programs, and particularly the weaknesses of Papert’s constructionism for real classrooms and real students. As in most of these things, I blame Reviewer #2.

Griping about the discipline aside, Ames’ fieldwork is exceptional, the writing clear, and while the case-study is perforce limited to its specific site, the results are extensible to any number of ‘one clever design hack to fix a complex sociotechnical problem’ charades.

(Disclosure Notice: I received a free copy of the book from the author, and no other compensation.)

Vietnam's Forgotten Army uses the biographies of two ARVN officers, Tran Ngoc Hue and Pham Van Dinh, as a lens to discover hidden strengths in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Hue and Dinh had oddly parallel lives. Both were born near Hue in the late 1930s, and were part of the first group of officers in free post-colonial South Vietnam. Both had formative experiences in the 1st Division in command of the elite Hac Bao (Black Panther) Company, and rose through the ranks to battalion command and Lieutenant Colonel. But there, their fates diverged. Hue was part of the disastrous Operation Lam Son 719, his unit overrun, and he was wounded and captured. A year later, during the Easter Offensive, Dinh surrendered his unit intact to the NVA, becoming the highest ranking officer to defect.

ARVN has not been treated kindly by either Americans or history. I remember one grunt's memoir which had the writer pre-sighting machineguns on the ARVN unit attached to his company, on the assumption they would break immediately. In Full Metal Jacket, Cowboy offers to trade "some ARVN rifles, never been fired and only dropped once." The ARVN contribution to the film's Battle of Hue is a pimp on a scooter, with a prostitute for the squad. And ultimately, ARVN disintegrated before the hammer blows of the NVA's final offensive in 1975. While some units fought bravely, many deserted en mass, joining the throng of refugees.

Wiest argues against this thesis, using Hue and Dinh to show that ARVN had competent, dedicated officers. And both definitely were good, possibly even great officers: bold in the attack, tenacious in defense, canny in use of terrain. Both fought bravely in the Battle of Hue, leading intense urban combat. Dinh had a period as a province governor, where he managed a successful counter-insurgency campaign that essentially wiped out the Viet Cong in his region. And there was the endless searches, cordons, and patrols of sweep and destroy.

Both Hue and Dinh had great relationships with their American advisors, but personal relationships couldn't bend the arc of the war. ARVN was in it for the duration, victory or death, while the Americans fought a one year war seven times, as advisors and soldiers rotated through on their tours of duty. America never really figured out what to do with ARVN. It was initially trained as a copy of the US military, a high-tech mobile force that was too expensive for South Vietnam and incapable of protecting the people from the Viet Cong. The Regional Forces/Popular Forces, true local defense militias, were hopeless third-rate soldiers. As Johnson and Westmoreland Americanized the war from 1965 onwards, ARVN was pushed out of high intensity operations and into a subsidiary role. Additionally, ARVN became addicted to on-call fire support, a wealth of firepower which would leave when the Americans did. While there was a distinct lull after the Tet Offensive, with the VC and NVA knocked back, as America drew down, ARVN did not rise to meet the challenge. A ramshackle and politicized command structure failed in major operations.

Wiest's take on the personal journeys of his subjects is that both emphasized their own version of loyalty. Hue's course is direct, demonstrating considerable fortitude and courage during his long imprisonment. Dinh's surrender is much more complex, and in Dinh's telling, he was abandoned by higher command with an order to die in place for little military purpose (likely true), and saw saving the lives of the men under his command as more important than his personal honor.

Vietnam's Forgotten Army is mostly fascinating, but hampered by a belief that ARVN could be good, when evidence suggests that it was on the whole anything but. A coherent military requires a basic level of competence across the board, and while Hue and Dinh were effective battalion commanders, a few solid battalions does not make an army. At the bottom, the basic problem was that ARVN soldiers were not paid enough to support a family, and this insufficiency worsened as the war went on. Petty corruption and a self-preservation instinct to avoid close combat were a common feature in all but a handful of elite units. And at the top level, a politicized command structure was full of incompetent generals who failed to exercise command and control. And while elite units could fight, Rangers, Vietnamese Marines, the Airborne, and Armored units all proved more loyal to their own branches than unified division or corps command. Ultimately, Wiest extends evidence that South Vietnam had potential, such as the valor of his protagonists and the durability of affection for South Vietnam in the diaspora, to make a case for the potential strength of South Vietnam and ARVN. And this case for potential strength is overshadowed by evident weakness.

The more general book, which I should revisit, is Brigham's ARVN.

The simplest way to describe Involution Ocean is Moby Dick meets Dune. A sybaritic drug user signs up with a whaling ship that sails on an ocean of dust to obtain a sure supply of the exotic drug Flare. No book could match up to greatness of those two, but Involution Ocean moves quickly, and sketches out a fascinating and mysterious world in the Great Dust Sea.

****

Reread 2021: Involution Ocean wears its homages on its sleeve, so much so that I wonder how much is below the surface. The style is great. While this is Sterling's first novel, and he hews closely to Melville's nautical anachronism, the bones of the patented cyberpunk eyeball kick style are still there. The protagonist John Newhouse's addiction and masochistic love for the bat-wing alien lookout Dalusa give the book an emotional urgency that leaps over otherwise simple characterization. And the alien ecology of the dust sea, with it whales and sharks and cannibal anemones delights in its opacity weirdness. The conclusion, a heretical voyage in a submarine made from a whale carcass and John's revelation of what lies under the sea, feels unearned and disconnected from the rest of the novel, but the journey is short, swift, and very interesting.

The Difference Engine is closer to being a collaborative writing exercise than anything approaching a novel. As such, the plot meanders between three points of view, with one climatic scene coming midway through the novel. The structure and pacing suffers. Fortunately, the style is of two cyberpunk masters at the peak of their abilities. Their London is a place of vivid vice, ambition, and stenches. The other major sin is that this book is in some way responsible for inspiring 'steampunk culture', aka 'goths discover brown while whitewashing the sins of empire.' I'm note sure how much fault can be laid on Gibson and Sterling for that.


Steampunk Cosplay from VICE, "If Steampunk Is the Future, Please Kill Me Now"

The Difference Engine is an alternative history with two linked points of departure. The first is that Charles Babbage's primitive computing device of the same name works much better than it actually did. The second is a political transformation in England, where the Industrial Radical Party rules, having overthrown the Tory military dictatorship under General Wellington. Lead by Lord Byron, now a politician rather than a poet, this new society is not some Victorian fancy of petticoats and cogs. The Rads are hard-eyed bourgeois utopians, in the model of Robespierre, St. Just, and Danton, and unlike in our reality they allied with the proletarians rather than the aristocracy when the crisis came (for a fuller explanation, see the Revolutions podcast on 1848 for what actually happened). But for all the Progress, unrest simmers in London, and it comes to a head one summer.

The first plot thread follows Sybil Gerard, daughter of a Luddite leader turned dollymop. She joins up as an apprentice adventureress with the publicist for General Sam Houston, president of Texas-in-Exile. Sybil becomes entangled with a sudden violence, and a set of strange Babbage engine cards, which might have incredible power.

The cards reappear as McGuffin in the second arc, following paleontologist Edward Miller, recently returned from Wyoming. A chance encounter with street tough sees Miller in possession of the cards from Lady Ada Byron, the Queen of Engines, and a mortal enemy of a street lout named Swing. As the Stench, a massive public sanitation failure overtakes London, Miller find himself facing down this Captain Swing in the midst of anarchist revolt. There's a gunfight, Miller triumphs, and goes on to a long and successful career.

The third arc follows Oliphant, a journalist and spy, as he attempts to clean up the threads from the first two. Olipahnt's surface problems of political factions and Lady Ada's debts may conceal something deeper, the Modus. This program is alleged to be many things, first a system for breaking games of chance, and then possibly a self-improving algorithm, a form of machine life. The book closes with a series of literary fragments, building towards of a future of panopticonic surveillance in the gears.

The Difference Engine is immensely stylish, and far smarter than the steampunk fashion which apes the era without understanding its radicalism. But it's also fundamentally about information technology circa 1991, made strange by being gears and punchcards rather than DOS PCs and BBS forums.

Martin Luther King Jr. is as close to a secular saint as America has. Every child learns the outlines of the story, the non-violent activist with a dream who was martyred for the sins of a racist nation. Garrow has written a deeply researched account of King's career with the SCLC, but in an effort to avoid drama or grandiosity, I think this book misses the forest for the trees.

King was thrust into leadership when he just 25, with the Montgomery bus boycott prompted by Rosa Park's refusal to give up her seat to a white person. Parks was selected as a test case for Brown v Board of education by the local NAACP, and King as a newcomer to the city was thought to be less influenced by city fathers. The boycott, a combination of non-violent activism and organizing, proved effective over more than a year of effort, bringing King to national attention, and leading to his calling as a civil rights leader.

King and the SCLC was at the center of the civil rights movement, a central front between the more conservative NAACP and firebrands of the SNCC. And King showed energy, fortitude, and moral courage. Yet its interesting that the account of the book reveals a much more desperate and hardscrabble movement popular history. Civil rights was always unpopular, always fighting uphill. King's moral center worked best against overt brutal segregationists like Birmingham Police Chief 'Bull' Connor, who could be counted on to do something stupid in front of the cameras. Yet the SCLC had perennial organizational problems and conflicts with local activists, rarely building something new. Garrow skims lightly over King's personal problems, his serial infidelity, exhaustion, and likely abuse of prescription stimulants, the last being common in the 1960s. The man was a man, not an angel, and had human appetites, though Garrow does not dive into salacious detail.

King had a reputation as moderate, and compared to the rising Black Power activists he was, but he also had a keen sense of universal justice that drew him to take unpopular stances against the Vietnam War in 1967, at immense cost to political alliances with President Johnson and much of the Democratic establishment. His last effort was a multiracial Poor Person's March, to demand a much more robust social safety net, including what in 2020 would be called universal basic income, before he was assassinated.

So about that forest, it's a counter-intuitive judgement, but King wasn't actually much of an organizer or politician. What he had was an absolute moral clarity about the fundamental injustice of America, and about the possibility for national redemption. I think that's the real story of King, not where he traveled and when he gave a speech. The book is at it's best when Garrow quotes King at length, or reveals a personal anecdote; King was a talented mimic and enjoyed teasing impressions of close friends, contentious late night meetings devolving into pillow fights, the perennially late King pausing on his way to a board meeting to ask a church janitor about his wife's back.

This is a key reference for the facts, or at least one interpretation of the facts, given the fallibility of human memory, but Bearing the Cross is a door stopper of a book, and I'm still looking for a volume on King I love.

Redemption Ark introduces some new twists and turns to the Revelation Space series, but has structural flaws as a book.

The A plot concerns Clavain and Skade, two Conjoiner operatives with very different views on the same mission. The Conjoiners are a transhuman cybernetic groupmind responsible for Really Advanced research in the setting. Clavain is a relic from the dawn of human space flight, four centuries old, with a life time of instincts and clever ticks. Skade is young, skill, and following a voice in her head that says everything she does is for the greater good. They both want the 40 Hell class weapons stored away on the Nostalgia for Infinity, and are willing to go to great lengths to get them.

The B plot continues in the Resurgam system, with Ilia and Ana in deep cover as parts of the local government. The life-exterminating machinery of the Inhibitors is working on a plan to clear the system, disassembling rocky planet to turn a gas giant into a gravity weapon to destroy the local star--a terrifying Von Neumann device. Ilia and Ana have to find a way to save as many lives as they can in Resurgam while balancing local politics, the Inhibitors, their mutated and self-aware starship, and Skade and Clavain's mission to recapture to Hell class weapons.

And the C plot introduce Anastasia Bax, captain of a intrasystem freighter just barely in fuel and life support, who gets caught up in these intrigues when she deliver's her father's corpse to the Yellowstone system gas giant Tangerine Dream.

All these plot threads converge in the skies over Resurgam, with the whole idea that some favorite characters might have to sacrifice themselves to... save a couple hundred thousand people from being killed right here and now so they can be killed later by implacable machines which alter the laws of physics to eat planets!?. Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

And while Reynolds has some really cool ideas about nearlight starship combat, he also frustrating cuts away from the firework factory at least three times in the book, once with an army of uplifted pig soldiers seizing a starship (wasn't easy), and twice with reployment of the Hell class superweapons. Key moments in the book hinge on an impossibly well connected benefactor in Chasm City choosing to give our heroes everything, and the random flight of the Nostalgia for Infinity leading it towards the fate ordained for it, and one which might lead to survival. In a book pushing 700 pages, Redemption Arc feels overstuffed and incomplete. The sheer gonzo hard scifi edge of Reynolds' ideas and sentences keeps it in the good range.

The American Way of Irregular War is a frustratingly vague entry in the counter-insurgency literature. General Cleveland knows what he's talking about, with a 37 year Army career in the Special Forces spanning field operations in South America to the senior levels of CENTCOM during the War on Terror and the Pentagon. His argument, that the United States government and military is poorly organized for irregular warfare, is undoubtedly true. But despite his long experience, he's unwilling to talk about what irregular warfare actually involves in a way that matches this civilian's understanding of the field.

Irregular Warfare is defined by a negative. It's anything short of mechanized industrial total warfare. Irregular warfare is population-centric, political in nature, and has major divisions between helping an allied state suppress militant groups, and supporting local opposition to states we oppose. The basic instrument of American irregular warfare is training and technical support, with the caveat that small groups of American soldiers are heavily armed enough that they make poor targets for hostile locals.

The best chapter of the book concerns Cleveland's involvement in the invasion of Panama. In 1989, dictator Manuel Noriega crossed over from CIA asset to liability, and was overthrown and arrested as the target of a US invasion. This worked because the US had longstanding relationships with many elements of Panamanian society, and were able to present the action as limited to Noriega's immediate ruling clique. There was even a democratically elected opposition president with wide support able to step in.

Conversely, the long and expensive War on Drugs has had a much more mixed outcome. While most South American countries are relatively peaceful and stable, in a strategic sense the drug cartels seem mostly unimpeded from doing business. It might not be the excesses of the 1980s, but drugs have won. And then there is the bleeding ulcer of West Asian policy, with trillion dollar failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, fiascos in Syria and Libya, a war in Yemen prosecuted by the Saudis with US weapons, and a sense that the whole area is one crisis away from general conflagration.

In short, while the Special Forces have tactically never lost a battle, aside from the friendliest terrain their long-term campaigns have been inconclusive at best to outright failures. And while no one could have saved the Bush administration's criminally incompetent Iraq strategy, the lack of an institutional home for irregular warfare definitely makes Cleveland's job harder.

The recommendations, that irregular warfare should be promoted to either an independent armed service on par with the Marines or Space Force, or even an independent agency like the Office of Strategic Services which would subsume civilian irregular warfare task currently run by CIA or the State Department, are okay, if you accept that the problem is basically bureaucratic and a better bureaucracy would do it's thing better (shades of Robert Komer).

Except, regardless of the label, I think the problem with irregular warfare is personal and political. Doing it well requires a certain kind of person, someone willing to live overseas for months to years in areas of great personal danger, someone capable of working with foreign politicians, soldiers, businessmen, criminals, terrorists, and war criminals, and getting them to sign on to American foreign policy when even a cursory reading of history shows that working with the Yankees is a great way to get hung out to dry. And ultimately, it requires the center of American hegemony to let these people drift away from stateside norms, without crossing the fatal line of Congressional oversight.

And until the American people stop lying to themselves about the shape of the American Empire which rules the world in their name, we'll keep screwing up the kinetic actions at its borders. It's easier to turn SOCOM into a targeted killing factory, or dump missile systems on Jihadists with an 'oops, we did it again', than it is to admit what America is.

Absolution Gap is a decent novel on its own merits, but a disappointing conclusion to the Revelation Space series.

The best parts of the book follow Rashmika, a 17 year old girl on the frontier pilgrimage world of Hela. Hela orbits a gas giant that occasionally vanishes, revealing hints of some immense machinery inside. An entire religion has grown up on Hela, centered around moving cathedrals that keep the gas giant perpetually at zenith and the strains of an indoctrination virus floating through the population. Hela has it's own xenoarcheological paradox, a local culture of extinct scuttlers who seem to have been killed by something other than the inhibitors. Rashmika is driven to find out why the scuttlers are extinct, what's happened to her brother, and the true nature of the church, all of which seem to center on a immense bridge of unknown construction over a massive canyon, the titular absolution gap. Meanwhile, the survivors on Ararat are trying to make sense of their mission, as the Inhibitors and Conjoiner war catch up to them and Captain Brannigan takes over the Nostalgia for Infinity. The plot lurches along towards a conclusion that has about three simultaneous deux ex machinas.

It's a shame, because while Reynolds sets up a fascinating universe, he never quite figures out how to tell good stories in it. The paradox of the Inhibitors is that they're a lot like zombies, an unthinking horde that can be slowed but not stopped. The point of zombie movies is not the zombies, but the survivors. Who do you become in a moment of survival? Who will betray you? The paranoid BDSM war criminals who populate the Revelation Space universe would space each other with more ease than drinking a cup of tea, so there's not much depth to be found there. The universe is also populated with enigmatic hints that the Inhibitors are not as all powerful as they seem. Tinned apes, as space faring H. Sapiens are, might not have a spitting chance, but there seem to be civilizations which have foiled the Inhibitors through migration into alternate biological forms, cybernetic uploads running on exotic substrates, or para-dimensional spaces. The theme that transcendence is salvation pokes up again and again in the series, but is ultimately dropped.

Instead, survival is assured by two previously unknown hyper-powerful alien societies. Our heroes pick the 'right ones', and survive the Inhbitiors, buying a few centuries for another form of rogue terraforming mechanical life to threaten the galaxy.

These books have their moments, but those moments are buried in ideas that should have been cut in the draft.

What's the difference between God and a maritime pilot?

Well, God doesn't think he's a maritime pilot.

Crossing the Bar is a collection of stories from Lobo's three decade plus career, piloting 6400 ships in and around San Francisco bay. Pilots are the people who bring a ship in from the open ocean to port, handling the delicate maneuvers of docking. San Francisco is more complex than most ports, with complex tides, bridges, shoals, the famous fog and quite a bit of channels extending far inland towards Sacramento. And it's not exactly like big ships can stop on a dime. One of the big container ships might be over 1000 feet long and weigh in at 100,000 tons, meaning that every maneuver must be planned out miles in advance, while the wind, currents, and other sailors do their best to interrupt your plans and slam your ship into something hard. The job is also wet and dangerous, requiring climbing between pilot boats and immense ships in harsh gales.

The problem with this book is that while Lobo is one hell of a seaman, he's only okay as a writer. While these stories might work pretty well over a pint at the bar, they're told without much sense of grandeur, and with plenty of 'ok boomer' type grumblings about the decline of shipping as a esteemed professional brotherhood into an international neoliberal race to the bottom, as discussed at length in George's Ninety Percent of Everything. Since I live in San Francisco, it's interesting hearing about what happens in the water all around us, but I can't recommend this book beyond that.