I picked this up at a used bookstore based on the cover alone, and for the chance of a glimpse into the Soviet mindset. From a literary perspective, there's not much to recommend these stories. They're fairly standard Golden Age scifi, with all the clumsiness that that entails, plus the added awkwardness of being a work in translation. Sadly, of the six stories only two are of any interest; a pair of linked stories theorizing that the Tunguska explosion was a spacecraft from Mars. The theory that the Martians must be advanced Socialists come to peacefully trade for Greenland's icecap is a rather nice antidote to the standard alien invasion story, but aside from the names, there's little that's particularly "Soviet" about these stories. The only recognizable name in collection are the Strugatsky brothers, and they're wasted with a bog standard 'robot gains self-awareness/goes berserk' golem fable.

On the other hand, as a historical artifact this collection is quite neat. Released in 1962, at the height of the Cold War, and with a decent introduction by Isaac Asimov, it serves a reminder of an attempt to build international bridges at a time of immense paranoia.

Like the machine gun in World War I, the tank and bomber in World War II, and the atomic bomb during the Cold War, the Predator drone is the defining weapon of the War on Terror. In Iraq and Afghanistan, both sides strike their blows at a distance, the terrorists with remotely detonated roadside bombs, and American forces with precision guided missiles from above.

Lt. Col Matt Martin takes us inside the hidden world of Predator operations. As both a knowledgeable practitioner and an amateur philosopher, he offers a very necessary counterpart to the speculators and pundits who have declared the Predator the ultimate weapon, or the first step towards illegal and inhumane automated warfare. The Predator, like all early stage technologies, is unstable and vulnerable to winds, clouds, and losing touch with the ground station. It is far from unmanned, every drone is operated by two pilots supported by immense teams of intel analysts and maintenance technicians.

Martin writes with candor and clarity about the misfortunes of war. He is responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians. You may or may not buy his rationalizations that war is random, and that no amount of planning can prevent a child from biking into the kill zone in the twenty seconds between pulling the trigger and missile impact, but he rightfully compares the Predator to messier alternative methods of doing the same, from commando raids to saturation bombing. It's strange to hear Martin talk about developing a cop's instincts for illegality when he's watching from a camera 10,000' above the battlefield; how much can an American learn about a foreign nation just from watching aerial video? But the results, and ability to track down insurgent mortar teams, speak for themselves. There are no battles in this new war, just alternating pairs of explosions.

Two caveats; Martin is an air force officer, and so not involved in the CIA's campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, and the main action of the book takes place before 2008, so the successful anti-IED Task Force ODIN is also not covered. But with that in mind, this is a vital insider's take on a significant emerging weapons technology.

Fighting for Time covers the period of Vietnamization in 1969 and 1970 as the Nixon administration tried to salvage something from the war. This book covers many topics: Cambodian neutrality and the Cambodian incursion, My Lai and the degeneration in military moral, political reform in South Vietnam and the death of Ho Chi Minh in the North. But with that breadth comes a lack of a coherent narrative or a critical analysis of these important historical events. This book manages a basic 'just the facts' reporting, but feels less complete and polished than previous books in the series.

This is a collection of short stories from authors who I can only describe as solid mid-listers. I've never heard of them, but according to their bios most of them have sold at least a dozen novels. So the words are put together in a way that meets the standards of the genre, but the stories themselves are wildly variable: A few serious meditations on warfare with AI, orbital weapons, and other wizbang tech; A few meditations on the psychological horrors of war; And a few stinkers; But mostly this book is utterly forgettable. Well, a decent diversion for an afternoon, and another notch in the bookrace.

All I wanted was a halfway decent Starship Troopers pastiche.

Reconstructing Earth is a manifesto for a new science and a new policy, Earth Systems Engineering and Management. Allenby calls for a recognition of the inseparability of technological and natural systems, and a holistic, data-driven, and self-reflective approach towards their management. Narrow environmentalism, focused mainly on protecting single species or habitats against human encroachment and restoring nature to a pristine prehuman state, is impossible. Rather, we need engagement, recognizing the complexity and value-driven challenges associated with managing earth systems at global levels.

In format, this work is a collection of columns from Green Business Letter, organized thematically with some connecting frontsmatter for each chapter. This means that the big ideas are mainly in the gaps, and that certain points are repeated a bit too often, but also that the book is interesting and readable. The annotated bibliographies that close each chapter are invaluable. Reconstructing Earth has added at least two dozen books to my Amazon queue.

((Disclosure: I'm somehow affiliated with Allenby in an academic sense. Agent provocateur, maybe?))

"Passing the Torch" the First Indo-China war, the rise of Ho Chi Minh in the north, and Nguyen Ngo Diem in the south, and the early commitment of the Kennedy administration to the war. This last section is covered more fully in other books in the series, and as a survivor of Bob Brigham Vietnam War history class, I can say that the Indo-China War and political developments in Vietnam are covered in a comprehensive and balanced way. Another great addition to the series.

This book is a detailed legislative history surrounding the passage of Section 504 of the Rehabiliation Act of 1973, and its implementing regulations. Scotch raises an interesting point that Section 504, which mandated an end to discrimination on the basis of disabilities, was passed without comment, by outsiders largely unfamiliar with the main disability/rehabilitation discourse. Because implementation was given to civil rights lawyers rather than rehabilitation social workers, the law became an instrument for creating social wide change, abet on a more symbolic than pragmatic level.

As a guide to current affairs, this book is somewhat outdated, given the passage of the ADA in 1990. But it still a fascinating look at a very important symbolic law.

Given that many of the authors of this book are professors at my school, and that I'm supposed to be reviewing this in some kind of serious sense for another forum, I can't go into details now, but suffice it to say, I did not like this book at all.

Humanities academics should be the last people to criticize another community as a bunch of eccentrics with impractical and irrelevant ideas. Glass houses and stones and all that.

This is one of those scholarly collections that no sensible person would read, but at least this one manages to do a good job examining the epistemological shift that occurred in medicine in the latter half of the 19th century, from older holistic theories of health based on bodily equilibrium, to the modern specificity model, with unique diseases and cures. A little scattered, as these things are, but solid and well-researched.

If anybody was unclear on the matter, George Patton was a pyscho. An excellent soldier, but a pyscho all the same. War as I Knew It is his memoir of WW2, and you get a solid sense of the man, his energy, and his confidence. What this book doesn't supply is any kind of perspective or insight on strategy. True, Patton had a genius for the attack and a relentless drive that he somehow imparted to his corps and division commanders, and eventually to the grunts, but he also had one of the best supplied and most technologically advanced armies in existence (fuel shortages in September-November of 1944 aside.)

War as Patton knew it was a grand game: with parades, visits from dignitaries, cocktails at lunch, and only occasional shelling by the Germans. I don't think anybody else experienced war that way.