A solid, well-research, and very readable review of the history of amphetamines from a pharmacological perspective. Iverson covers their differences in structure and mechanisms of action, before delving into their use as diet drugs, anti-depressants, for ADHD, enhancement in sport, and illegal activity. Each of the chapters is rather light, a summary of a complex topic rather than the final word, but there are plenty of references to primary sources for the scholar who wants to go deeper.

I picked up this big coffee table book for a buck at a used bookstore. It's alright, a rambling collection of ancedotes, but only a few stories rise above the mundane.(Van Meeregen's Vermeer frauds revealed when he defended himself against charges of selling priceless masterpieces to the Nazis, and Clifford Irving's Howard Hughes biography). Mostly, this is just a collection of insane lies, and not particularly comprehensive or well-researched.

Rangers were some of the most effective units used in Vietnam. The light infantry tactics of the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols were able to turn the tables on the Viet Cong, catching them in ambushes and accurately aimed artillery where large-scale sweeps and random harassment and interdiction fire failed. The core of this book are brief oral histories from each of the Ranger Companies, short tales of bravery, fear, and enemy action.

The problem is that this book doesn't put the Rangers into any kind of context in the Vietnam War, choosing instead to link them with Colonial and Revolutionary-era forces. This might be the mythos the Rangers draw upon, but their doctrine and tactics is far more modern; British Commandos and special operations in WW2. It's not quite clear where the Rangers fit between mainline units and the Special Forces, who are distinct. The equipment chapter is likewise lackluster, mostly full of rather quibbling details about uniforms (did you know Rangers had to steal, beg, and barter for camouflage uniforms in theater?). While the original pictures are great, the reconstructions are not. Could you guys at least find a skinny guy to model the web gear?

Ah, the risks of impulse buying at outdoor used book sales.

A big coffee table book, mostly about the CIA and operational fiascos. As a pre-Fall of the Berlin Wall book, there's a lot that the authors wouldn't know about the CIA or the Cold War in general, but even so, this book has little to recommend it.

A Collision of Cultures covers the less well-known aspects of the Vietnam War. The civilian aid effort, support troops, the black market, life in Saigon and in the countryside, as well as the deterioration in military morale that lead to My Lai and other atrocities. This book is clear-headed and hard-hitting, exposing how the surge of American money corroded South Vietnam, replacing a sustainable civilian economy and turning the people into a nation of bar girls and shoe-shine boys. Military policy aimed to separate the troops from the people in order to prevent friction, but result was that fast, hostile encounters, from petty theft and abuse to all-out combat, continued while any chance for friendship and mutual respect was cut short. Cultural and language training was almost non-existent, making aid efforts random shots in the dark. In the environment, the "gook mentality" demonized the Vietnamese people, leading America to ask what they were fighting for.

Biocapitalism and neoliberalism are complex and slippery concepts, and as scholars it behooves to use them in considered way, rather than as placeholders for "BAD WRONG STUFF." Education in the Age of Biocapitalism has at it's heart a decent critique of the modern educational reform movement: that in a quest for objective, data-driven, evidence-based metrics of learning, it is creating populations of high and low valued students which recreates a deeply unequal segregated school system.

Unfortunately, this critique is lost under layers of Academic High Theory which renders this book completely incomprehensible to anybody without several years of graduate training. There are many interpretations of theory, but I'm still unclear as to why biocapitalism is used at all-it just seems to confuse the subject. There are gestures towards a new understanding of science literacy and using actor network theory in middle school science classes, but this original contribution is merely sketched at. And as someone who has done work on two of the specific chapter topics (GMO organism and ADHD), I can confidently say that Pierce's reading of the subjects is incomplete at best and seriously misleading at worst.

Diagnosis and DSM is a nice little scholarly monograph critiquing modern psychiatry from a Foucauldian and semiotic perspective. Stijn describes the transition from prototypical diagnosis in early psychiatry (similarity to a prototype or best example of a condition) to the post-DSM-III criterion based system, which looks for mental disorders as a number of checklists. The DSM is a polythetic, socially constructed, system of classification; one that has not resolved the reliability problem which was the ostensible reason for reforming the DSM in the 1970s (the low odds of two psychiatrists agreeing on the same diagnosis for a patient); and has not guided quality research--as the recently developed NIMH bioneural Research Domain Criterion hope to demonstrate.

The work is all well and good, although I think it could've used more original research on the DSM-5. The problem, as with most critique, is the 'so-what' question: so the DSM-5 follows naive medical semiotics? So mental disorders are reflexive kinds, tied to human experience and expert driven orderings? How does this prove that psy-professionals are undeserving of their authority, or that the DSM-5 is inadequate for understanding the trajectory of individual suffering. Why, if the DSM is as weak as Stijn and the historical anti-psychiatry movement suggest it is, has it endured?

Classifications have power, but how does power make classification?

Decker has written a great book in the history of medicine; accessible, deeply researched, appropriately contextualized, and full of vital details. The DSM-III is the 'Bible of mental illnesses', a standardized descriptive approach that since its publication in 1980 has redefined how we understand and treat mental illnesses. Decker uses Kuhn's paradigm shift to explain psychiatry as a field in crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. Though psychodynamic and Freudian approaches had been dominant for decades, they were unable to answer the challenges of the antipsychiatry movement; that psychiatrists were unable to distinguish between insanity and sanity, unable to cure the insane, were not scientifically grounded, and were simply a reificiation of various forms of unjust power. In this charged atmosphere, Robert Spitzer, an energetic and iconoclastic psychiatric, lead a neo-Kraepelian revolution through the creation of a new DSM.

Roughly half the book describes the history and major players, the other half being a nearly day-by-day account of the campaign that Spitzer used to get his version of the DSM published. He was willing to compromise on many fronts (the specific language of disorders, particularly female specific problems like PMS and hysteria), even on the key issue of whether psychiatric disorders were a strict subset of medical disorders. However, on the core issue of including neurosis as an explanatory theory for mental illnesses, Spitzer was unable to reach an accord with the psychodynamic mainstream, primarily due to their disorganization in the face of his focus, and their tardy engagement with the new DSM. Ultimately, psychodynamic approaches were excluded from the manual, and fell by the wayside.

Psychiatric diagnosis is more contingent and less scientific than those who treat it and suffer from it would like. In this book, Decker has done a masterful job of exploring how we move, not towards a perfect understanding of mental illness, but for what was the time a radically new and optimistic approach.

Halberstam's book is a sort of Vietnam-themed One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, following an ARVN infantry patrol and its American advisers. Captain Beaupre is tired and full of self-loathing, Lieutenant Anderson is professional and ambitious, Lieutenant Thoung cynical and prideful. They stumble forwards through the soul-crushing heat towards an illusive enemy, following intelligence they distrust and the orders of men they do not respect in service to a purposeless cause.

This book is a good picture of the early adviser's war, written by a man who clearly knew the country, but it'll never be a classic. The deeper literary ambitions never really came together, and ultimately something that might've had punch as a short story is spread over 200 pages and three narrators. Recommended only for completionists.

Lang Vei is one of those little battles that make up the fractal FUBAR of the Vietnam War. On the night of February 6th, 1968, a massive NVA force including tanks attacked a small Special Forces outpost near Khe Sanh held by 24 Americans and several hundred Montagnards of the Civil Irregular Defense Group. In the intense battle that followed, seven Americans were killed, three captured, and all but one wounded. All of them were decorated for valor, including a Medal of Honor and 17 Silver Stars.

Philips does an admirable job contextualizing Lang Vei in the larger picture of the Battle of Khe Sanh. He draws upon interviews with the survivors and radio transcripts of the attack to depict the chaos of battle, and the desperate struggle of the men trapped within the Tactical Operations Bunker, and the post-battle blamesharing. Who should have given the A teams antitank weapons? Who should've mounted a rescue operation? The final chapter is dedicated to the struggles of Phillip's aunt, who lost a son MIA at Lang Vei, and the personal experience of those who searched for clear answers about the dead and missing in the late 70s. I'd like to give this book a higher rating, but despite the quality of the research and writing, it never quite rises above good to great, and as a minor and very unusual skirmish, is not much like the rest of the vietnam War.