War Without Guns is a fascinating little historical artifact. Written by a group of US civilians, the book describes the activities of the United States Operations Mission (USOM), a branch of USAID that sent two advisors into each of the provinces of Vietnam to conduct rural economic development. Published in 1966, it seems to have been aimed to shore up a kind of elite support for involvement in Vietnam as part of a civilizing mission.

The three chapters, respectively authored by advisors in the Mekong Delta, the Central Highlands, and the coast by Da Nang, provide a candid picture of the bucolic life of the Vietnamese peasant, the good work that American advisers are doing in providing building materials, new agricultural tools, and schools and hospitals. There's also a lot of frustration with a Saigon bureaucracy that can't seem to coordinate the simplest of aid projects, such as moving textbooks from warehouses in Saigon to schools around Da Nang, and military operations that fail to dislodge the Viet Cong and provide security for the peasants.

Reading from a distance of fifty years, it's easy to see why USOM failed. They saw their actions as part of an 'economic war' to improve the standard of living of the Vietnamese peasant. Their military colleagues were responsible for the 'war war' to seek out and destroy the Viet Cong. Comparatively, the Viet Cong never lost sight of their objectives in 'political warfare', to create a system of meaning and opportunity for the peasants that lead towards Communism, and to destroy the credibility and legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government. For a variety of reasons (lack of knowledge, lack of authority, short term tours etc), Americans in USOM could not improve their Vietnamese counterparts in the Provincial governments, who always looked up at their masters rather than down towards their constituents. By such was America doomed to fail.

The enormity of the incompetence and insanity of the American occupation of Iraq is difficult to grasp, but Chandrasekaran gives us a pretty good picture of the 15 month misrule that was the Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA started out small, without resources or personnel, and never improved, as short-timers selected primarily for their loyalty to the Bush Administration rather than any expertise in reconstruction or Iraq rotated through. There was just enough energy to implement yet another inane privatization scheme or meaningless law, but not enough to build civic institutions or repair the damage caused by decades of Saddam's neglect, the war, and looting. CPA staffers lived in an Americanized bubble, protected by 17 foot blast walls and armed guards, and almost never got out into the real Iraq.

Some people come off better than I expected. I always thought L. Paul Bremer was a "heckuva job, Brownie!"-style incompetent, but he was actually a legitimate diplomatic professional, albeit a micromanager with far too broad of a mandate, forced to push a delusional agenda, and without good coordination with the military. Chandasekaran points out the few successes where he finds them: Haliburton's excellent customer service for Green Zone workers; a successful science diplomacy effort by State/AAAS fellow Alex Dehgan; some of the crisis-management in public health and electrification by Stephen Browning, a US Army Corps of Engineers engineer who headed five ministries. Mostly though, the story is of economic shock therapy gone nuts: Privatizing Iraq's state owned industries in the blind faith that the Free Market would sort it out (the Free Market decided no deal was worth getting shot and declined to invest). A public health manager who focused on a new national pharmacy formulary and anti-smoking campaign when Iraq's trauma care was collapsing under the insurgency. The utter shambles of picking politicians, which exacerbated Iraq's sectional tensions. In almost every instance, mismanagement and incompetence carried the day, giving the insurgency vital space to develop.

Chandasekaran is an excellent reporter, which is part of why this book gets just four stars. There are a finely detailed moments, but they're disconnected from a broader theory of reconstruction or narrative arc (aside from 'bad to worse'). The Green Zone was a profoundly weird place, as the dozen or vignettes of daily life show, but Chandasekaran is too much of a professional to go full gonzo. I've heard it say that reporting is history's first draft, and this is a great first draft, but we're still waiting for the final edition.

Preston is so damn cranky, and he lets it all out in this very idiosyncratic list of crappy warships. Some of them are hilariously bad: early ironclads that flipped over after a 20 degree list; the circular Popovkas which spun when firing their guns and could not make way against even a mild current; hydrogen-peroxide powered submarines that mostly choked their crews. However, the hilarious follies are outnumbered by the banally bad-pricey cruisers that couldn't take heavy seas, attempts to outmatch falsely reported speeds on foreign ships, and way too many attempts to "fit a quart into a pint glass" by second-rate powers like the French and Japanese.

Unfortunately, this book is caught halfway between freakshow and system. Preston knows what kinds of ships he likes: tough, moderately-sized, seagoing ships, with conservative armor and armament. He is merciless on anything innovative, sometimes rightfully with a Swedish combined cruiser-aircraft carrier-minelayer, and sometimes unfairly as when he dismisses missile armed corvettes as a class. He hates it whenever "enthusiasts" get ahold of naval procurement, but I get the feeling he'd be happiest with 72 gun ships of the line, and damn this newfangled steam.

As with the other books in the series, this is a solid survey of part of the Vietnam War, in this case domestic issues and the anti-war movement through 1972. A Nation Divided starts with the post-WW2 foreign policy consensus, the Baby Boom, and the Red Scare, before moving into the Civil Rights movement and anti-war activism proper. The book does a solid tracing the links and conflicts with the Civil Rights movement, the newly political college student, longstanding peace activists, and the traditional blue collar New Deal coalition. Some of the 'battles'--the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention and the Kent State Massacre--are picked out for detailed analysis, as well as the role of television news and the new underground press.

Wings of the Eagle is a practically day-by-day account of Grant's tour as a Huey pilot in Vietnam from March 1968 to March 1969. It starts slow, hanging around Da Nang flying VIPs and C-rations to nearby units, but a month in Grant was reassigned to the "Kingsmen" 17th Assault Helicopter Company, and found his calling as a Long Range Patrol pilot. LRPs were small teams insert deep into the jungle (and even Laos) to gather intelligence, and use sudden and overwhelming firepower to take on Viet Cong units. LRPs were constantly in trouble, and when they needed extraction it was always an urgent call from a hot LZ.

The heart of this book is flying and drinking, drinking and getting into trouble with officers, flying some more, drinking a lot more. Grant's day-by-day countdown is a perfect look into how people lived their tours, '364 days and a wake-up'. This isn't the definitive account of the helicopter pilots war, that'd be Mason's Chickenhawk, but it is a damn good memoir.

The Therapeutic State is a deeply researched study of the influence of psychoanalytic 'emotional talk' in American statecraft, from its origins in the Progressive Era to a crescendo during the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Each chapter is deeply researched and developed, with topics including emotional damages in civil lawsuits, mandatory drug rehab, the self-esteem movement in education, child welfare legislation, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, and the rhetoric of presidential campaigns. While the individual chapters are quite good, the larger framing and theory doesn't quite cohere.

Nolan's thesis is that in a period of declining legitimacy in the American state, as measured by public opinion polls and an inability to link the traditional Weberian sources of legitimacy (charisma, tradition, rationality) to anything the government says or does, policy has taken a therapeutic bent, attempting to heal various psychological ills through a host of programs that 'feel a citizen's pain' and guide them through a psychodrama to self-fulfillment. As a consequence, the government is larger, more invasive, and beholden to a radical psychological agenda. Whatever our beliefs or actual problems, we must play out the roles of victim and healer.

The reason for my skepticism is basically one of causality and timing. Education has been doing some form of values and self-esteem since the 30s. Drug courts are a product of the 1970s, emotional damages and Clintonian rhetoric of the 80s and 90s. Meanwhile, psychology has itself had many movements and changes during this time, with strictly analytic perspectives dominant only from the 1940s through 1960s. Nolan has definitively proved that something has changed, but he doesn't quite put his finger on why, or what it means.

This book is definitely provocative, and putting in conversation with other works on subjectivity, such as Rose's Governing the Soul suggest a different take on how the minds of citizens became a rightful location of governance. Basically, happiness is a means to defuse labor movements, maintain a population under aerial attack, and encourage personal flourishing as prelude to longterm development and stability. The radical individuality proposed by psychoanalytic theories is a reaction to the anti-individual ideologies of the 20th century; Facism and Communism. The State can only demonstrate its legitimacy by cultivating a personal relationship with every citizen.

Nothing ages as rapidly as political commentary, a lot of this book feels like a conservative critique of everything about Bill Clinton's America as an abandonment of Weber's Protestant Ethic. While it's somewhat dated, it's not wrong. George W. Bush ran and won as a 'compassionate conservative', and definitely governed in an emotional rather than rational style. Obama might be described as an ultra-logical Spock, but his strength as a politician is a symbol of a young, non-white, aspiration America. With the 2016 campaign heating up, Hillary Clinton is dusting off Bill's rhetoric to say that she understands that struggles of working Americans (Don't even ask me about the GOP field right now). I try not to let my politics get in the way of my reviews, and this is a really good book. I just think that the evidence strongly suggests a replacement of a Weberian paradigm of State power and legitimacy with a Foucauldian biopolitical model, whereas Nolan says the opposite.

The Truth is prime Pratchett, and the start of the Ankh-Morpork industrial revolution series. William de Worde is the impoverished and oddly ethical scion of a noble family, who writes a few odd letters on important happenings, when he stumbles into the technological revolution of printing, the social revolution of journalism, and a complicated and corrupt plot to depose Lord Vetinari featuring a pair of killers who wandered out of a Tarantino movie. The usual Pratchett humor and ethics are on full display here, and while the topics aren't exactly fresh, he handles them deftly, asking us to ask 'who are the 'they' that make everything official, and what is the power of the printed word?

It's --ing good!

Picked this up at a outdoor booksale (my kryptonite). It's a pictoral history of fighter aircraft, heavy on the British planes and WW1. Mostly about manufacturing and design, not much analysis or anecdotal stuff. Lots of cool pictures, though. This book would've been awesome when it was published, but in the age of wikipedia, it's a little bit of a relic.

Cortex Plus is rapidly becoming one of my favorite generic RPG systems. The Firefly RPG is less precisely aimed than Leverage, but the quality of presentation and setting details make this a great book for RPG geeks and Firefly fans.

You're probably familiar with the cult-favorite cancelled before it's time show Firefly, but in case you're not, it's a Space Western about idealistic criminals trying to survive on the rim of space. In the RPG, you can play as Mal and the gang on Serenity, or stat up your own crew and ship. The book has pretty much everything you'd expect in a RPG (core rules, character creation, sample adventure), with one twist in presentation. The first hundred pages are a gameplay tutorial and recap of the show, walking new players through the Cortex Plus system and demonstrating how scenes from the show play out with the support of the rules. For setting fans, the book also has a map of the 'Verse with 200 named planets and moons, as well as a dictionary of Chinese phrases for cursin' with. The writing is top notch, clear and perfectly in the style of the show. Glossy stills of the cast and some decent artwork add visual flair.

The Cortex Plus system is a dead simple dicepool. Roll Stat + Skill + Distinction + Assets and keep the 2 highest. Spend plot points to add more dice to your total and try and beat the opposition. Rolling 1s introduce Complications but also give you plot points to use when it really matters. There are 3 stats (Physics, Mental, Social), 19 skills, and a whole passel of Distinctions that help distinguish who your character is. The basic gameplay structure is about getting enough plot points in hand to throw ludicrous numbers down on the table when it matters. Big Damn Hero dice are awarded for exceptional successes, and can be banked long term to future moments. The GM and Players need to be on their toes when introducing Assets and Complications, making sure that they're interesting and not too broad or too narrow. For someone coming from a more traditional RPG like Dungeons & Dragons, the Cortex system is going to be a shift, but it's not entirely narrativist gaming without a net.

There are quite a few interesting bits here. Ships are handled like another character, with Engines, Hull, and System stats and Distinctions of their own that are combined with the crew member's Skills and Distinctions to get a dice pool. Gameplay is structured like a TV show, with an episode made up of scenes made up of beats. Characters can be Taken Out by losing a high stakes contest, or having a Complication go above d12. Conversely, there are some parts of the system I'm less sure about. Not all skills are created equal. Influence comes up every time a character tries to get an NPC to go along with with them, Throw is a lot less useful. Fortunately, there are enough skill points to go around. Default untrained is d4, and characters get 18 step-ups, meaning they could get to d10 expertise in 6 skills, which is a fairly broad area of expertise. My second quibble is that while its okay for the system to abstract away the "broke and struggling" aspect of Firefly, the show is really about a group of people finding out that they're more than a crew, they're a family. The RPG could've used some more solid rules for building relationships between characters and encouraging people to help each other out. I might hack in a version of the Apocalypse World relationship system to add another way to introduce plot points.

Final verdict: If you like Firefly or Cortex Plus, this is a game that's worth your time.

These Are Our Masters is the first volume in an amateur history project that is totally insane, in the best way. Kersley is walking us through the war from start to finish, one day at a time, covering every theater and focusing on the experience of the soldiers in the trenches, and the absolute pointless misery of the war. It is comprehensive and totally unique in what it's doing, and gives a sense that this was truly a world war, fought not just over Flander's field, but along hundreds of miles of the Eastern front, in the Middle East, and in Africa. Kersley writes with a light touch, treating the horror of war very seriously, and looking for moments of levity. In this volume, the best parts are the early dairies of Louis Barthas, a French infantryman and grognard of the old school, and the indescribably insane small actions around the German cruiser Konigsberg in Africa. Kersley corrects a lot of popular misconceptions about the war, discussing the early optimism, the hard lessons learned in the initial battles about the lethality of machineguns and modern artillery, and why the powers kept fighting, without falling into a revisitionist trap that there was anything worthwhile there.

This volume does has some flaws. Kersley has little patience for the diplomatic maneuvering of the July crisis, which sadly has to lead off the book. He's still finding his feet as stylist (he's good, but gets better), and honestly, this is just better in bite-sized chunks as opposed to reading straight through. But you should still buy this book, because it's quite good, incredibly ambitious, and Karsley deserves a little compensation to make it through the rest of the war.

The First World War Day-by-Day has become an established part of my daily routine. Wake up, walk the dog, make some coffee, read how the world was getting messed up exactly 100 years ago. Sign up, stick around, and catch up we me as we close out 1915.