My girlfriend bought this book thinking it was anthropology and folklore rather than sort of a children's book. VanBuskirk presents a solid, if possibly lopsided collections of stories where weaving figures heavily, which makes sense since she helped found a center for preserving traditional Andean textile techniques. The first three stories are talking animal folklore, apparently gathered from Chinchurro oral tradition. My favorite featured a marriage between an Andean woman and a bear from the Amazon, and their strange and strong son. The rest of the book are of VanBuskirk's own imaging, an idealized series about different coming of ages in the Andeans, and life in a highland village centered around llama herding, weaving, extended families, and ceremonies. There's a fine line between respect and appropriation, and I'm not sure where this collection quite falls.

However, the illustrations by Peruvian artist Angel L. Callanaupa Alvarez are incredible! Great depictions of traditional dress and activities. Having just visited Cuzco, I hope that the locals can find a balance between their traditions and the 21st century (ironic, I know). I wish I could see the canvases in their full size.

I tend to take the same approach to negotiation that Bruce Willis did in The Fifth Element. Not to surprise anybody, but it hasn't worked very well. So when I saw a short article by the author exploring how to build an exit ramp for Trump supporters after the 2016 election, I figured that I should read this book.

Malhotra offers 89 principles based on his years of experience as a professional business negotiator, and drawing from historical examples, and divided into categories of framing, process, and empathy. The top level insights are to develop a framing that allows all sides to claim victory, to create a process that allows flexibility while maintaining credibility (never make ultimatums), and to see the perspectives of the other parties.

I think that his advice is useful in finding net-positive outcomes, even in the face of seemingly impossible challenges. However, I was left with questions about the limits of negotiation (there are some), and the proper mindset of a negotiator.

Mallett apparently wrote one of best works on this topic, and one that has not been surpassed since. Italian mercenaries have a bad reputation: plumed cowards who refused to close to battle, who switched sides at will, and who ravaged the countryside. Mallett goes beyond the ideological commentators (Machiavelli and various 19th century Italian historians with axes to grind), to get at the mercenaries as they were.

What he reveals is the creation of one of first standing armies in Europe, a disciplined combined arms military system that influenced the continent and was only defeated through political division. Italian mercenaries went from barely organized bandit groups in the 12th century, to independent sovereign powers in the 13th, to key assets of Italian city states in the 14th. They were couragous and vile in turn, but also dedicated and trained professionals with an advanced grasp of tactics, logistics, and weaponry.

Mallett writes exceptionally clearly for an academic, avoiding many of the worst tropes of high theory. His historical account is leavened with descriptions of battles and characters, and while it may be difficult to keep all the characters apart in-mind, I can think of no superior work for this topic.

McNamara's historical legacy is the Vietnam War, but people forget that he was brought into the Pentagon to reform military procurement and planning. In some cases, he succeeded admirably, creating the Single Integrated Operations Plan, which was an actual plan for fighting World War 3, as opposed to the fratricidal disaster that came before. Some of his other areas did not go as smoothly, the Tactical Fighter Experimental program among them. In the late 50s, the Air Force sought a new deep interdiction bomber, while the Navy was looking for a fleet air defense fighter. The designs for both planes were roughly similar-a large swing-wing plan with impressive performance and cutting edge electronics. In a fit of efficiency mania, McNamara decreed that a joint program would fulfill the needs of both services.

What followed can only be described as an engineering fiasco. It took four rounds of competition to align the drastically different visions of the service, at the end of which the Air Force and Navy agreed on Boeing's design. McNamara overruled both services in a unprecedented bureaucratic maneuver, choosing the General Dynamics-Grumman design, which lead to Congressional inquiries about potential corruption in the DoD (which went nowhere.) This book goes into immense detail in looking at the cost-efficiency process by which McNamara imposed his vision of defense planning on the military, and the ultimately subjective and incommensurate problems of choosing between complex alternatives. While the Boeing design had slightly (~1%) superior performance according to the evaluation criteria, McNamara determined that Boeing's cost estimates for R&D and production were impossibly optimistic, and went with what became the F-111 Aardvark.

With the benefits of hindsight, we can see that the TFX program was a disappointment from start to finish. The Navy dropped out in 1968, making the multiservice aspect unnecessary. The F-111 proved a success at deep interdiction, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare, with far fewer losses than the F-105 Thunderchief it replaced, but the huge plane would never make a decent fighter, as proved by the Energy-Maneuverability theories of John Boyd. In the end, the lesson of the TFX is that multirole and joint service is a false economy, and that good-enough-today is a better than cutting-edge-tomorrow. Of course, we're spending $1 trillion on F-35s, which is a cheap bomb truck encumbered by stealth, STOVL, virtual reality cockpits, and a (theoretical) laser cannon.

Defense procurement, defense procurement never changes...

Brennan has put together a high-octane collection of personal accounts of battle from 30 Air Cavalry warriors who served in the 1st of the 9th Air Cavalry. I read a lot of these memoirs, and this one is a cut above the rest, both in terms of the accounts and the organization. The 1/9 was an elite unit that was constantly in battle, and these men have hair-raising tales of heroism and sacrifice under fire. Putting seven years of stories together provides a bigger picture on the war than is typically in a one-year tour of duty memoir, with the progression from slow pistol powered H-13 scouts and ad hoc Huey gunships, to the battle-tested tactics of 1970, and the battered withdrawal in '72.

Cav troopers came in three flavors. Blue teams were infantry, securing hot LZs and rescuing downed pilots. Red teams flew gunships, first Huey and then Cobras, devastating targets with rockets and miniguns. The best of the best were White team scouts, who flew H-13s and OH-58s at treetop level, tracking Charlie down jungle paths, drawing fire from the infantry, and using a variety of customized guns and bombs to bring the fight to the enemy.

What's the difference between The Truth and unreconstructed Russia propaganda?

Baldwin and Heartsong decry Western strategy in Eastern Europe from a generic anti-globalization perspective. The basic argument is that a cadre of corrupt strategists, headed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and hopelessly locked in a Cold War mindset and/or planning to asset strip everything for mega-corporations like Exxon. By combining Nazi-influenced Straussian Neo-Conservative Ideology with Israeli psychological warfare tactics, Zbig and the Clinton-Bush-Obama conspiracy plot to override national sovereignty with false flag color revolutions in utter violation of international law.

Poor plucky Russia just can't help but get sucked into invading, um, sorry, *peacekeeping operations in defense of local dissidents* in Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. But thanks to the strong and ethical leadership of President Vladimir Putin, Russia has avoided the worst of these traps, and is setting up a financial alternative to the evil Washington establishment.

So yeah, the level of _~woke~_ that this whole thing is on is pretty high. I'm not saying that the CIA doesn't do some hinky shit, or that neoliberalism is a terrible ideology, but this book is rife with conspiracy theories: MH-17 was probably shot down by a Ukrainian Su-25. The Tienanmen Square protests were part of a CIA-backed coup attempt, and no one died. The Bosnian Genocide was entirely fictional. Apparently these are things that are also important to believe, along with the main thesis of Western aggression and checkmate.

While this book looks like scholarly work, citing professors and experts, it draws deeply from the alternative universe of GlobalResearch.ca amnd RussiaToday.com. And as matter of personal "wtf", Baldwin cites Wikipedia several times. I tell my undergrads to cite one layer deeper, and I expect the same from books I've spent actual money on.

As an academic and roleplaying geek, there are few things that I take more seriously than the right way to pretend to be an elf.

I want to be nicer to this book than I'm going to be, since I recognize the challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship, and while I don't know the author, it's a small world. That said, I'm not entirely what this book is about or for, aside from the general statement "LARPing is cool and fun." There are lots of types of games and performances, but what Simkins returns to again and again is that LARPing is more immersive than similar things. That putting on a costume and pretending with a group of like-minded people can move a player into the headspace of their character, for entertainment, education, or empathy building.

Simkins meanders through an investigation of US Live Action Roleplaying (LARP), centered around the New England Intercon and a Chicago-style Lord of the Rings LARP. Noting that LARPs are heavily based around implicit norms and communities of practice, one goal is a Geertz-style thick description, a way that LARP might reveal the values of a subculture. Unfortunately, for all the work (interviews, video recordings, analysis, decades of hanging around LARPs), I still don't have a good idea of that key moment where immersion happens.

For other scholars working in LARP, Simkins offers a few typologies that may prove useful. LARPs work because players mirror each other, creating consequences in a shared social context that allows a large degree of freedom. Players fall in a Venn diagram with circles of Acting (seeking drama and emotional catharsis), Gaming (seeking clear objectives and mastery of a system) and Immersion (feeling like you're another person), and LARPs can be turned towards different play styles. There are some tips for putting on LARPs, but it seems like a lot of work, best left to the professionals.

There's some good stuff around the essential question of all storytelling games: how can a group of people come together to agree on the "right" answer to the question "What happens next?" Unfortunately, the parts on genre and literacy miss entirely, and the argument for the use of LARP in education is unclear, against say the Reacting to the Past consortium. The major and immediate research question: how does the necessary embodiment of LARPing increase immersion (whatever that is) given the frequent crudity of props and scenery, is just dropped.

Finally, someone needs to figure out the link the between childhood imaginative play, which seems pretty universal, the stage in adolescence where it stops, and the revival of LARP. I think there's a really good psychology study there, but I don't have the chops to do it. Know any geeky childhood psychologists?

War Comes to Long An is prototype district study in the counter-insurgency literature; a cognizant and powerful case study of the loss of a key district in the Vietnam War over fifteen years. Long An province stretched from the border with Cambodia to the outskirts of Saigon. In hundreds of hours of interviews with government figures and Vietcong defectors, and thousands of pages of primary source analysis, Race describes how the revolutionary movement of the Vietcong out-strategized and overpowered the urban elites of the Saigon government.

Race describes the Vietnam War as a social struggle between Saigon and the revolutionary movement for the loyalty of various components of Vietnamese society. The key 'terrain' in this agrarian nation was the village, the level of governance that ordinary people encountered most often, and the key issues were land redistribution and promotion within society.

Land reform is, and always has been the key issue in Vietnamese society. The land system that the Saigon regime inherited was tilted towards large landlords and plantations, with landless farmers serving as an easily exploitable labor pool for French commercial interests. Prior to 1954, Long An had been a liberated district, with the Viet Minh allocating land to the tillers. After the Geneva Treaty, the landlords and government returned and demanded nine years of back rent and taxes! Way to start off on the right foot, guys. The fitfully implemented land reform law only kicked in for plots over 100 hectares and required peasants to pay for land transferred to them. The forced dislocations of the agroville and strategic hamlet programs were the final insults to anyone who considered themselves an apolitical farmer. By contrast, the revolutionary movement separated Vietnamese society into five classes: landless laborer, renter, self-sufficient farmer, rich farmer, and landlord, and organized the first four against the last, with an effective land redistribution scheme.

Promotion and prestige are key elements to any human being. The revolutionary movement promoted within the echelon. A person would sign up as a village guerrilla, and effective people would rise to the district, province, region, and finally central levels. By contrast, the most effective pro-Saigon Village Councillor would remain at the village level indefinitely. Officials at the District and above level were dispatched from Saigon, from the educated classes, and they did not understand the needs of farmers. Village-level communists had a great deal of discretion and power. Village level officials in the government had almost none.

As such, the revolutionary movement was able to mobilize far greater numbers of people, and get supplies, intelligence, and loyalty. A relatively sparing use of violence, 80 assassinations in 1960, was enough to complete cripple the government, while lavish use of artillery, airpower, and foreign troops, with the commensurate loss of thousands of civilians lives, could not break the revolutionary movement. The security strategy of the government, which involved isolating the population from the revolution, could not succeed with any reasonable level of troops. The revolutionary movement was nearly completely decimated in 1959 and in 1968, and managed to return to some semblance of strength both times.

I have two quibbles with War Comes to Long An: First, this is very much a dissertation and it sometimes descends into turgid 60s organizational sociology, to the detriment of actually making a point. Second, for all its clear diagnosis of the failures of the Saigon government, their immense cognitive blind spot which meant that the more efficient and active they were, the more they recruited for the revolution, Race offers no diagnosis of how a guerrilla movement might be defeated. There has to be some power to being a legitimate government, with courts and police and all that, as well as the ability to call on nearly limitless American aid, but it seems the best thing to do is hide in the jungle eating rice and conducting revolutionary self-criticism sessions.

Sea Warfare is a detailed account of World War 1 and World War 2 naval warfare from a British perspective, book-ended by more general sections on the evolution of battleships from the ironclad to the Dreadnought, and looking towards the 1975 future of guided missiles and anti-submarine warfare. The book is one of those oddly nostalgic British Empire project, organized by a bunch of men who grew up thinking they'd rule the world, and instead the best they can manage is caretaking a legacy. For all that, it's comprehensive on what it covers, and while I wished for a little more context on shipbuilding during the Dreadnought race and interwar period, and the use of radar as a revolutionary technology, there's a lot here. The best feature by far is the artwork; over 250 large photos, paintings, and elevation drawings of warships.

After The War Was Over is a languid and wandering coda to A Bright Shining Lie, as Sheehan tours the newly opening, but still very poor and very communist country in 1989. Interviews with prominent Vietnamese are interspersed with his own reminiscence about the war, and about what going back to these sites was like. There isn't really much here: most of the people he interviews are plucky entreprenuers who survived the war to set up their own small business, and who have no hard feelings towards Americans. The communist bureaucracy is stubborn and occasionally cruel, but managed to step back from the brink of absolute collapse in 1986. Nearly 30 years on from the renormalization of relationships between Vietnam and the West, this book is as much a historical artifact as Sheehan's reporting.