Osnos was a reporter during the Vietnam War, later a major publisher in foreign policy, and specifically the publisher of McNamara's mea culpa In Retrospect. The book opens with the promise of revealing previously hidden insights into the two key Americans involved in escalating the Vietnam War, and like a "special extended edition" of a movie, the major take-away is that there's a good reason those scenes weren't included in the first bit.

The book briefly and ably covers the major points of Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest thesis, that a deeply-rooted anticommunism and unexamined assumption of American superiority lead to the major commitment of ground forces and all the bloodshed of the war.

What is beneficial is a little bit of a deeper insight into McNamara's character. I've been fascinating by McNamara since I saw The Fog of War, and how McNamara illuminates the question of how an intelligent and decent man could become enmeshed in atrocity. In McNamara's case, the key issue was one of integrity, which meant loyalty to the dead JFK, with whom he shared a real personal bond, and loyalty to the idea that in the executive branch only the President and Vice-President are elected, and the role of every other member is to support those who have been democratically selected.  You may advise, but once policy has been chosen, the only option is to back the policy.

Both McNamara and Johnson were skeptical of the war relatively early on, in 1963 and 1964. But 1964 was an election year, and Johnson was concerned mostly with not giving Barry Goldwater an avenue to attack him. So a decision on what to do in South Vietnam was pushed off as the situation deteriorated. Johnson was a political operator to the spine, and charting a path between the doves and hawks meant a gradual escalation that satisfied no one and lead to almost the worst of all interventions. Both McNamara and LBJ did their best, but they were unable to find a strategy that could lead to American victory, or a way to sell giving up to the American people.

If there is one word to describe McNamara, it would be 'deliberate', and he definitely planned his series of books and statements in In Retrospect, Argument Without End, and The Fog of War with care. If you're looking for some kind of admission that isn't in those sources, you won't find it here. 

The Mauritius Command changes up the Aubrey-Maturin formula by giving Captain Aubrey more than a frigate, though he does have the obligatory slow-sailing frigate to restore. This time, Aubrey is promoted to commodore, one of his greatest wishes, and has to deal with issues that cannot be solved by seamanship and personal presence.

The beginning of the book starts with the usual unhappy domestic scene. Jack is on half-pay which is not enough to support his newly expanded family, with wife, twin daughters, mother-in-law, and servants crammed into the small and damp Ashgrove cottage. He spends most of his time in his observatory, pretending to observe the moons of Jupiter for navigational purposes while really gazing at passing ships. Maturin arrives with secret orders to save the day, a mission to take the French colonies of Mauritius and La Reuniuon, where French privateers are playing havoc with the India trade.

The first problem is one of balance of forces. Aubrey's fleet is slow, undergunned, and with one ship in such bad condition that a hurricane or firing its own broadside would reduce it to splinters. The French have four newly built heavy frigates, each with 40 24 pounder cannons. British seamanship can even the odds, but those are long odds.  The other problem is his subordinates.  Lord Clonfert is ambitious, but desires the approval of his men more than anything else, and stretches the truth and naval discipline to fulfill his psychological needs.  Captain Corbett is a flogging captain who retaliates against minor lapses with harsh physical discipline.

The campaign seesaws back and forth, the odds constantly shifting as Aubrey captures ships and loses them. One of the better segments is a losing battle, where Maturin accompanies Lord Clonfert on a raid that turns sour, and sees what dash untempered by good strategic consideration leads to. Aubrey would never make such a mistake, or have the bad luck to wind up there.

This is also the first time I've done the series on audiobook (thanks, local library) and everything said about narrator Simon Vance is true. That guy is fantastic!

Well that is an insane ride with three rogue cops on the thin line between justice and oblivion. Bud White is a thug, a bloody handed brute with a weakness for battered women. Jack Vincennes is a narcotics detective with Hollywood connections who feeds tips to scandal sheets. And Ed Exley is the straight-laced scion of a prominent police family, aiming to surpass his legendary father. Over eight years in the 1950s, the three of them come to the edge of the destroying each other, and then uncover a truly horrific conspiracy that stretches across Los Angeles.

The initiating incident is the historic Bloody Christmas scandal, where drunken LAPD officers beat a group of prisoners on the rumor that one of them had severely wounded an arresting officer. Exley informs on the other officers. Bud White is demoted, his partner jailed, and Vincennes loses his treasured Narcotics assignment and is assigned to Vice.

A few years later, the second incident is the Nite Owl murders: six people shotgunned to pieces in a late night cafe, including a former cop and small-time pimp. LAPD makes three African Americans for the crime, and their alibi is that while all this was happening they were brutally gangraping a Mexican girl. Exley closes the case, shooting all three suspects after they escape from jail.

Meanwhile Vincennes is investigating and getting nowhere on a book of unusual pornography, both high class and incredibly perverse, with one orgy framed as  a bloodbath. Vincennes' muck-racking contact at the scandal magazine Hush Hush is murdered, literally severed limb from limb. An strange and high-class pimp, Pierce Patchett is involved. His main racket is a stable of prostitutes who have been surgically altered to look like movie stars, but he's too well insulated to be touched.

And then everything swirls together in a vortex involving old secrets, new ambition, organized crime, politics, family, women, violence, dope, revenge... everything!  The plot is complex, but where this book hits best is in the dialogue, the crackling slang of cops and criminals and tough, brutal men, making a tough brutal world.

This is an ugly book, but also a gorgeous one.

A Mist of Grit and Splinters goes back to the first book, with a more-or-less straightforward military fantasy, as told through several points of view, each chapter with a ticking -X days until D-Day heading. The Second Commonweal doesn't have the people to spare for the military it needs or the time to train the people it does have, but they are going to do their best in the calm rationality that is the hallmark of this series.

Where I liked the book was where it departed from calm rationality. There is an extended digression on graul reproduction, which is incredibly weird in a way 180 degrees away from horny. Closer to emotion is a discussion between Duckling, one of the main points of view, and a junior Parlimentary clerk, about whether or not the Captain and Team Awesome is secretly plotting a coup against the Commonweal. Duckling, who's normally a very professional soldier, is on leave and wearing the kind of dress that shows everything and then too much if you move. Imagine intense political and philosophical debate, while one of the characters keeps thinking "I better not boob too bustily". Hilarious.

But what we're all here for is action. And it takes a while to get there, but the Battalion unleashes some truly intense violence against Sea People invaders. Commonweal doctrine is based on annihilation even more than victory. Forces that attempt to invade must be defeated entirely without even the dead and information leaking back home. To outsiders, the boarders of the Commonweal must be ringed in red. In this case, that annihilation comes in the forms of hundreds of red-hot shells, an end of the world-megatonnage, and the battalion marching through the fireball under the glowing shield of the Bubble, wrecking everything it can see with javelins and blasts of force.

So that's the Commonweal series. Weird books, but entirely different from anything out there.

The Knowledge is an incredibly whiggish pean to appropriate technology, as viewed through the lens of the end of the world. Images of the apocalypse and what happens afterwards are commonplace today.

The legacy of civilization would decay at strongly varying rates. The electrical grid and water system would fail almost instantaneously, within hours. Fresh fruits and meats would rot in days, dry preserved items might last for months or years before rodents breached the packaging, while canned goods could endure for decades. The material world would see similar destruction. Gasoline turns to sludge within a matter of months. Unmaintained buildings would fall apart in years. Some material objects, like glass, aluminum, and some plastics, are basically indestructible on human timescales. Even steel would take a long time to rust. Depending on how many survivors there were, they could live on the corpse of civilization for quite a time.

But quite a time is not forever, and at some point, civilization needs a reboot. The question there is what can be regained quickly, and what has hard limits in terms of complexity and resources. On the upside, there's a lot of useful inventions that were discovered surprisingly late in history that don't require advanced materials.  For example, the horse collar didn't arrive until the 15th century, and makes carts and plows much more useful. A 19th century schooner is made out of the same wood and rope as a trireme, and is an infinitely more handy ship. For mechanical engineering, knowing the Bessemer process to make ample steel, and the importance of the lathe and milling machine for precision parts, can let a reboot civilization skip directly from the 2nd century to the 19th. Similarly, sulfuric acid is fundamental to almost every industrial process, and can be obtained from a reaction with pyrite rocks and chlorine gas, which can be gotten from electrolyzed brine. Radio and antiseptics are similar low hanging technological fruit. On the downside, automobiles require a lot of precision engineering and rubber (rough if you don't live in the tropics) and petroleum and semi-conductors might be permanently lost fields. 

This book is fun, but there a lot of "simply take {raw material} and cook it in a vessel to extract {useful substance}", without much analysis of exactly how easy it would be to manage this without waste products, or in an environment where both food and fuel are tightly constrained. Everything seems easy-peasy lemon squeezy, while overlooking the parts that might be difficult difficult lemon difficult. In terms of wasted opportunities, there's not a lot on the idea of what could be scavenged and repurposed, aside from the back half of automobiles become hackney carriages, which is the fun part of the wastelands.  And the book ends with a resounding defense of the scientific method and innovation, which is hard to square with the utility of "ancient" wisdom after the apocalypse. Two millennium of believing the infallibility of Aristotle did enough damage to progress; would new thinkers be able to escape the shadow of thinkers who were right about much more? 

The Mountain in the Sea blends classic big idea scifi with stylish cyberpunk, telling a story of communication across the deepest gaps.  Sometime in the future, the hottest technology is artificial intelligence, and the DIANIMA corporation leads the way.  Dr. Nguyen Ha, a heretical scientist who wrote a book hypothesizing that mollusks could exhibit sentience, takes a job with DIANIMA at the Can Dao nature preserve, a Vietnamese island haunted by a historic prison, thousands of exiles residents, and a legend of a troublesome sea monster.

The story proceeds on several tracks, each chapter prefigured by a quotation from Ha's book, or another fictional book, Building Minds, by Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan the founder of DIANIMA.  The primary story is Ha unravelling the mystery of octopus intelligence and communication, along with her partners on the island Evrin, a singular conscious android built by DIANIMA, and Altantsetseg, a Mongolian security specialist and veteran of a brutal war against China who's one of the best in the world at what she does. Parallel plots track Eiko, a slave on an automated fishing vessel, a Russian mercenary hacker named Rustem, and an unknown woman gathering stories of the Can Dao sea monster for her own purposes. 

This book has its flaws: overly didactic, and the three plots don't quite mesh at the end. Eiko's story is vital for showing the bottom of this world, as well as what humanity has done to the sea, but his relationship to the main events is contrived. That said, I haven't read scifi this good in a while, and the flaws are part of the genre. 

Days of Shattered Faith is a fantastic conclusion to the Tyrant Philosophers trilogy.  The story takes us to Alkhalend, a city coded primarily as 'foreign', with hot climate, fratricidal succession and a host of warrior-monk orders. Our main viewpoints are Gil (Sage-Investigator Angilly) and her aide Loret, representing Pallaseen Outreach, a department of diplomats and spies that uses imperfect means to advance perfection.

Things are bad in Alkhalend, with the old Alkhand Oparan blind, dying, and listening most to the trapped ghost of his murdered brother. His designated heir, Dekamram, is pro-Pallaseen and considered too soft to be an effective ruler. The elder son, Gorbudan, has been exiled to a fortress and is gathering raiders for a new war against local enemies and the Pals.  But if things are bad in Alkhalend, they're worse back home, where the cults from the previous book have caused the government to open concentration camps and root out heresy by any means necessary.

The fulcrum of the story is the love between Gil and Dekamram, two people who have to choose between their love of each other, and their love of their people. They're mutual outcasts who have found themselves at the precipice of greatness, and who know that the last step requires a great sacrifice. Other standouts are the return of the hospital from book two, and Helgrim and his wife from the first book (Helgrim and Yasnic are the founding members of the Difficult Wives Club).

But where the story really shines are the battles, with Pallaseen firepower against local heavy cavalry mounted on dinosaurs and some kind of terrestrial mantis-shrimp thing. There's plenty of meat in the action, and plenty of originality.

Douglas Delany is a man split in two. One side is a professional writer with short stories, plays, and movie scripts under his belt. But when writing doesn't pay the bills (which is often) out comes Delaniac, the tower dog. Tower Dogs are the blue collar heroes of the cellular revolution. They're the poor bastards who climb up hundreds of feet in conditions from blizzard to sweltering heat to make sure calls and texts flow smoothly through the air. It's grueling, dangerous work, and all for $14.50 an hour.

The central narrative covers Delaniac's return to the towers in 2008, when he had a baby to feed to a particularly fruitless round of rejections. He worked jobs around New Jersey for a company founded by a former roommate, a sitcom actor who's sidegig turned into a successful business. The stars of the book are the other tower dogs: Godfather, Vic with a D, Triple J, Crack Baby (surprisingly solid), Frogger (surprisingly incompetent). It's long days and longer nights at BBQ "debriefings" in motel parking lots.

Delany's goal is to depict his comrades as they really are, and I think he succeeds. Normal people do not climb towers. These guys are freaks, but the veterans are by and large skilled professionals.  There's not a lot of room for fuckups on towers. The thing is that a lot of people wash out on the way to veteran status. Frogger and Sean Dog are the local antagonists of the book, two Central Floridians so dumb it's a wonder that they can breathe.  One of them doesn't know colors! Not colorblind, just never learned what "blue" or "yellow" was. Frogger gets fired after he gets hit by a truck crossing Route 17 (six lanes of 55 mph traffic) to buy beer. Sean Dog should have gotten fired after tossing a ton of discarded coax cable off a rooftop, which could have easily killed someone on the ground. He makes it until he glasses a dude in a bar and goes to jail.

The other narrative is Delany trying to sell the story, first as a Deadliest Catch style reality show, then as an NBC Dateline investigation. The Dateline investigation happens, the reality show doesn't. And here the enemy is The System. Tower Dogs die by the dozens. Delaniac would tell you that almost all of the dead killed themselves by failing to follow simple safety rules about clipping onto the tower and checking your lines. Delany will tell you that it's because the cheap bastards at say, Verizon are insulated by at least two layers of middlemen from the guys plummeting to their death, and it'd be too slow and expensive to do it right.

This is a gripping story.  And one with a happy ending. According to Wireless Estimator, the premier industry tracker, 2013 was a peak year for fatalities, with 14.  Every year since 2015 has seen single digit deaths, and only 2 deaths in 2023 and 2024.  That's two families who'll never see their son or husband or dad again, which is two too many, but it's a dramatic improvement.

Game Wizards might be subtitled "never meet your heroes".  TTRPGs are one of my primary hobbies. D&D turned 50 in 2024, and both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are credited as inventive geniuses behind the hobby. Peterson's history reveals legal and corporate battles and every manner of personality flaw, as the battle between the 'founders' of D&D played out in courts and the hobbyist press.

In the early 1970s, Gygax and Arneson were both serious amateur gamers. Gygax had written a medieval wargame called Chainmail, and idly added some fantastic elements from sword and sorcery books and Lord of the Rings.  Arneson used Chainmail to run the Dungeon of Blackmoor, an unconventional game where many participants each controlled a single unit against Arneson's traps and monsters. The two of them decided that they had something, and wrote up a little pamphlet called Dungeons and Dragons. Together with a local gamer and machinist, Brian Blume, they scraped together a few thousands dollars for a print run and began selling the game to the small but intense community of wargamers.

What they had was a spark that lit that community on fire. D&D expanded exponentially year over year, along with the company, TSR, that Gygax and Blume had founded to publish it.  But the partnership fractured almost as quickly as it was founded. Arneson moved to the small town of Lake Geneva to help with the company, but wound up doing grunt labor in the shipping department rather than creative work (Arneson's creative work, or lack thereof, is another issue).  The two 'cocreators' split up, and the hastily drafted royalty agreement between the two amateurs would provide fodder for a decade of lawsuits.

Arneson drifted around the community, promising and continuously failing to write multiple new games, and complaining that Gygax was stealing his credit and money to anyone that would listen. Meanwhile. Gygax was acting the big man, a star at gaming conventions who started breaking out into the mainstream as D&D became a fad in 1980s. TSR grew rapidly as well, employing hundreds of people and dozens of relatives of both Gygax and Blume. Gygax picked fights with every other company in the industry, liberally threatening lawsuits over unenforceable rules and arguing that if it wasn't TSR and official D&D, it was crap. 

Gygax wasn't much of a manager by his own admission. But he also wasn't much of a creative. It's hard to say what words or ideas he contributed to the game after say, 1977. He spent most of the 1980s in California, trying without success to turn D&D into a movie. Meanwhile, he went from abject poverty to owning a 29 acre horse estate with a mansion, to a messy divorce.  When TSR hit headwinds in 1984, the ramshackle corporate governance and uncontrolled spending turned into a hemorrhage. Gygax met Lorraine Williams, heir to the Buck Rogers IP, and she forced him out in a coup in 1985.

A secondary theme is the Satanic Panic. D&D was associated with the disappearance of a troubled MSU student, and was blamed by opportunistic Moral Majority types for corrupting the youth and teaching real witchcraft.  Ironically, both Gygax and Arneson were devout Christians (well, Gygax was a Jehovah's Witness, but close enough.) There were some minor changes around divine and supernatural themes, but the controversy likely helped spread the game.

The story revealed in Game Wizards is of two men who had an odd idea, and who were consumed by their success. Neither ever didn't anything close to as significant as D&D.  I'm unclear if Arneson did anything later in his life. Gygax's jealousy of other designers and fruitless obsession with a movie doesn't come off well either. But by the late 1990s, when D&D was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, enough time had passed that the two could be wheeled out as grand old men of the hobby. 

The Commonweal is back, with a new character. Eugenia is a student sorcerer who's suffered a near-fatal brain injury attempting an external working from the characters from the prior two books (Edgar, Dove, Zora, etc. I saw someone else refer to them as Team Awesome and that's going to stick). She's got less than a year to live before the dead section of her brain kills her, but she's lucky. The rest of her class died immediately.

 Eugenia just wants to be useful to the Commonweal in her remaining life, and fortunately, Team Awesome is on hand to patch her up so that the next time she bumps her head on something she won't die. She gets assigned to the Shot Shop, making artillery and shells for the Second Commonweal, and we learn a lot more about the next generation of weapons available. 

And this is where the book is most fun, because frankly, those weapons are awesome! (As an aside, the cover photo is one of my favorite images, a National Geographic picture of a MIRV test at Kwajalein atoll. I had a poster of it for years). Eugenia takes the experimental battery out to some wastelands for test firing and runs into more guys from Reems. The hostile nation is on the march, or more accurately, on the run from a power that is eating them. Commonweal diplomacy does not do much for second chances. Squid rounds (made from demons, turns landscape into writhing mass of tentacles) encourages the hostile force to march to the wrong location. Then they're annihilated at point-blank range of 12 km by red-red shot, which is the kind of thing where if the battery didn't have a ward up they'd also have suffered a fatal sunburn.  That MIRV cover photo is entirely appropriate.

More stuff happens. Fan favorite character Grue wanders into another group of guys from Reems and dies in a way that Team Awesome can't bring her back. There's a lot of handwringing about the ethical limits of the Commonweal and its Independents.

Again, either you like The Commonweal or you don't. I still do, and while this book doesn't cover a lot of new ground, it goes back to the military fiction of The March North and moves more briskly than books 2 and 3.