It's a real pleasure to read a literature review conducted by professionals. The structure of science is changing, become more collaborative, more interdisciplinary, more international, and more focused around Big Science projects like CERN. Has our understanding of how science is done, and how future scientists should be trained, kept pace with changes in practice?

The results in this report are both comprehensive and sadly partial. The report has a profound ambition to discover the factors that lead to success in team science projects, from personality types, to management styles, educational experiences, and institutional structures and assessments. There is a strong recommendation that something be done to formally assess how science teams are working together to produce knowledge, but little concrete about how to overcome deep and very real epistemic and cultural challenges to success, or what competencies are needed in the future.

Good teams have mental models of whatever one else knows and is doing, so that they can successful guide research from the bottom up. But cross-training is expensive in terms of time and energy. "Great" scientists appear on psychological tests as arrogant extroverts, but great leaders are inspiring, empathetic, and humble. Demographic diversity is sought out in grant apps, and has a negative effect on team performance. The individualistic promotion system for scientists, based around universities and disciplines, mitigates against teamwork and interdisciplinary science, even as funding for those priorities has gone up.

The summary of this book in one line might be "treat your research staff like human beings," and hope things work out. The science of team science future agenda seems to be based on very close tracking of researchers through specialized badges to collect more precise data about what is being done, and the development of models and simulations. I'm sympathetic, but I wonder what this gets you that detailed ethnography, or even an honest airing of grievances about the direction of a research collaboration and the balance of power within it, do not.

For all that, this is a very well researched primer, and I'm looking forward to diving into the footnotes over the next little bit.

I'm conflicted about this book. Mamatas is a writer with many gifts, an avowed leftist with a deep background in horror who ably mixes classic imagery with premonitions about the future. His writing is Extremely Online and Extremely Correct. And yet, a lot of it was just okay.

The stories are at their best when he does alternate history, imaging a past of steampunk and dieselpunk wonders inhabited by Engels and Trotsky. And there are a few more intimate psychological studies, of Greekness and fatherhood, and of the psychology of pain, that really worked. But about half of the book was filler, a kind of late-Gibson "welcome to you cyberpunk present" without the deep estrangement that makes Gibson so great (it just clicked that my favorite Gibson is "The Belonging Kind"). Without that kind of cutting insight, the scifi was just glib. And the finale story, an antiwar fable about micronations and a telepathic kid, failed to move me entirely.

I appreciated the biographical notes at the end of each story, a sad tale of publications shuttered, of nominations to awards lost, of the quiet desperation of a 'full-time writer' in the 21st century. Mamatas is perhaps best known for a practical book on writing, Starve Better, and this stories are plenty hungry. But the conclusions felt like the first answer to the premise. Mamatas comes up with fascinating ideas, but the workings through of those ideas are all too often predictable, a dish without the necessary ingredient of surprise.

These days, 'Swift boat' is political jargon for turning a candidate's strengths against them, thanks to Karl Rove. But historically, Swift boats were a dangerous and daring mission during the Vietnam War, patrolling the coasts and rivers of Vietnam in the finest traditions of the US Navy. In the words of John Paul Jones, "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm's way." This memoir by a Swift boat has some interesting stories, but doesn't quite rise above the pack.

Swifts were militarized versions of Gulf of Mexico oil rig boats, 50 feet of aluminum powered by twin diesels crewed by five sailors and one junior officer. The boats packed some hefty firepower, with twin .50 caliber M2 machine guns up front, and a stern pedestal mount with another M2 and an 81mm mortar, along with the crew's M-16s, M79 grenade launchers, personal sidearms, and any scavenged weapons that could be rigged onboard, but they had no armor aside from speed.

Vietnam is a an aquatic country, with a long coast and many rivers, and the Swifts searched coastal boats for NVA weapons shipments, provided fire support for troops ashore, and made occasional troop landings. The mission was dangerous. The 50 boats were vulnerable to heavy seas, and the author had one boat swamped and sunk under him on patrol by the DMZ. Inshore, narrow rivers and canals were full of ambush sites, and there was no shelter from enemy gunfire.

Daly writes about training in San Diego. Swift boat crews were all volunteers, and trained and deployed as a unit, which really made a difference to the mission. His description of radio procedures and navigation is really detailed. And Daly expands the story from his personal crew by mentioning some actions by his fellow captains from training, such as capturing an NVA supply ship and an ambush in the delta. While he's enthusiastic, he has room to improve as a prose-stylist, and I wasn't immersed in the writing. Swifts were an interesting branch of the Navy, a group of very junior mavericks doing things with style and dash in their own way, and yet Daly is careful to recount respect from officers in big ships like destroyers, along with unrelenting bureacratic hostility from LTCDR "Ball Cap" Smithson.

As I said, this is a solid memoir with a lot of facts, but the Swift Boats are still looking for their Chickenhawk or A Rumor of War.

This book is a study of supply chain dynamics in the aerospace industry. It is almost impressive in how obscure and useless it is. Improperly managed supply chains can make planes inoperable and cost millions of dollars. Components are made of sub-assemblies, and each layer of contractors has months of lead time between when an order is placed and a part delivered. Even in relatively simple cases, the 'bullwhip effect' can amplify variations down the supply chain. After reading this book, I have a greater appreciation for difficulties in this field.

Unfortunately, I also have no greater understanding of how to model supply chains, or how to improve them. Basic ideas, like translating real-world terms into system diagrams, and calculating lags from actual data, are mentioned not at all. The graphs poorly designed to the point of pain. This is a rare book that would be improved by more equations, because then I could at least implement them in a modern language.

The saving grace, and reason this gets a second star, is one useful equation in the first chapter about how to estimate how much stock to have on hand, given variability and lag time. This appears to come from Simchi-Levi, D., Kaminsky, P., & Simchi-Levi, E. (2008). Designing and managing the supply chain: Concepts, strategies and case studies, which may be a decent book on the subject.

Degregori had a front-row seat on Sendero Luminoso and the violence that engulfed Peru through the 1980s. Not only was he a member of the 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a leading liberal media 'Senderologist' during the worst of the violence, he personally knew and was a peer of Abimael Guzmán. Both of them were social sciences professors at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University in Ayacucho at the same time. But while Degregori went to Lima, and mainstream success, Guzmán went underground, becoming the ideological focus of fanatical Maoist movement which sparked a war that killed 69,000 Peruvians, most of them Quechua-speaking campesinos. This was a dirty war on all sides, but Sendero started it, and they were responsible for roughly 2/3rds of the deaths, by the accounting of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I believe Degregori has the raw material for a really amazing book here, a kind of Andean A Bright Shining Lie. Unfortunately, this book is turgid mass of sociological theory, where a few anecdotes stand in for narrative, let alone story.

The opening chapter warns against essentializing Peru, against treating the Inca heritage of the highlands as some kind of root Pagan barbarity cast against coastal modernity and metizo hybrid confusion. So it is with greatest irony that every subsequent chapter does just that. In Degregori's analysis, Peru in the period 1945-1980 lagged regionally in material development indicators like GDP, but it excelled in providing secondary and post-secondary education. Provincial mestizos like Guzmán and the raw recruits of the Shining Path were educated, cut off from their ancestral roots, but unable to break into the true power of Lima's elite. Frustrated as a class, they were easy pickings for the sureties of 'scientific Marxism and the inevitable historical dialect of Revolution.' Even the earliest Shining Path rhetoric is drenched in blood, so it is unsurprising that they started killing in their liberated zones. First the violence was a kind of revolutionary justice, against cattle rustlers, thieves, wife beaters, etc. But as the Senderos were pushed out by the Peruvian Army, the killings escalated to include all the people who had failed the People's Revolution. Fanaticism was little match against the resources of the state, and when Guzmán was captured in 1992 in a Lima safehouse, the revolution fell apart.

It's an interesting thesis, but it's backed up with a few scanty interviews, a few quotes from the voluminous hardcore Marxist propaganda of the movement, and nothing about Guzman, or why his version of People's War was so bloody.

Bui Diem had a front row seat to some of the most important historical events of the Vietnam War. As ambassador to the United States from 1965-1972, he was South Vietnam's representative in Washington during the most intensive period of intervention. From 1972-1975 he served as a representative to the Paris peace talks and ambassador at-large. Always one of the top civilians in the military government of President Thieu, Bui Diem advocated for nationalist and constitutional policies to little avail.

Bui Diem was born and raised in Hanoi, in a family with a legacy of academic excellence in the Confucian tradition. An uncle, Trần Trọng Kim, wrote an influential history of Vietnam and briefly served as Prime Minister under the Emperor Bao Dai. Instead of Confucian classics, Bui Diem was educated at Thăng Long School, where his history teacher as Võ Nguyên Giáp (yes, that Giap), and later studied mathematics. Hanoi in the 40s was roiling fervent of secret political groups, and Bui Diem joined a embryonic nationalist party. He was repelled by the overt manipulations of Communism, and became a hardened anti-Communist when his faction was systematically liquidated by Communist secret political assassination squads. Bui Diem only escaped with his life by running and hiding, reemerging in public life in 1955 in Saigon.

Bui Diem was locked out of the autocratic rule of Ngô Đình Diệm, garnering some influence as a newspaper editor. With the acccession of Thieu and Ky, and a stable military government, he was appointed ambassador to the United States.

This book is at its best when Bui Diem talks about his job. He tried to foster good relations between Johnson, Theiu, and Ky, sound out Johnson's "Best and the Brightest", and get a sense of political currents in Congress.

In The Jaws of History covers two major bombshells. The first is that the decision to dispatch Marines to Danang in 1965, the most significant escalation of the war, was made as a fait accompli with no consultation of South Vietnam. Bui Diem admires Johnson as a committed friend to South Vietnam, but admits that serious strategic considerations of the intervention, like how victory was to be defined, were known as early as 1965, and never seriously clarified by Johnson. The second is the Anna Chennault affair, which to summarize a great deal of complexity, is the theory that Richard Nixon used Anna Chennault and Bui Diem as a channel to tell President Thieu to scuttle peace negotiations in the runup to the 1968 election in order to increase his odds of winning. Diem both confirms and denies this theory. He did pass along messages from the Nixon campaign, but he doubts they influenced Thieu's decision. Theiu was a deeply suspicious man, and already doubted the intentions of North Vietnamese negotiators, with some justification.

This is an important and interesting book, and it also showcases the weaknesses of Bui Diem's side, particularly when read against Trương Như Tảng A Vietcong Memoir. Bui Diem certainly suffered, particularly during his childhood under French occupation, and in the desperate guerrilla days during the First Indochina War, but I don't get the sense of marginal existence from his memoir that less privileged Vietnamese had; where starvation and/or death by violence were ever present enemies. Bui Diem's elite diplomacy could take the temperature of public opinion, but Trương Như Tảng deliberately aimed to influence it. This account is ultimately a penetrating look at the failures of the American-South Vietnamese alliance, and the limited imagination that America had for the future of South Vietnam.

*Record Scratch, Freeze Frame*

"Yep, that's me. Now you might be asking, how does a Yid from the East End wind up in Guangzhou, next to President Chiang Kai-shek and the rest of the KMT honchos?"

Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen is one of those peripheral figures of history. Almost forgotten today (I heard about him through a War is Boring article), Levy's biography is a fascinating tale of a true character. The first difficulty, as Levy recounts, is that almost nothing written about Cohen, including his 1954 autobiography, is accurate. A scoundrel to the bone, Cohen puffed up his importance. With that stripped away, what's left is a man who rose from almost nothing, who made a few daring friendships and seized chances at the right time, and who lived life on his own terms.

Morris was born in 1887 in Radzanów, Poland. His family escaped the Tsarist pogroms and moved to London around the turn of the century, landing in the bustling Jewish neighborhood on the East End. Morris was a natural trouble maker, and after an arrest for pickpocketing at the age of 13, was sent to the Hayes Industrial School, where he excelled, and then to Canada at the age of 16. He lasted a year as a farmer before skipping out to join the circus, finally settling into a comfortable life on the grift: Small short cons to get ready cash, late nights gambling, and even some respectable success as a real estate salesman in Edmonton. He was in and out of jail for various crimes, but generally getting up to as much trouble as man could get to in Canada at the time.

Vice in Canada around 1910 was concentrated in around the Chinatowns, and Chinese-Canadians were subject to vicious racism. Cohen intervened in a robbery against a Chinese friend, Mah Sam, and the trajectory of his life bent towards adventure. Cohen became a sworn brother of the Tongmenghui, the underground revolutionary society of Sun Yat-sen, first President of China. After a stint in the Army during WW1, where Cohen built railways under fire, he finally made his way to China, met Sun Yat-sen, and became his bodyguard and aid de camp.

China in the Warlord Era was a place where a bold man could make a fortune. Reports that Cohen was the power behind any number of warlords are almost entirely false, rumors spread to increase his own importance, including the rank of "General", to which he was eventually officially promoted, though he was never a warlord in his own right. Cohen did become a moderately successful gunrunner, switching his nickname to "Five Percent", for his regular commission. He spent money as fast as he made it, living high in Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. He was in Hong Long in 1941 when it fell, and spent years in a Japanese POW camp before being exchanged. He was in San Francisco for the birth of the UN, and may have played a role in getting the Chinese delegation to vote in favor of Jews living in British Mandate of Palestine.

Post-war was a darker time for Cohen. He got married, but wound up divorced because he spent months in China, trying to put together deals that went nowhere, and was otherwise a lousy and emotionally abusive husband. Being a family patriarch and pillar of the Manchester Jewish community were thin gruel compared to the action and money of his youth. He was one of those old men who loiter in hotel lobbies, smoking cigars and waiting for someone to tell his well-worn jokes and stories to. The later chapters of the biography are full of assessments from various foreign service officers describing Cohen as an unreliable windbag.

Cohen got a break in the 1960s, finally acting as an intermediary between Rolls Royce and Communist China on an airplane deal. Once an ally of Chiang Kai-shek, Cohen switched his loyalties to the Communists as the rightful heirs of Sun Yat-sen's vision for modern China. Both sides benefited. Communist China got a useful Westerner to speak on their behalf, Cohen got to feel important again. He spent his last years speaking in favor of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, before dying in the presence of his family in England in 1970. His life straddled an era, and if he never was one of the Great Men of history, he met history on his own terms. Levy has done us a service in giving an honest account of his life.

Oh yeah, and the "Two-Gun" moniker. Cohen was in a gunfight in China when he got winged in the left arm. In his own words: “The bullet that caught me in the left arm had made me think. Supposing it had been my right arm and I carried my gun that side, I’d not have been able to use it. As soon as we got back to Canton I got me a second gun, another Smith and Wesson revolver, and I packed it handy to my left hand. I practiced drawing and soon found that I was pretty well ambidextrous—one gun came out about as quick as the other.”

A Distant Mirror is a fascinating study of the time and culture of chivalry, as seen through the life of Enguerrand de Coucy, a powerful French baron, and last of his line. de Coucy left a relatively light mark on the historical record (his face is turned away from the viewer in the only extant portrait, his castle was razed by the Nazis in WW2), but this book is more about the entire time, and that time was a shitshow.

The central event of the 14th century was the Black Death, a wave of plague which reduced the population of Europe by between 30% and 40%. War was almost constant, and the superiority of walled cities and castles over armies of the time meant that war was fought by mass destructive raids. Men-at-arms, called to fight for France or England or Burgundy, would transition almost effortless to brigands during periods of truce. The Catholic Church was at its lowest ebb, split in the Great Schism between rival popes in Rome and Avignon. Chivalry had degenerated to a parody of high culture, with knights lavish dandies and dancers by night, and incapable of even moderate tactics in battle.

Tuchman's book is a masterful survey of the glamour of life at the top of Medieval society, and the oppression and suffering that support that glittering top.

A Nation of Realtors® is up front that it is Hornstein's dissertation, and while this book is a close study of the creation of the professional culture of Realtors® from 1900 to 1950, it has the weaknesses of a starting academic work, a kind of "wait, this is what you thought was interesting?" I mean no offense, academic work is hard, and my own dissertation is hardly a model of lucid clarity. But know going in this going to be narrow.

Hornstein's story is about the transformation of real estate brokers into Realtors®. And that 'registered trademark' symbol is an important part of it. A real estate broker is anyone who connects people who want to buy land with people who want to sell it. Through the 19th century, the whole profession was haunted by an image of unscrupulous 'curbsiders' who would pounce on unsuspecting newcomers to town, elderly widows, similar unfortunates, and swindle them out of their money. By contrast, a Realtor is a paid up member of a local real estate broker associate, affiliated with the national board, was an ethical professional, a keen dealmaker who provided access to middle-class dreams, and who helped build new beautiful cities.

Hornstein moves through a variety of cultural history conflicts. Pages are spent on the tensions in the conception of masculinity in the early 20th century, and the figure of the 'professional ethical entrepreneur' as a many-faceted figure. There are conflicts between Realtors® and non-member brokers, board status and state licensing requirements, the desires of the national committee versus local boards, and the new academic discipline of 'land economics' against the practice of actual real estate brokerage, along with pages about the role of women in real estate. While women were a minority in this era, as a paraprofession about the 'home', they made swift inroads as Realtors® well before they entered law, medicine, and science in significant numbers.

But this book touches only lightly on what I regard as the key issue, the creation of the middle class as defined by a owning a detached single family dwelling. Suburbia was no accident. Rather, it was a deliberate innovation to create a synthetic Jeffersonian agrarian republic at the time that real economic forces were encouraging a class of urban renters and rural megafarms. Realtors® played a key role in this, helping guide Federal policies that encouraged mortgage loans and discouraged public housing, as well as thousands of local level zoning efforts to create 'proper neighborhoods for proper people'.

The policy issues here are fascinating, and sadly mistreated in favor of worn tropes that hey, Progressive Era people were full of contradictions, and even the best of them were shockingly racist by post-Civil Rights Act standards.

Oh, and a life-long Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Reader, Hornstein has nothing to say about the allegation that all 1.3 million licensed Realtors® are actually aliens, acting as the first wave of an invasion. You read it here first!

David Donovan had a privileged position in the Vietnam War. A lieutenant fresh out of training, he was assigned as a military adviser deep in the Mekong Delta, a backwater without roads, electricity, even soap. With just 4 other Americans and two platoons of haphazardly equipped local militia, Donovan didn't have much, but he was the Co Van, the senior American in the district, and for better or worse a Warrior King. He could call down fire from the sky, dole out miraculous American medicine, order people imprisoned or killed with a word. Donovan admits that at times he may have gone slightly mad, but some sort of fundamental decency kept him on track in his year-long tour. He couldn't win the war, but he held his sector together.

The anecdotes make this book, ranging from tense ambushes and slogging patrols to the indignities of being at the end of the American supply system and learning to make do with grilled rat and rice dipping nuoc mam. Three incidents in particular speak out: trying to maintain conservative Vietnamese sexual mores and American military standards with young ladies literally throwing themselves at the team (Donovan claims he respectfully declined), a local Catholic priest who hated Americans and plotted against them to the extent that Donovan strongly considered having the Phoenix Program assassinate the man (and declined because he didn't want to kill a man of the cloth, no matter how annoying), and when 'loose-cannon' Captain Jackson fired his M16 to intimidate some prisoners and wound up causing a fire in the base that set off 400 rounds of mortar ammunition and leveled everything (which would be hilarious, except that 4 people died).