This might be the most important book you read this decade. Graeber asks what the phrase "You have to pay your debts" really means, and his answer involves a looping historical, anthropological, linguistic, and philosophical inquiry into the nature of currency, coinage, and capitalism.

As Graeber notes, the standard economic story of the development of coinage: that bartering diverse goods (potatoes for shoes for sheep for shovels) was so inconvenient that people developed cash to be more efficient, has no evidence of support. Rather, indigenous societies tend to work on principles of mutual solidarity within the group. Everybody is bound together in a complex web of minor debts and obligations, the cancellation of which is the same as the end of the relationship. Currency in these 'human economies' is used to arrange marriages and compensate for murders. Their purpose is not that human beings can be bought, but precisely to point out how unique each human life is.

On top of this primordial communism, Graeber recognizes two harmful phenomenon. Debt peonage, caused by ever escalating interest on loans, reduces free citizens to slaves, prompting rebelling and escape from urban agricultural centers. Coinage, precious metal currency, is wealth stripped of all its context, anonymous money for strangers of little trust. Together, they lead to what Graeber describes as the 'military-slavery-coinage complex', the use of force to seize human beings, rip them away from their homes, set them to working mines and plantations, and turn them into coins to pay the army to continue the war. Combine the two, and you get the most rapacious form of modern capitalism: debt-laden soldiers trying to reduce everything around them to hard currency as fast as they can.

The philosophical and linguistic sections are if anything, better than the history and the anthropology. Almost all of our modern philosophies originate in questions about what money measures, what the universe is made of, and the paradox of ethical action and self-interest.

Graeber's arguments are more complex than what I've presented here. I'm sure that there are other interpretations to the history he has chosen. But he's asking The Big Questions, and one that cuts at the heart of our current crisis of faith.

Dan Hampton is a F-16 pilot and author, who offers an entertaining, if flawed look at the elite brotherhood of fighter pilots, starting from the First World War and moving through the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. The style intersperses novelist accounts of combat with historical sketches, and analysis of changes in aircraft and tactics.

The book starts well enough, with Roland Garros using an machine gun shooting through the armored propeller of his Morane-Saulnier scout to destroy a German scout plane. Soon, famous aces like Boelcke and Lanoe Hawker were dueling over the trenches, and planes began getting faster and more heavily armed. The first section, on the Great War and aerial mercenaries in the interwar era, is a delight, joyfully written and comprehensive. The basic qualities of the lords of the sky are laid out. Excellent flying skills, good gunnery, confidence and aggressiveness, and some qualities of leadership to train and command aerial armies.

But as Hampton gets closer to the present day, the quality declines. WW2 is the Battle of Britain, Midway, and the tales of Nazi super-ace Hans-Joachim Marseille and female Soviet ace Lilya Litvyak. Post-WW2, we have Korea, Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, and then Desert Storm and Iraq II. Hampton gets lost in jargon, and doesn't clearly get across what air combat with guided missiles, electronic warfare, and a hostile integrated air defense environment is like.

And then there are the errors. The B-29 is not a "large jet", an elementary mistake. In the description of the forces on an airplane in flight, lift counteracts drag, and thrust counteract weight, which a basic force diagram shows is nonsense. While it's impossible to give a complete history of air combat in a single volume, at 623 pages, this book feels both too long, and also incomplete.

Altered Carbon is the latest scifi novel to make the leap to the small screen, with a gorgeous adaptation by Netflix. But this isn't about the show, this is about the book.

Takeshi Kovacs is an ex-Envoy, member of an interstellar police force turned criminal turned prisoner. His world is defined by the technology of DHF, minds stored on tiny chips implanted in the skull and bodies reduced to "sleeves". Most people just get the body they're born with, but if you're rich enough you can have entire tanks of clones or just buy new flesh from someone who's fucked up and put their mind on ice. Kovacs is called back to the world by Laurens Bancroft, an effectively immortal super rich dude who blew his own head off a few weeks prior. Cops are treating it as a badly done suicide (why would someone with backups shoot themselves without erasing the backups?), but Bancroft thinks it was murder, and wants Kovacs' Envoy skills to find the true killer.

The story loops Kovacs through the criminal underworld of San Francisco, trouble with mistaken identity (his current body used to belong to a dirty cop), and a confrontation with an enemy out of the past, Reileen Kawahara, a powerful criminal who runs high-end brothels. In a world where any sin is available for enough money, Reileen has the ultimate illegal kick, snuffing prostitutes who will really die, because she's forged a "Do Not Resuscitate" order on the basis of their Catholic faith. With a bill coming through that'd allow resurrection in pursuit of criminal inquiry, Kawahara needed leverage on Bancroft, and had him kill one of her girls with the assistance of Bancroft's jealous wife. Grand plots of politics work down to sordid little personal conflicts. Forget it, Jake, it's cyberpunk neo-noir.

Morgan leavens up the standard cyberpunk tropes with references to poet and philosopher of revolution Falconer Quell, and he has an eye for action, but I can't say this book is more than the sum of it's bricolaged parts. And I will say that while this is the show bleeding over, this book is weird about women and women's bodies, and not in a particularly elegant or pointed way.

The General has achieved a recent notoriety as the book White House Chief of Staff (for now) General John Kelley reads after every promotion. And since I'm a long-time fan of Forester's Horatio Hornblower books, I decided to check it out. What we have is a lean, ironic, and acerbic picture of an exemplar of British military leadership during the First World War. Our protagonist, Curzon, is a cavalry officer of the old school: Red-faced, energetic, stiffly honorable, utterly unimaginative. Sent into line at the Battle of Mons, Major Curzon distinguishes himself through unyielding defense and is promoted to Major-General. He marries a duke's daughter, trains a new division of Kitchener's Army, and is promoted to Corps level. At Ypres, at the Somme, at Arras, he proceeds in the best tradition of the British Army, sending thousands of Tommies to their deaths in the trenches in futile attacks. Curzon is untroubled by the slaughter, by innovations like gas and tanks, unable to see victory beyond brutal attrition. He participates in intrigues at G.H.Q. and the dining table, until at the end of the war, his lines broken by new German stormtrooper tactics, he rides out to meet his fate, and loses a leg to a random shell. Death before comprehension, for this general.

The kindle edition has a solid introduction by Max Hasting, placing it in historiographic context of interpreting the first World War, the popularity of generals like Haig at the time, and their subsequent erasure as donkeys and butchers. Two passages, the description of Curzon in the beginning, and the metaphor of the general staff trying to win offensives like someone who had never seen a screw before try and remove one by pulling, are legendary. The book as a whole is a strong contribution to military literature, and a fascinating character study of a vanished breed.

This book collects two unrelated award-winning novellas from classic author Fritz Leiber. Ill Met in Lankhmar describes the first meeting of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in the city of Lanhkar, and is a sword-and-sorcery classic, with our two heroes up against the evil Thieves Guild, first as part of a drunken con, and then for bloody revenge. Ship of Shadows is scifi, a story of a man named Spar, lowly crewman on massive spaceship falling to pieces, trying to figure out what is happening through an alcoholic daze.

Leiber had the misfortune to win Hugos for two of his worst novels. At his best, which this is, he writes richly layered gothic fiction that is both imaginative and thrilling.

A roleplaying game designed for the Vietnam War should be extremely my jam. Patrol is a 21st century spiritual successor to the Recon games, with modern mechanics designed to support a style of psychological realism in the vein of Platoon or Herr's Dispatches, rather than pure simulationist tactics.

The core of the game is a d6 dice-pool system. Characters have three attributes (Fortitude, Vigilance, Proficiency) which range between 5 and 10 and may be modified by equipment and situational bonuses. When you make a check, roll a number of d6s. 6s are successes (along with 5s, if you have a relevant skill), and if you beat the difficulty you succeed. If you get more 1s than successes, the result includes a FUBAR, something bad happening. Some basic probability shows that you need a lot of dice for reasonable odds of success on anything harder than about 2, and that unskilled characters can be expected to FUBAR about half the time.

Where this game gets innovative is that each character has one of four psychological profiles (idealistic, pragmatic, righteous, and egocentric), which describe the Doubt that your character takes doing or witnessing common situations, and the Victory Points gained for accomplishing tasks that represent winning your own, personal war. Every profile wants different things for the game, naturally pushing intraparty conflict. Turns are about 30 minutes long, representing a substantial chunk of activity, and each one pushes you further along various condition tracks. There's interplay between high levels of fatigue, which are required to unlock the highest VP generating conditions, and the ways in which fatigue becomes trauma as your characters wear down over the course of the tour.

The GMing section has some really good advice for getting the feel of the war, especially the barriers of communication. American NPCs speak in first person and have multilayered personalities. Vietnamese are narrated in third person, and should be described in stereotypes. This is not your country, GI, and you don't belong. The rules include a variety of weapons, vehicles, and opposing forces and allies. Anyone can show up, from Viet Cong guerrillas to Australian Special Forces and Korean Marines.

That said, this is a reading review, and there are some parts that I'm fuzzy on, and some areas where I think this game falls short of its ambitions. The interplay of personality, doubt, fatigue, victory points, XP, and trauma is not particularly elegant. This is an aggressively non-tactical game, but it still military-centric, and more could have been done to distinguish the options in a firefight and add some real weight to the choices. Finally, I think there should have been better or more explicit support for the idea that you're part of unit beyond your characters, and that individuals come and go, but the unit remains.

Patrol is a good game, but it falls short compared to truly great games like Night Witches and Blades in the Dark

A lot of hyperbolic language has been spilled over trolls and the internet subculture of trolling. I know, because I've added my tiny share (trolls as reactionary guerrillas). Unlike most commentators, Whitney actually gets it, blending intensive ethnographic involvement in two troll communities in the critical period where trolling went mainstream with a rigorous grounding in sociology and folklore.

Phillips argues that trolls are agents of cultural digestion, sifting through the detritus of a heavily schizophrenically juxtaposed media for memetic fragments that can be weaponized "for the lulz." "For the lulz" is the key to the entire business of trolling: the stance that lets trolls win at their own game of emotional damage, while being able to continually shift and redefine and rules. Trolls are as old as discussion on the internet, with a dual definition of either throwing out provocative comments to catch 'honest' discussants, or simply serving as some kind of horrifically regenerating monster.

As Phillips chronicles from her time in 4chan, anonymous moved from a dense world of inside jokes and gross-outs (hello goatse my old friend...) to playing tricks on the mainstream culture. Their triumph was getting Oprah to claim that a pedophile organization 'with over 9000 dicks are raping little children' on live TV, a grandiose and ridiculous claim that made the Queen of Daytime TV the dupe of pimply nerds in dark basements. Maximum lulz.

The symbiotic relationship between the mainstream media and trolling subculture is one of the most interesting parts of Phillip's research, as she spoke with a loose network of memorial page trolls, who would stalk the pages of telegenic dead teenagers to mock the victim and their family. This predatory act is a mirror of the Nightly News' attitude towards crime, the faux-concern that comes down to the primal fact that if it bleeds it leads, doubly so if the victim is white and wealthy. At best, these memorial trolls were motivated to strike against the stance of fake grief taken by strangers.

These days, we live in a world of trolls. 4chan memes are sold at Hot Topic. Donald Trump trolled low-energy Jeb!, little Marco, and Lying Ted Cruz into oblivion in the 2016 GOP Primary (as an aside, Phillips argues that Trump is not a troll, but his /pol/ are his greatest supporters.) Phillips engages with a research subject that is built on ironic detachment and deliberate lies, on desecrating sacred cultural touchstones and then saying "hey man, it's just a game", and does so with impressive clarity and sensitivity. My expectation is that this book will soon become canonical for people studying memes, internet culture, and trolling.

Give me that old time religion! The kind with bloody sacrifice, sacred groves, portents and oracles. By Jove! And Athena, and Serapis, and Ba'al, give me that old time religion.

In Pagans, O'Donnell tackles the question of what happened to the traditional religion of the Mediterranean. How, in the 4th century, did the rites of the old gods up and vanish? The mundane argument is pretty simple. The Emperor Diocletian (284-305) massively reformed the civil service, centralizing power and finances at the expense of local elites. Money, which used to support local civic rites across the Empire, was distributed from Constantinople to new Christian leaders via the mechanism of the military and the Church.

That, of course, is a paltry explanation. Belief that exists only in the presence of cash subsidies is a paltry belief indeed. But that may have been enough. O'Donnell argues that the old religions were transactional. A sacrifice to a god was the human side of a deal, the divine side of which was victory in battle, prosperity in trade, or healthy children. Gods which lost the support of human emperors were no longer worthy of emulation by the masses. 4th century Christians had a number of rhetorical and technological advantages, as their doctrine combined the sophisticated philosophy of the neoplatonists, a strong tradition of public oratory and writing, and the political power of the assembled congregation (Oh, and the True Gospel of Christ's Love). Against this, the old religion had the obscurity of signs and portents, the spectacle of rite and sacrifice, and Bronze Age traditions that seemed sclerotic and obsolete.

O'Donnell writes clearly for the new reader, while placing this work in an ongoing scholarly dialog about the Classics that I don't know enough about to criticize. His most original argument is that pagans as such did not exist. Augustus would never have used the word to describe his beliefs. Rather, paganism was constructed as an opponent by the early Church, a specific kind of rhetorical move to distinguish 'soldiers of Christ' from the ignorant superstitions of the countryside, which is the root word of 'pagan'. Similarly, one should not speak of belief in Jupiter, but rather an assemblage of practices and images relating specific human beings to a common vision of a 'heavenly father'. There's a frustrating skipping around in the arguments and primary sources. These are very much O'Donnell's interpretations, and I'm not convinced they are the interpretations. Still, this is an interesting book for a modern atheist who loves Rome, but knows relatively little about the end of the Empire.

Call to Arms follows up Duel in the Dark with few surprises or literary merits. Dauntless has spent weeks in dock being repaired. Meanwhile, the war against the Union is going poorly, as seemingly endless waves of battleships and fighters pour out of the wormholes. The Confederation is forced backwards, from one stand after another.

Dauntless rendezvouses at the scene of the last battle, and with the help of the Intrepid, a friendly battleship hiding in a dust cloud, destroys a major supply convoy and finds a major clue to the strategic situation in a captured database. The Union's impossible offensive is being supported by a massive secret mobile supply base. The two Confederate battleships must launch a desperate assault to stem the tide of enemy reinforcements.

Call to Arms has all the flaws of the first book in the series, and few new charms. Aside from a gesture that logistics matter (which honestly is appreciated), the war is Midway in Space. Characters are two dimensional, with the addition of a required fighter pilot rivalry, and a "good" spymaster who usurps the constitution because that's what survival needs. The Union are the USSR in space, except they all have French names (wow, much creativity).

I guess my biggest problem with this series, aside from the generally average writing, is how much the spacecraft seem to run on the will of the captain. The main battery is broken, until it's really vital to get a shot. The interceptors will take 20 minutes to prep for launch, but you can do it in 10 if you try hard enough. Engines and guns are pushed to 110% charge, with no sense that these are delicate machines that are being burnt out for a tactical advantage. I want to sit Allan down with a copy of Shattered Sword and explain that this what heroism looks like, under the parameter's you've sketched.

Is there a way to leave an ebook at the beach?

The FBI has a carefully curated image as heroic G-men, busting major criminals like mafia dons, bank robbers, kidnappers, and art thieves (hello Robert K. Wittman). But behind the image is a paradox, the workings of a secret police agency in a democracy, a shadowy organization that operates beyond the normal boundaries of the law. In Enemies, Tim Weiner ably traces the paradoxes of the FBI in its long history.

The Bureau of Investigation (not yet Federal) existed before J. Edgar Hoover, but the first director left such a mark on the FBI that's his story is its story. Hoover joined a minor agency, and in the turbulent era of anarchist bombers and Communist revolutionaries around the First World War, turned it into a crack machine for targeting subversives of all stripes. Hoover pioneered wiretaps and blackbag jobs, and a voluminous system of secret files directly under his control. FDR called on Hoover to track down Nazi agents, and the two formed a partnership based on political gossip secret intelligence. The period immediately after the Second World War was perhaps the most influential for Hoover, as he used artful leaks to frame the emerging Cold War, and made his anti-Communist views the dominant framework of the American government.

Hoover ardently believed that Communists aimed to overthrow the American government, and that there was a direct line between Moscow and the American Left (including labor and civil rights activists). Furthermore, a rash of breeches at the CIA convinced Hoover that Communism and homosexuality were linked as well. Hoover's war on "deviance" prompted spying into the private lives of American citizens, especially Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the massive COINTELPRO campaign to subvert and disorganize the American left. Though the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Hoover formed partnerships with Vice President and then President Nixon based on anti-communism, and LBJ based on political intrigue. Hoover was the man who knew all the secrets.

The twin blows of his death in 1972, and the Watergate burglary, where ex-FBI Nixon staffers ran into a newly independent FBI investigation, prompted the first crisis of faith, one from which the FBI has never really recovered. It turned out that the FBI's crown jewels of wiretapping and blackbag jobs had no Constitutional legitimacy or legislative basis. COINTELPRO was massively illegal. Despite all the effort involved in fighting Communism, FBI counter-intelligence was a shambles, and people with access to secrets across the government sold out to the Soviets again and again.

Since 1980, and especially since 9/11, the FBI has repeatedly tried to reorganize itself as a counter-terrorism intelligence agency, mostly to resounding failure. Weiner documents bureaucratic fiefdoms that refuse to communicate, agents without the touch to work confidential sources well, analysts who can't access materials due to outdated computer systems, and a lack of clarity and purpose that stretches for decades. Most cuttingly, prior to 9/11 the FBI and CIA anti-Al Qaeda units hated each other. When the FBI agent in charge died in the WTC attacks, his CIA counterpart said that his death was "the only good thing that happened that day." Despite a worldwide presence, thousands of agents, and billion dollar budgets, the FBI's vaunted successes in the War on Terror seem mostly to be about entrapping mentally ill Muslims into terror plots where the FBI supplies the plan, the weapons, and even the Jihadi rhetoric.

Weiner's book forces us to confront an expensive and painful legacy of failure, an undemocratic erosion of freedoms that has not even brought much security. Yet there's a vagueness about what he thinks intelligence should do, vis a vis subversives and terrorists, that weakens his argument. This is only a partial history, because the FBI does investigate and arrest common criminals. And finally, while it's easy to direct the apparatus of a secret police against unpopular subversives, we need more and better investigations of white collar crime and financial fraud, particularly in the wake of 2008 financial collapse. Enemies is an important part of the picture, and likely the sexiest and most interesting part of the picture, but it is only one part.