I came into Connect thinking "This is really powerful. This is really good."  I came out of it wondering what exactly I'd learned. Robin and Bradford are two of the minds behind one of the most popular courses at the Stanford Business School, Interpersonal Dynamics, loving referred to as "touchy-feely". 

The idea is that a lot of relationships we have are shallow and not particularly satisfying. We can have better ones by being authentic, vulnerable, and not making assumptions about what other people are feeling.  The examples, using both invented dialog and the author's experiences, are quite good.  Issues include being talked over at work, marriages that are floundering on changes in career and parenting, aging parents who prefer solutions to emotional openness, and friendships that are on the rocks due to life changes.  

I think the key points are not to let emotional 'pinches' build into crises, and to stay on your side of the net and not make assumptions about other's motivations. It's good advice, but hard to apply in a real world where your own emotions are unclear, others can be predatory, and the need to save face is constant.

Scott has written a number of dadly WW2 histories. I own and read a few, and they are consistently solid.  Black Snow covers one of the more shameful moments in American military history; the campaign to obliterate Japan via firebombing during WW2.  

The B-29 was the single most expensive weapon project of the war, more expensive than the Manhattan project. A solid generation ahead of the B-17s and B-24s that had devastated Germany, the B-29 was designed for high-altitude precision bombing. However, these early missions had no effect, with the jet stream scattering bombs, weather cutting out raids, and many planes lost to Japanese air defenses and accidents.  The genial General Haywood Hansell, in charge of the operation, was wedded to doctrine and didn't have the guts to force a tactical change.  He was dismissed and replaced with Lemay, an iron-hard veteran of Europe and the fiasco of bombing from China.

Lemay ran the numbers and switched from high altitude bombing to low-level incendiary raids. Japan's tightly packed wooden cities were tinderboxes, their night fighters lacking, and napalm cluster bombs could easily hit a target the size of a city. The results were catastrophic. The first raid killed perhaps 100,000 people in a single night. Subsequent raids killed tens of thousands.  Lemay's bombers hit a city a night, limited only by the ability of the US Navy to keep shipping in incendiaries. 

This book is at its best drawing from translated Japanese oral histories, a comprehensive account of survivors recorded in the 1970s. The raids were sheer horror, entire families dying by flame, smoke, heat, spontaneous combustion.  Numbers can only say so much, stories of parents running from the flames, only to find their children roasted to death on their backs, say so much more. This is a hard book, and a necessary one.

Sherman was right. War is hell.

I've been following Jordan "@DreadSingles" on Twitter and now Bluesky for ages, so I figured why not try a book from the author of such banger tweets as HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA, TEETH FILED INTO HUNGRY POINTS, DONNING WRITHING VESTAMENTS OF WHISPERING DARK, PRE-ORDERING THE FRESH NEW APOCALYPSE.

Well, turns out there's a long way between a banger tweet and a book.  Hot Singles is weird fiction following two characters. Noah is some guy, started a new job with a newspaper called Printed Matter that publishes personals like the one above. His orientation involves a blood draw and watching a VHS of a red orb that erases your memory.  It beats mopping up blood and teeth in a bus station bathroom.  Maybe. 

Malachia is a bone nun in an empty city called Silence, once ruled by nine Great Powers, but now practically empty. Her daily rituals and search for a lost lover take her to the Corpse Oak, which sends her on a mission to return the Great Powers who are overdue. 

And that's about it.  There are lots of weird little scenes, juxtaposing rotting mundane places like offices and apartment complexes with the teeth strew weirdness of Silence. But the overall impression is just so-so, more funny than horrifying (except for one bit, a kiss).  And while I don't need rigorous worldbuilding, there's an utter carelessness towards Silence, Great Powers, and bone nuns. Like, we're supposed to recognize all these things as uncanny signifiers of hidden world who's truths would break our fragile human sanity, but it's just a bricolage of body horror.

House of Open Wounds follows the first book with a skip of a couple of years, and the presence of only one character. Yasnic has been arrested for god-smuggling, and since his prior record says 'miraculous healer', he's given the option of working in an experimental Pallaseen military hospital rather than a short drop.

The hospital is Hell, overseen by a large disgraced Pal called The Butcher. Torturers have the option of showing mercy, the hospital does not. There's no kindness, just unusually good odds of survival thanks to The Butcher's skills with a saw and alchemy, a fire priestess turned surgeon, a plague priest who draws away infection, and a Divinati healer who can take wounds onto herself. Yasnic, now Maric Jack, is entirely superfluous in a magical sense. God is an ornery bastard who won't heal, and the price of God's intervention is impossibly high for soldiers. But Yasnic can carry and bandage and stitch, so he does.

There's a fair bit of amusement with intra-Pal problems between the "specials", the necromancer in charge of the hospital (raw material, you know), her archrival the demonologist, and the golem mechanic, but compared to City of Last Chances most of the other characters don't leave much of an impact. Only Banders, former-Cohort-Broker and a Milo Minderbinder-esque war profiteer, had much interest for me. The battle/casualty scenes go a beat too long; there's a lot of screaming in hell.

The main plot concerns God's private war against Pallaseen discipline. At first uninterested in healing soldiers, when Yasnic is explicitly forbidden from using magic to heal anyone, God decides that he's the one who does the commanding around here. The ordered and devious Pallaseen military mind codifies what kind of violence God prohibits into the "97 Loopholes of God", a fantastic scripture if I say so myself.

However, this is maybe a C plot, against Yasnic's further loss of faith and pursuit of a succubus, which I didn't care for at all, and the military situation between the Pals and an opponent organized and powerful enough to slow their war machine.

The Tongue Trade is science-fiction inflected noir, and your enjoyment will be closely linked to how much you buy the premise.  William Kirst is a translator in a world where languages have diverged so much that you need specialists to communicate between different professions (police, business, marketing, legal, IT, medicine, etc.). He's leaving dinner with a date when he witnesses the aftermath of a murder. Translating between another witness and a lawyer, he learns the shocking truth that his client was the killer.

Unfortunately an ironclad oath prevents translators from revealing what was said to third parties, even if it would be criminal evidence. Against his better judgement, Kirst is drawn into an investigation against a powerful businessman, one which involves a radioactive quarantine zone, Zeppelin shipping, beautiful dames, and murderous goons.

The best parts of this book are the epigraphs at the start of each chapter, a story of professional communication gone wildly awry. Secondarily is when the story leans on Kirst's skills to finding the meaning behind youth slang, criminal argot, and all sorts of weird jargon. The rest is good to adequate. The plot wraps up a bit too neatly and quickly for my tastes, without the layers of perverse sexual desire which make a true noir so dark.

Attachment theory is one of the more popular psychological frameworks, and one that I've got mixed feelings about. I've been inside the anxious-avoidant relationship collapse (it sucks), but the theory doesn't offer much to do, aside from recognizing that you're falling into maladaptive attachment patterns and break them.

Raising a Secure Child  has a slightly different set of terminology. The premise of the book is that children have a natural circle of security, moving from "support my exploration" to "enjoy with me" to "welcome my return" to "protect and comfort me" and "organize my feelings".  As a parent, your own upbringing has generated 'shark music' (ba-dum, ba-dum ba-dum-dum-dum-dum-DUM) around some aspect of life, one or more of the core safety triggers of Esteem, Safety, and Separation.  Your job is to work through your own history and daily exhaustion and find a way to give your child what they need in the moment.

The good news is that kids are pretty resilient, and even if you fall off the circle it's easy to get back on. The hard part is balancing reasonable parenting demands (don't run into traffic, no hitting, at least try to put your shoes on, etc) with your child's temperament, and there the book offers little help.

City of Last Chances is dark fantasy that delivers. Ilmar, the titular city, is a place of grime, crime, oppression, and magic. The usual forces of capitalist exploitation (with demons driving the mills) and a rampant criminal underworld have a special master, the imperial Pallaseen occupiers, who's ideology of "perfecting the world" is an excuse for ongoing conquest and then erasure of local cultures. It's been three years since Ilmar was conquered, and the city is a tinderbox waiting to explode.

The story dances through multiple points of view. And while this complexity is a common failure of epic fantasy, Tchaikovsky never loses the thread, using each distinct character to show a different part of the city, and different angle on ambition, intrigue, violence, and idealism.

There are so many characters. I'd have to say my favorites were Blackmane, an Allor (magic foreigner, from another conquered city) sorcerer and pawnbroker, who's constant plots are always a source of amusement, and Ruslav, a soldier for an organized crime faction who's love of violence is tempered by a strange romanticism.

Tchaikovsky teases three major mysteries through the book, and all of them pay off fantastically. First, there's The Reproach, a district of the city abandoned to a slowly spreading curse that drives people mad, and where wealth and secrets are hidden.  Second is the promised revolution, the uprising against the Pallaseen which will see Ilmar free and restored, or at least transformed.  And third is Helgrim and his wife. Helgrim is a soldier from another world who came through to Ilmar through the Anchorwood, a mysteric passageway between places, and lost his wife along the way.

I've seen a lot of other reviews on the other site saying they didn't like or didn't finish this book, and I don't know what these people are reading. City of Last Chances is some of the finest fantasy I've read in a long time!

Angles of Attack is a gripping engineering thriller, a tale the of meteoric rise and even faster fall of Harrison "Stormy" Storms, a key figure in the Apollo program. It stands next to The Soul of New Machine as a story of men, machines, and the cost of innovation.

In the early 1960s, North American Aviation was hot as it got. NAA had contributed the P-51 to WW2 and the F-86 to Korea. Harrison Storms was pushing the boundaries of speed and air with the X-15 program and the XB-70 Mach 3 strategic bomber. When Kennedy announced the moon landing as the goal of the space program, an effort to mark a technical triumph America might beat the Russians at, Storms went over the heads of his bosses to put in bids, winning both the second stage of the Saturn V and the over-all program itself.

The chapters are about hard-working, hard-drinking "tin benders", pragmatic engineers putting in 80+ hour weeks for years on end to meet the unimaginable technical challenges of the lunar mission. The Apollo program required strength, lightness, durability, and unimaginable precision and scale. One key component, the dome tank wall that separated liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, had to be built out of precisely fitted honeycomb panels, with the hydrogen side just above absolute zero and the oxygen side merely freezing cold at −183 Celsius.

The engineering challenges required a human effort to match. The North American plant in Downey, south of Los Angeles, was a hive of activity with thousands of craftsmen refining the design and the prototype items. NAA was the lead contractor, but Apollo had subcontractors and pieces spread all over the country, all of which had to be coordinated in a constantly changing dance to hit the end of the decade target. It was engineers screaming at each other, engineers having heart attacks on the shop floor, kids growing up without seeing dad, and marriages falling apart. Apollo was a hurricane, with Storms at its heart.

All of this came to a head with the Apollo 1 disaster, which killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee. The three astronauts were conducting a ground test when the capsule was engulfed in flames. They were dead in seconds, likely suffocated by toxic fumes, and then burned alive. NAA and Storms had argued against the circumstances that lead to the disaster. They wanted a conventional air atmosphere and an outwards-opening hatch equipped with explosive bolts, two design proposals overruled by NASA. The rest was the holes in the Swiss cheese lining up. Astronauts loved velcro, which kept things from floating around the cabin. Velcro's flammability had been tested in 5 PSI of Oxygen, which was what the mission would be at. But the test was run at 16.7 PSI of Oxygen to simulate the pressure difference between the capsule and space. At 5 PSI Velcro burned actively; at 16.7 PSI, it exploded.  A patch of velcro wasn't considered important enough to go on the engineering drawings, so the sheer amount of velcro in the cockpit slipped past the safety review.

Even so, NAA took the blame, the ordinary friction of aerospace R&D being blown up into programmatic incompetence and fraud against the government. Storms was the scapegoat, and he was unceremoniously removed from his key role. Other men would take Apollo to the moon. North American Aviation would merge with Rockwell, becoming just one more division in a conglomerate and losing its engineering identity.

Angles of Attack has flaws. It's very much Storms' view of Apollo, and the program was bigger than any one person. Gray has an ear for action and thrills, and perhaps overlooks the mundanity of the work. But for all that, this is still a fantastic book.

Platoon Leader is one of the starker Vietnam War memoirs I've read, with a particular focus on the difficulties of small unit command. McDonough graduated from West Point in 1969 and after Airborne, Ranger, and Jungle Warfare schools, joined the 173d Airborne Infantry Brigade, where his assignment was to defend a strategic hamlet along the South China Sea about halfway between Saigon and Da Nang. 

McDonough's first job was to win the respect of his men, which he decided to do by focusing on tactical proficiency and aggressiveness. The platoon, just above half of its nominal strength of 40 soldiers, would patrol aggressively. McDonough would be on at least every third patrol. 20 square kilometers is both not a terribly large area (rough estimate, a 2 mile walk in any direction from the platoon outpost), and also a tremendously large place to defend with a platoon. The men were the usual mix of jokers, slackers, newbies, and killers. In one rather tense initial moment,  McDonough torched a private's marijuana stash, and the soldier "accidentally" fired his M79 at the McDonough's back.  McDonough literally hoisted the man up with the muzzle of an M16 under his chin.  McDonough's command, and learning how to use their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses, is the core of the book.

Combat is another major focus. Death is sudden, violent, utterly random.  McDonough was wounded early in his tour by a landmine and avoided major injury only by a chance turn to the left at a critical moment. In defensive positions, the platoon could pour out incredible firepower and take little more than shrapnel scratches. But on patrol, a man could die in seconds; cut down by a burst of machine gun fire or a booby trap. Worse was that lingering of mortal wounds, body pulped and heart still beating. War is a bloody business, no management, just killing. 

Loneliness in command is a third subject.  McDonough had to maintain a distance from his men, to show as little weakness as possible. He had no peers. The Vietnamese Regional Forces commander in the village was useless. His company commander was passive, even cowardly, and the other platoons were separated by miles and barred areas of operation to prevent friendly fire. And yet that distance was vital to keep from becoming a monster, to restrain violence from civilians as much as was possible (not much at all).

The finale of the book is the grim realization of what "political warfare" means. The Viet Cong are deadly shadows who mostly use terror attacks against other Vietnamese. An elderly widow who traded C rations for her ad hoc orphanage is brutally murdered. One of the platoon's Kit Carson scouts, a VC defector, loses his family in an attack. The war cuts through families, with VC and ARVN in the same household. Any illusion that this might restrain the violence is lost in the finale, as the Viet Cong attack the town the platoon is protecting and the strategic hamlet is destroyed in the ensuing battle. 

Americans aren't the only people who can destroy a village to save it.

Permanence is classical Big Dumb Object space opera, with weaknesses in characterization and plotting papered over with quick writing and some actually interesting ideas about deep time.

Rue Cassels is escaping from her abusive half-brother and the tiny cometary mining station she calls home when she stumbles across a find of incredible, mind-boggling wealth. A distant speck of light is not just a chunk of rock, not just a slower-than-light Cycler starship, but an alien Cycler. The discovery tosses Rue into the deep end of human politics.

Small-town girl Rue is a mite out of her depth (despite deep wells of cunning, decency, and resilience), and xenoarcheologist Michael Bequith becomes a secondary point of view.  Bequith is much more interesting than the standard YA protagonist is Rue. He's the human fixer for the truly gifted Dr. Herat, but both of them have become disenchanted with their discipline. For decades, humanity has been searching for aliens that they could have diplomatic relationships with. However, while life is common, sentient technological life is incredibly rare. The handful of existing equivalent species will have nothing to do with humans out of various forms of revulsion: Autotrophs find the fact that we eat grotesque. Slyphs regard altering the environment to suit you rather than vice-versa a sin worthy of genocide. And there's a species of nomadic interstellar solipsists. Every other species is dead, nothing than more than ruins, many of then wiped out 65 million years ago by a theorized empire of Von Neumann berseker probes called the Chicxulub.

Herat has about given up hope, and so has Besquith. His academic work is a cover for his banned religion of NeoShintoism, which uses AI and VR to capture the Kami of alien worlds, but an experience on a ringworld fragment has left Besquith profoundly shaken.

Rue's Cycler, the Envy, represents a lot of hope. For Rue, it's wealth, freedom, and a lifeline for her civilization based in the dark halo worlds, which have been bypassed by the FTL ships of Earth's Rights Economy. For Besquith, it's a chance to find his faith again. And for Admiral Chrisler of the Right's Economy, it's a chance to win a war that's his side is losing via unloosing automated weapons, whatever the cost.

The parts that I found most interesting concern the Right's Economy and the Chicxulub. The Right's Economy is a nightmare of DRM, where everything has a price and money and is funneled upwards to Right's Owners back on Earth. Even military starships require constant microtransactions to operate. Most people find this awful, and a growing rebellion is winning the war. Yet some kind of unified government is necessary to prevent humanity from splintering into transhuman fragments. (Notably, Rue is off-baseline. Growing up on a cold and dim cometary hab means she finds ordinary light and heat blinding and stifling. Unclear how much is genetics and how much is just adaptation). And both the Rights Economy and the rebels, using FTL ships that only work around major stars, would leave Rue's home of the Cycler Compact habitats to wither and die.

The sweep of big ideas makes up for some, well, not bad characterization, but not exactly great characterization and plotting. Rue, for all her good qualities, get by mostly on luck. Some of which is expected (hey, we need an inciting incident of finding the starship), some of which is earned (and she should be able to turn it on), but there's one chance drift into a secret rebel base which really stretched my credulity. The Rights Economy seems like a bad joke, but given that this book came out in 2002, the iTunes Store opened in 2003, and the Oblivion Horse Armor DLC fiasco happened in 2006, Schroeder was weirdly prescient--an apt bit of writing given that he's also a serious futurist.