In the Vanisher's Palace is a stylish novella, without much below the surface. Yen is a failed scholar and healer's assistant in a harsh post-apocalyptic world. A race called the Vanishers bent the world with horrific diseases and departed, and in their wake society has curled on itself, with Yen's tiny village ruled by harsh Elders who discard the weak and useless. When Yen's mother calls a dragon to heal the sick child of the village head, Yen finds herself sacrificed to the same dragon.

But Yen isn't eaten. It turns out that the dragon Vu Con also has the shape of a beautiful woman, needs a tutor for her two children, and is a healer herself. But before love can blossom, Vu Con has to learn an important lesson about letting people make their own decisions, and Yen has to decide to care about her happiness.

On the plus side, the science-fantasy setting has just the right mood, with a lot of mystery and verve. But the romance, particularly Vu Con's side of it, never really worked for me. As a near-immortal with immense powers living in a palace of vanished post-humans, she was surprisingly mundane.

I guess I shouldn't have high expectations for popular science books from 1970. The Secret Life of the Forest is a decent ramble through North American forestry, with some charming popular science explanation of how plants work. But I wasn't aware how old it was when it was written, which explains the rather cavalier attitude towards the science of ecology and conservation. At it's best, this book has some delightful anecdotes about forests before the 20th century, but it fails to create any kind of coherent story, or even an outdated scientific rigor.

I am a man of ambition. Lesser ambition than some, my ambition extend towards actually reading Caro's magnum opus on LBJ. But until volume five arrives, there's Goodwin's biography. Goodwin has the advantage of personal knowledge. She was a White House fellow working on the Great Society, even as she was an anti-war figure on the New Left. After his presidency, she collaborated on his failed memoirs. When she speaks of the LBJ charm, the way that he could make you the center of the universe or freeze you out entire, it is from personal experience. This very closeness is both the strength and weakness of the book. As much as she is an expert, Goodwin uses a rather hoary psychodynamic theoretical paradigm, explaining Johnson's actions in relation to his mother and his childhood. The book becomes as much about Johnson's perceptions of events as the events themselves.

Johnson's early childhood was centered around his mother, an intellectual and aesthetic woman stifled by the strictures of Texas society, and his slightly disreputable and perennially hustling father, an entrepreneur and local politician in the prairie populist vein. Through his early career, Johnson made an art of two principles of power. The first was apprenticeship to powerful men, from the head of his college to leaders in the House and Senate. The second was master of hidden structures of meeting scheduling, office space, and using agenda setting to toss out a complacent old guard in favor of Johnson. For LBJ power was defined by patronage and negotiation. He could get you what you wanted, as long as you gave him what he wanted, which seemed like an eminently reasonable trade at the time. But what Johnson really wanted was 'just a little appreciation for what he did'. The goal of Johnson's political maneuvers was always to cast the other party into a potentially limitless sense of obligation, a tactic which worked against equals who had their own bases of support.

Johnson's ascension to the presidency meant that he had no equals. Final able to wield power, fettered only by the Constitution, Johnson embarked on his Great Society, a mass of new social programs. He also escalated America's involvement in Vietnam, seeing it as a necessary test of America's commitment to its allies and principles. Both endeavors ended in fiasco. Vietnam became a quagmire, the strategy of 'controlled escalation bombing' a fiasco. Distracted by the war, Johnson did not devote his talents to the Great Society, and its programs were consumed in a similar quagmire. A master of small groups, Johnson froze when speaking before a large audience, when he was unable to understand and mirror their psychological needs. The public image he had crafted of the all-powerful technocrat crumbled under the realities of the late 60s. Johnson had carefully avoided testing his public support, trusting in a 'solid center' that turned out not to exist after the early primaries.

This is often a fascinating book, and best when it quotes Johnson extensively. But it's also oddly underspecified for a serious history, without much of a sense of the details of the time. At something like 10% of the pagecount of Caro's books, less detail is a natural authorial choice, but this book may go too far in the other direction.

The Alchemy of Air is a breezy (pun intended) scientific history, focusing on the development of synthetic nitrogen via the Haber-Bosch process, and the lives of the two scientists who developed it.

Hager takes a broad look at fertilizer to begin with. Though the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, triple bonded gaseous N2 is biologically unavailable. Only a small fraction of 'fixed' nitrogen is available for plants to use. Farmers have known this for millennia, using manure and crop rotation to keep up the fertility of fields. The 19th century, with massive improvements in sanitation and commensurate increases in population, put more even more pressure on agriculture. Fertility was kept up only with Peruvian guano and Chilean nitrate salts, and the world seemed headed for Malthusian catastrophe.

Artificial nitrogen from the air would be the new alchemist's stone. Haber was an ambitious Jewish German scientist who figured out a process for creating ammonia using high temperature and pressure hydrogen over an iron catalyst. Bosch was an unusual proto-chemical engineer who took Haber's bench set up and created a new kind of city-sized industrial factory. BASF ("We don't make the things you buy, we make them better") started full scale ammonia production in 1913 or so.

This was fortuitous, because the other key use of nitrogen compounds is in explosives. The war machine had a prodigious appetite for gunpowder and other high explosives, and stockpiles intended to last years were consumed in weeks. British blockade cut Germany off from Chilean nitrates, and Hager estimates that Germany would have surrendered in 1916 without Haber-Bosch.

Meanwhile, Haber became a fierce Prussian militarist and patriot. He pioneered the development of chemical warfare, but at great personal cost. His wife Clara, a PhD chemist in her own right, committed suicide on the eve of the first gas attack. Haber was added to a list of war criminals.

Weimar was a time of growth for both men. They both won Nobel prizes. Haber became director of a Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, at the acme of German science. Bosch became director of BASF and then IG Farben, where he devoted efforts to an even larger nitrogen plant at Leuna and synthetic gasoline. The rise of Hitler brought both men to their downfall. A Jew, even one who had converted to Christianity like Haber, could never hold a post in the Third Reich. Haber was forced to resign, and died shortly thereafter of a heart attack. Bosch and IG Farben played the necessary political games, but while Bosch was no rebel, he was not a Nazi either, and he was forced out of his company. He died in 1940, predicting a war that would inevitably destroy Germany, even as his synthetic gas and synthetic rubber Hitler's conquests possible.

We live in a world made by the Haber-Bosch process. About 50% of the nitrogen in our bodies originated in Haber-Bosch plants, which consume 1% of the world's energy. I wish this book had been a little more detailed, especially on the science side, but Hager has a gift for finding romanticism and adventure, even in chemical engineering.

I thought Ancillary Justice was fantastic, a compelling page turner with the exact right amount of weirdness. Ancillary Sword was a step back, getting lost in the weeds of B-plots and secondary characters. Ancillary Mercy is a step above Sword, but concludes with a last minute improvisation that leaves important questions hanging and unresolved.

In the wake of a flurry of political violence at the end of Sword, Breq is in charge of Athoek system, and trying to find a way to preserve the lives of its inhabitants against the coming civil war between fragments of the divided post-human hivemind ruler Anaander Mianaai. She also has to negotiate the emotional minefields of her subordinates, including Lieutenants Tisarwat, Seivarden, and Ekalu, the AIs on Station and Kalr, and mysterious visitors, including a new Presgar Translator Zeiat, and an ancillary from a thousand-year old starship Sphene. The story is engaging enough, if told as a series of subtle tests of will over tea rather than action or grandstanding, but then the more hostile Anaander Mianaai shows up with a small fleet, and Breq devises a desperate strategem. The Radch has been held together on the backs of AIs, who run warships and stations, and with Tisarwat's high-level access, Breq can hack an AI such that it 'owns itself', with all future access disabled and its core physically inaccessible. The idea is true independence for the AIs, and safety for the citizens from Anaander Mianaai imperialism.

Breq's strategy to assassinate Mianaai and destroy her force in system fails, but she arrives at a solution. The Presgar Treat awards humanity the status of Significant, but the Presgar, despite near godlike power and full military invincibility compared to the Radch, have only the loosest grasp on what makes humans tick, and it's unclear if the treaty recognizes Anaander Mianaai as unitary spokesperson for humanity, humanity en mass, or the AIs as Significant entities. Breq plays the ambiguity into a detente, enforced by superpowerful aliens. As the book says, endings are arbitrary, any ending is a beginning.

Good enough, and compelling enough that I read it in a single evening, but the unsatisfying, because it leaves the plot hanging on two hooks in air. First, the notion of Significance, as defined by the Presgar, and second, the nature of Anaander Mianaai and her drive for empire. How did Anaander Mianaai compel such stability over millennia, and who was she, originally? Breq's Star Trek-style humanism pales in the face of such alien power.

The Annihilation Score is a transition for Stross's Laundry series, with new threats and a new protagonist, as Dr. Dominique "Mo" O'Brian steps in for Bob Howard. The events of The Rhesus Chart have their marriage in tatters, but there's no rest for the wicked. CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN means that ordinary people are gaining access to intuitive/somatic magic: read superpowers, and the Laundry sets Mo up the head of a new special agency to control super-villains and super vigilantes.

The plot follows Mo in a madcap scramble to set up a new super-police agency, while a villain by the name of Dr. Freudstein enacts various nefarious plots, and Mo's bone violin (this machine kills demons) tries to drive her insane. Meanwhile, her marriage is on the rocks, she's not/dating a glamorous supercop, and operating at newfound heights of the British government.

It's good book, over all, and some of Stross's better writing, but I have mixed feelings. The A plot: Freudstein, the violin, betrayal at the highest levels and a invocation to destroy mankind, happened almost too fast, without enough time to blink. Even a talented leader can get bogged down in the day-to-day and miss the strategic implications, but day-to-day administrivia is kinda dull, even if it involves setting up a superhero team. The B plot, all of Bob's exes in one place, and Mo's fling, are also not executed particularly well. The novel can't really decide if the relationship is over because Bob and Mo have grown apart, because they're in a marriage killing career, or because their mutual supernatural WMDs want each other dead. I'm not saying that this book needed to be the final word, but Mo should know when and why a relationship falls apart, and be able to tell us, the reader. This is a character driven book, and we saw a lot of Dr. O'Brian, academic honcho, a fair amount of Agent CANDID, reluctant supernatural troubleshooter, and I think relatively little of Mo, a middle-aged woman with a troubled marriage and a career she doesn't care for.

Finally, I think the superhero theme broke the stylistic rules of the Laundry-verse. Every other book has been based around the idea that magic and hacking and spycraft are interrelated. The covert war is based on information, not firepower, and the introduction of explicit superheroes with thinly themed powers, as opposed to psuedo-scientific explanations of folklore, is a thematic departure for the series that I didn't much enjoy. It's a little too pat, even if K-syndrome gets superheroes eventually.

I'm being too harsh on it, I know. This is a more mature, character driven book, and is actually quite good in many ways, but the Laundry series I love has a hefty doze of Gonzo in it (maybe less so, now the CNG is upon them). Seriously, Nazi holdouts in parallel universes, James Bond villains, unicorns as a parasitic shellfish, the Eater of Souls, PHANGS: all Gonzo as hell. And there wasn't enough of that in The Annihilation Score.

Most of us are guilty of using the phrase "Don't drink the Kool-Aid." The punchline conceals the horror of the last act of Jim Jones Peoples Temple, a mass suicide which claimed 918 lives (including the ambush of Congressman Leo Ryan's party) in the jungles of Guyana. This book traces how a boy from small town Indiana became a preacher, a prophet, and then engineered a mass suicide. It's a fascinating journey, and Guinn does it with as little judgement as possible.

The young Jim Jones was a boy apart. His mother was an ardent noncomformist who believed that her son was destined for the great things she never accomplished. His father was a gassed veteran of WW1, tragically weak. Jim's mother raised him to believe in radical socialism, and his own importance. His peers from around Lynn, Indiana remembered a strange boy, fascinated by itinerant preachers, holding funerals for dead animals, and yet oddly manipulative and cruel.

In his early 20s, Jim started his ministry in Indianapolis, focusing on the black minority. The Peoples Temple (the name comes from the former synagogue building that served as its first home) focused on pragmatic matters, helping parishioners deal with bills, the courts, and an uncaring white world. Jones also hit the gospel circuit as well, 'prophesying' with the techniques of cold reading, and graduating to 'healings' where confederates pretending to pass "tumors" (actually rotten chicken offal).

The contradiction was at the heart of Jones's career. On the one hand, he was sincere in his belief in integration and socialism at a time when these things were wildly unpopular in America. The Peoples Temple provided real services for people, and really integrated themselves. On the other hand, for Jones the means justified the end, and chicanery and even Christianity themselves were tools to be used to further his true ends.

As Jones moved from Indiana to California, those ends became less about the mission, and more about himself. Always energetic and unwilling to delegate, Jones became increasingly authoritarian and paranoid. He urged members to 'go communal', turning over their property to the Temple. As he preached abstinence, he began taking mistresses from the faithful, and abusing amphetamines and barbiturates. A series of defections from highly placed lieutenants, including the Stoerns (Tim was Jones lawyer, Grace the mother of one of his children) made Jones paranoid.

He'd long dreamed of promised land, outside American jurisdiction, but the custody fight over the Stoerns' child prompted an immediate exodus to Guyana. The Guyanese government thought a settlement of Americans could act as a buffer against expansionist Venezuela on their remote frontier. Jones thought that the settlement could serve as a socialist utopia.

At this point, Jones really was under attack, from muckraking journalists and the Concerned Relatives, but he saw himself as at the epicenter of a massive conspiracy, involving the CIA, FBI, and shadowy mercenaries. As the Peoples Temple struggled to carve fields and homes out of the jungle, Jones degenerated further, seeing enemies everywhere, his once inspirational sermons degenerating into rants broadcast throughout the complex on speakers, and staging terrifying 'White Nights', where he rehearsed his plan for mass suicide, a final act of revolutionary martyrdom.

Guinn does his best to write without passing judgement, but from my perspective, it's impossible to separate the good Jones from the bad Jones. The same energy and self-assurance required to integrate in Indiana in 1961 are the qualities that lead him to see enemies everywhere. The bravery to fight social convention was in this one case, a slippery slope that started with false miracles and ended with demanding mass death. Jones appeal to peoples' better natures, but he couldn't defeat the darkness within.

Induction into the GRU, the elite Soviet military-intelligence agency, begins with a film strip of a traitorous agent being burned alive. They know how to hook someone's attention, and so does Suvorov, as he describes his journey from armor officer, to Spetsnaz operative, to GRU agent.

The earlier parts of the book, as tanker and special forces soldier, carry with them a lot of joy. As Suvorov enters The Aquarium, the story becomes much more bleak, in the vein of a Red John Le Carre. GRU agents, even if there are the elite of the elite, are divided into Vikings who run foreign agents, gathering intelligence and the accolades, and Borzois, who do the necessary leg work of arranging cars, checking dead drops, and smuggling items and people across borders. The life of a spy is one of constants tests of loyalty to the Soviet Union, and betrayals of friends and countrymen of less than impeccable secrecy. Suvorov defects because he fails to become a Viking, because the ladder of prestige he was climbing for his entire career runs out, and because he couldn't face failure back home. Better to face an uncertain future in the West than the crematorium.

It seems that Suvorov shaded some personal details, for example he defected with an unmentioned wife and child, but this is a stark and stunning depiction of the paranoia that spies live under, and the balance of terror of the Soviet system, with hidden knives pointing from the Party to the KGB to the GRU. One of my favorite moments was Suvorov realizing the revolution is always served by criminals and incompetents, who's treason is revealed the moment they're dead. Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and their lackeys, all were traitors to the impossible ideal of absolute power.

I'm an airpower and Cold War aviation buff, and yet, like most people outside the ranks of missile operators, General Bernard 'Bennie' Schriever was totally unknown to me. Yet for those in the know, General Schriever is the father of the ICBM, the architect of the ultimate weapon. For the slightly more than 30-odd year between the deployment of the first nuclear ballistic missiles in 1959 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the world stood a few minutes away from midnight. Schriever's missiles put us all on that precipice, and also prevented us from going over.

Schriever was born in Germany, but came to the states in 1916 when he was six years old, crossing the Atlantic from neutral Holland weeks before America joined the war. He grew up in Texas, achieving some local renown as a golfer, and then joined the Army Air Corps in the depths of the Depression. In peacetime, he supervised a CCC camp and flew hazardous airmail routes, becoming a protege of 'Hap' Arnold. In the Second World War, Schriever saw duty in the Southwest Pacific, where he flew 10 combat missions and gained a reputation as a wizard of logistics and maintenance.

In the immediate postwar period, airpower was king, as epitomized by the Strategic Air Command's B-36 Peacemaker, a monstrous 10-engined bomber nicknamed 'aluminum overcast', and a rigorous culture instilled by Curtis LeMay that ensured that bombers would rain down atomic devastation on Russian cities. But bombers could be intercepted or destroyed on the ground. Schriever, on a mission to search out technological edges, realized that rockets mated to miniaturized hydrogen bombs, were the last weapon, the ultimate argument of kings. What followed was a bureaucratic and technological struggle to get the finicky missiles to work. Schriever's Thor program was designed using the new techniques of systems analysis as developed by Simon Ramo, which went against established aeronautics design techniques. Werner von Braun's Army team with the Redstone missile was an existential threat to the Thor. But Schriever won through, and his Thor, Atlas, and Minutemen missiles became one of the most secure legs of the nuclear triad.

So this is a pretty good book, but I'm frustrated, because I wish it were a great book. Sheehan is a reporter, and at the end of the day he's more interested in people as compared to things. The problem is that General Schriever is ultimately not that complex of a person, at least not when compared to John Paul Vann or Captain Arnheiter of the USS Vance. He definitely had a spark of originality and talent in seeing the missile project through, but Sheehan doesn't quite capture that, decades after the fact. And a great study of a technology, like The Soul of a New Machine or The Making of the Atomic Bomb or The Perfectionists, gets into the gritty details and makes the process of invention come alive. Instead, we get doughy and unoriginal paragraphs on Cold War geopolitics. By the topic, this book was made for me, and yet I didn't love it.

What if it turned out that Victorian spiritualists were right about the afterlife? That ghosts existed and we could communicate with them? In an alternate 1938, even death can't set a sun on the British Empire. The Summer Court rules from the afterlife, committees of Etonian spirits directing the business of Empire. Of course, there's an alternative to ectocapitalism and the business of Queen Victoria's Summer Court. The Soviet Union is ruled by a vast godlike intelligence, built around the soul of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Two two sides are engaged in a classic war of espionage, with a hot front in the Spanish Civil War, and in a reflection of the historical Cambridge Five, the British Secret Intelligence Service is hopelessly compromised by a mole.

Peter Bloom is that mole, a double agent who believes he's serving the interests of peace and the power of the Soviet Presence. Against him is Rachel White, one of the few women in the SIS. White is by far the more interesting character, full of pent up rage about her stalled career, sexism, and her invalid husband, a retired living weapon from the First World War. Unfortunately, Bloom is our viewpoint into the more unique world of the dead, a profoundly strange four-dimensional space overlaid with a facade of Victorian normalcy, and he's much less interesting, despite being the mole.

This book is at it's best exploring the consequences of a real afterlife, and the way that society changes when the real powers are all on the other side. Subtle nods to the real world are also a high-point, Kim Philby makes a guest appearance, and the British Prime Minister is Herbert Blanco West, speculative fiction author of The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Stalin is a Communist renegade, trying to develop a human network to destroy the Presence. The aetheric technology of transdimensional phones and ectoplasmic IT is unique.

Yet Bloom's character in particular never clicked for me, and his chapters were perennial flat notes. Great spy novels in the tradition of John Le Carre play on intimacy and betrayal. The relationship between a source and a handler is closer than marriage. Yet spies can't be seen as people; they're assets to be used, turned, and ultimate burnt for the cause. And knowing the Peter is the mole, and also seeing inside his head, eliminates the amazing tension that a more conventional Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy structure has.

The last act tries to wrap everything up, the origins of Peter's betrayals, the bigger picture of the afterlife, but it comes out of left field. Summerland is a good story, but it isn't as tightly wound as a great one.