Bridge of Spies is a thrilling true story of espionage and super-power diplomacy at one of the tensest moments of the Cold War, centered around a prisoner exchange in Berlin in 1962.

Willie Fisher, alias Rudolf Abel, was a Soviet spy in the finest traditions of the Bolshevik 'illegals' (named in comparison to legals, who had diplomatic cover as 'cultural attaches' or similar). His mission was to rebuild a spy ring to match the immense A-bomb theft of Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs. Fisher was undercover for years, but it unclear what, if anything he managed to uncover, before a drunken and incompetent subordinate defected to the West rather than face recall to Moscow. Undone by the weakest link in a human chain, Fisher was sentenced to decades in prison.

Meanwhile, America was pursuing its own patented brand of espionage. The U-2 flew at an altitude of 70,000 feet, above the range of anti-aircraft guns and interceptors. Aerial photos provided detailed evidence of the weapons backing Khrushchev's bellicose 'we will bury you' rhetoric, or rather, a detailed absence of evidence. In the late 1950s, everything pointed to an immense American advantage in bombers, bombs, and even rockets, with the Russian ICBM program a handful of balky liquid fueled rockets. The overflights enraged Khrushchev, but the CIA's voracious appetite for intelligence lead them to schedule one last overflight on May 1, 1960. This flight put Gary Powers in range of an S-75 Dvina SAM, and the shootdown killed hopes for disarmament and detente.

The two spies were sentenced to years in prison. Mostly through the entrepreneurial efforts of Power's father, and Fisher's defense lawyer Donovan, were the two sides able to broker a swap, throwing in a US PhD student who's thesis on East German economic was also declared to be espionage.

Giles keeps it fast, interesting, and manages to capture the spirit of the era.

The beginning of Monster was so confusing that I had to go back and reread Traitor (which was perfect). Having gotten re-familiarized with the setting and characters, it was back to the matter at hand. Monster is a flawed book, a fine fantasy adventure that lacks the ticking clockwork heart of Traitor.

Baru is now the The Agonist, one of the handful of Cryptarchs who secretly rule the Falcrest Empire, a conspiracy bound together by mutual crimes. Baru's goal is to destroy the Empire from within and liberate her home, and to do that she's lead a province into rebellion, betrayed the rebellion, and ordered the execution of the woman she loved. Tain Hu was supposed to be a lever to use on Baru, but she cut that lever off to give herself greater freedom of action. Baru's planned ascension is interrupted by orders from Cryptarchs with greater power, a quest to find the hidden enemy power of the Cancrioth, and by some blowback. A Falcresti admiral who Baru used in her plot wants revenge for the dead sailors, and Tain Shir, Hu's cousin and a failed student of Baru's mentor Farrier, wants to teach Baru a lesson about spending other people's lives like coins.

So it's off chasing the Cancrioth, the conspiracy behind the Mbo federation, while being chased by a mad admiral, on a ship populated with other secret rulers, including a Mbo Prince, the head of Falcresti intelligence, and two frenemy Cryptarchs. Baru spends the journey mostly drunk and moping, with occasional flashes of brilliance. But tension is introduced by artificially keeping characters from meeting and confronting each other honestly.

What I loved most about the first book was the terrifying iron discipline of Falcrest, the deliberate application of violence, training, finance, and sin to remake the world in their image of utopia. Monster goes broader, showing a deep split between those who believe heredity is destiny, and those who believe training is destiny. And the blowback is in some sense welcome. Baru has to face the shattering consequences of her action. The Mbo offer a whole different perspective, a world where human connections form a kind of magic that link everyone together. And behind it all is the Cancrioth, potential immortality through blasphemous altered biology.

This is really a 3.5 star book, but I'm rounding up because I like the series, and sentence to sentence Dickinson is still fantastic. Second books are hard, and I'm hopeful that he brings it back in the home stretch.

Well, that was certainly a book.

Dune: Chapterhouse is mostly empty sand, with a few bits of melange in original thoughts about tradition, power, and survival. The main character is Odrade, Bene Gesserit Mother Superior, who faces the destruction of her order at the hands of the rampaging Honored Matres. Only secrecy, and a Reverend Mother's willingness to die before betraying the order, can buy Odrade precious time to figure out a strategy for survival, a multipronged plan involving a ghola of the Bashar Miles Teg, renegade Honored Matre Murbella, and the ecological transformation of the planet Chapterhouse into another Dune via sandworm.

But here's the thing, a protagonist requires a character arc; a heroic protagonist requires a flaw (at least in the classical sense), and the Bene Gesserit in this book provide neither. The are history embodied, through the thousand of other memories that live in the Reverend Mothers. the Honored Matre are a kind of twisted mirror of the Bene Gesserit, all of their vaunted control and power with none of the tempering of wisdom. But what faces Odrade is not barbarians, but what Iain M Banks deemed an 'Outside Context Problem'. What has returned from the vast Scattering of human space and evolution, and how is it beyond the memories of the Bene Gesserit. However, the Bene Gesserit are too unruffled, to serene even in the face of extinction. They're a far cry from the subtle shapers of people and events of Dune, and strangely unaffected by the failure of their 10,000 year program to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, which lead to Muad'Dib and the Tyrant Leto II.

Dune was at its best when it balanced the grand forces beyond human control, the Fremen Jihad, prescient powers, Bene Gesserit plots, etc, with the fact that it mattered that it was these humans, in this time and place, Paul and Jessica and Chani and Stilgar, on Dune, when the power of the Atreides has been broken.

Herbert died before the true conclusion of the series. Duncan foresees an enemy that the Honored Matres are fleeing from, which in perhaps the ultimate example of anti-climaticism, are Face Dancers named Marty and Daniel who have absorbed so many identities they have become super-human.

If Heretics were fragments of a better book, Chapterhouse is those fragments ground to dust.

Smokejumper is a compelling memoir by one of America's firefighting elite. Smokejumpers have one of the most insane jobs in the world, parachuting near (definitely not in) wildfires in inaccessible terrain to cut lines and put out blazes before they grow into firestorms. Ramos discusses his career as a smokejumper in the context of the history of wildland firefighting, with a focus on those rare tragedies where firefighters die in the context of their duties.

The trivia is fascinating. The smokejumpers originated in the 1930s, and as America's first parachute deployed force, served as a model for the famous Airborne units of the Second World War. Every smokejumper is an expert tailor, since they have to custom-make their jumpsuits and packs, working with gnarly fabrics like kevlar and nomex. Fire is deadly and unpredictable. Flamefronts can melt cars to puddles of slag, and leave water containers a few dozen feet away unscathed. Working uphill of a fire is inadvisable, since fire moves up hills, but working downhill means risking flaming boulders and other projectiles coming down the mountain.

Ramos has a few hobbyhorses that he is a little obsessive about. He thinks smokejumpers are consistently underused by incident managers who consider them primadonna mavericks. I can't speak to the jurisdictional concerns, and while smokejumpers have a definite macho attitude, it's a matter of degree rather than kind compared to their peers on hotshot teams and helitack crews, who do much of the same things by truck and helicopter. He has a real bug about equipment, and particularly inadequate fire shelters, though given that's its his life on the line, he's right to care. But overall Ramos is a charismatic and charming writer, and an excellent ambassador for his profession.

Every time I think I've reached the end of the fractal of fuckedupedness that is the Vietnam War, I find something new. The Ravens is an oral history of the Steve Canyon program, a secret program of Forward Air Controllers that flew missions in Laos in support of the CIA backed Hmong Army of General Vang Pao.

What comes through first and foremost is the immense courage of The Ravens. These men flew Cessnas (literally, the Cessna O-1 Bird Dog) against a sophisticated air defense network of 14.5mm machine guns and 23mm cannons. In a 6 month tour, 90% of Ravens would be hit by ground fire, 60% forced to crash land, and 30% would be killed in action. Flying long hours under intense pressure, the Ravens went a little bit crazy, and Robbins does an wonderful job describing the hectic ground life at the secret airbase of Long Tieng, with drinking parties, Madame Lulu's brothel, and pet bears. Though the work was dangerous and exhausting, Ravens universally loved the ability to fight as hard as they could, without the burden of REMF oversight.

The on-the-ground story is put in a broader context, with overviews of Neutralist agreements in Laos, and high-level diplomacy with Kissinger and B-52 strikes. A great book on a lesser known aspect of the war.

The New Economics is a series of flashcards, carrying telegraphic versions of Deming's Big Ideas. Deming, of course, was an American economist who helped trained the Japanese in a new style of quality management that arguably lead to decades of Japanese dominance in high technology. His ideas lay behind the Toyota Production System, and the maligned TPS reports of Office Space. He also passed away in 1993, just as Japan entered its lost decade. The New Economics was his last book.

The center of his ideas holds up. Think of a company as a system, with management's role being to organize the system for quality. Understanding that there is natural variation in a system, and don't go chasing randomness. Treat workers as humans beings and approach their psychology as high-morale team members, rather than creating self-defeating 'meritocratic' ranking systems.

But this book is scattered, organized anecdotally rather than thematically. It's one thing to proclaim that 'the firm is a system', but Deming lacks the theoretical tools to describe how systems self-organize and can be governed. It's a little unfair to argue that a dead man should be current with the latest research, but this book would be so much better in conversation with the Sante Fe Institute (see Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour, John Boyd's OODA loop (Richard's Certain to Win, or even the intersection of epistemology and ecology (Miller et al. 2006. Epistemological Pluralism: Reorganizing Interdisciplinary Research, particularly the figure on the adaptive cycle from Reorganization, Growth, Conservation, and Release).

Deming is still a name to conjure with, but there are likely better books on the area.

The Hold Life Has is an absolute classic of ethnography. Allen traveled to the remote Andean village of Sonqo (possibly now rendered as Soncco), north east of Cuzco, and lived there for quite a while in 1975. The updated Second Edition describes changes that Allen observed returning in the 1990s and 2000s.

The altiplano around Sonqo is a harsh environment, and Allen works through the cosmology and rituals that sustain life in this place. There is a hierarchy of spirits, embodied by features on the landscape from great peaks to local hills and gullies, and the spirits must be appeased with offerings of coca. Life is based on reciprocity, flows of energy, and interdependent binaries. There are great stories here, about ritual, conflict, and the importance of the living ayullu community.

And there's also tragedy in the poverty and the suffering. About the only thing that grows well on the altiplano are potatoes, and potato farming and herding doesn't bring in much cash. The people of Sonqo survived the conquest of the Inca, centuries of colonial domination by haciendas, and various land reform policies, but they couldn't maintain their way of life in the face of consumer goods and development aid. Fertilizer and homes more lavish than one room huts destroyed the traditional farming practices of the people. Children fled to bigger cities, to live as misti (mestizos) rather than runa (Indians). The war on drugs made coca leaves scarce, and the social forms of chewing the ritual offerings of k'intu hard to maintain.

I've spent some time in Peru, most of it on the tourist trails and in a small city in the south. The Peru I know is a lot like anywhere else, with the most notable difference being that the plumbing isn't up to first world standards. But there's this vision that one day, the Inca will return, and those who they recognize as living like they did will be saved, and the rest of the mistis destroyed. I think few Peruvians would survive this apocalypse. But the word 'Sonqo' translates as heart, and the altiplano will always be the heart of Peru. This classic ethnography is a great glimpse of that heart.

Growing up in Los Angeles and skiing in Mammoth, I knew Mulholland as the name of a road, and the Owens Valley as desolate stretch of wilderness along the 395. But that's at the remove of 80 years. Mulholland was once a power, the unquestioned king of water in Los Angeles, and the Ownes Valley home to hardscrabble but successful ranchers and farmers.

To grow, Los Angeles needed water. Mulholland and former Los Angeles major Fred Eaton hatched a plan to buy up water rights in the Owen's Valley, and transport water to Los Angeles with an ambitious 235 mile gravity fed aqueduct. Mulholland was the chief engineer, Eaton the financier, but the partnership broke down as Eaton demanded an extortionate $1 million for a valley well-suited to be a reservoir. Mulholland's crew braved desert temperature extremes, cave-ins, and guerrilla war from the locals to build and maintain the aqueduct. Meanwhile, a cabal of Los Angeles based speculators used their insider knowledge to profit immensely from new development in the San Fernando valley. Mulholland himself didn't profit from speculation, but those around him did.

Mulholland's reputation was destroyed by the 1928 failure of the Saint Francis dam. The reservoir broke suddenly in the middle of the night, killing hundreds, an the ambitious prosecutor Asa Keyes aimed to show that Mulholland's incompetence was the root fault. And certainly, as chief engineer, he bore ultimate responsibility, but Davis argues the dam collapse was due to an ancient landslide unexplained by contemporary geological theories. Mulholland would have need to be prescient, more than prudent, to prevent the collapse.

Rivers in the Desert is a fast moving history, and illuminates some of the character of the age. But I'm a fan of engineering biographies, and this book falls short of the sublime of McCullough's The Path Between the Seas, and is oddly silent on the California Water Wars. I'd probably read Cadillac Desert on that subject. But within these limits, Davis does a great job.

A battlefield hospital is like the sucking drain of a war. Sooner or later, everything come through there. Glasser was a doctor at Zama, a hospital in Japan that treated those injured in Vietnam too badly to be patched up in country, and not injured enough to die. The hospitals saw something like 8000 patients a month, closer to 11000 during the Tet Offensive.

But this isn't really Glasser's story, it's the stories of the men he treated, and how they wound up in his hospital. The overall feel is a lot like Michael Herr's Dispatches, though this book came out sooner, in 1971 while the war was still a going concern. Glasser has a fair amount of literary talent, but part of me wishes this had been more focused on his own world of the wards. Perhaps the second greatest illusion of war (after the idea that they can be really be won), is that death, if it comes, and it's not coming for you, is going to be clean, honorable, even cool. Except that by the odds, you're more likely to be shattered, blasted, burned, to suffer in agony for hours or days or years, before wounds finally do you in. The book only reaches that authenticity in the last story, about a severely burned soldier and the doctor who cares for him.

The Mirage Factory is a history of the birth of Los Angeles, from roughly 1900 to 1930, as seen through the biographies of three key people, each of whom built great things only to end in disgrace. William Mulholland brought water to the city, to the eternal damnation of the Owen's Valley. D.W. Griffith invented the grammar of the motion picture, and then failed to follow the industry he pioneered. Aimee Semple McPherson combined Pentecostal preaching with the new technology of radio to create a new kind of broadcast, but her later life was embroiled in scandal.

Krist knows how to keep the story moving (this is the third of his urban histories), and if he skews more towards the salacious, there's plenty of quality gossip in early Hollywood. This is the third book I've read in a month with William Mulholland as a major character, and Krist breaks little new ground, hewing close to conventional accounts of the Owen's Valley water wars and the San Franciquito dam collapse. He has a genuine love of early cinema, and the chapters of D.W. Griffith are much better done.

Early cinema was scandalous, a D-rated non-art. Griffith figured out how to make the camera his own, which as an avowed Southerner and son of a Confederate colonel, he used his skills to make The Birth of a Nation. This was a high-water mark. Griffith's epic film style blew out budgets and produced a turgid epic about the evil of violence just as American entered the first World War. His fussy Victorian sentimentality didn't match the emerging tastes of Jazz Age audiences, and after successive failures as an independent director, he crawled into a bottle and drank himself to death over decades, making his last film in 1931.

Sister Aimee Semple McPherson is by far the most complex character. A devout pentecostal preacher, she damped down the hellfire and brimstone and took to the airwaves, broadcasting to an audience of thousands from her Angelus Temple. But her personal life was increasingly chaotic, as she's rumored to have carried on an affair with her chief radio engineer, and otherwise act in an ungodly manner. In 1926, she disappeared for six weeks while visiting the beach. She reappeared, claiming to have been kidnapped to Mexico and held prisoner. Investigations were inconclusive, unable to either find kidnappers or prove that McPherson carried out the hoax. Her ministry continued, though not at it's previous level, until her death in 1944 of a Seconal overdose. Her Foursquare church still exists, with millions of members and 50,000 congregations worldwide. Though perusing her Wikipedia page, I see there are internal church controversies not mentioned.

This is a popular history, and though strongly sourced, it has the feel of gossip pressed until authoritative, rather than original history. From what else I know of Mulholland, the stories here are sensational and on the shallow side, rather than getting at deep issues. But that's LA, a city who's best monument is a sign for a real estate development left up.