Dinosaurs Rediscovered is a fascinating look at how paleontology has become more scientific over the past forty years, along with a review of the most recent understanding of dinosaurs. Ernest Rutherford is quoted as saying that "Science is either physics or stamp collecting", and paleontology does more stamp collecting than most fields. But systematization over Benton's career has reversed that trend.

Some of the extensions are rather natural. Finite element analysis, a standard computer modelling technique in engineering, can be applied to dinosaur skulls to estimate the bite strength of a Tyrannosaurus rex and the locomotion of a Brontosaurus. Studies of stride length and biomechanics can give numbers for how fast dinosaurs moved, and lead towards their metabolism. We now know that dinosaurs are feathered, and we even know what color some of those feathers were. My favorite factoid was that we know that the Chicxulub impact happened in the month of June, because fossilized ponds show lilies in as they would be blooming in June, followed by a layer of iridium rich dust, followed by a 1000 years of ash. Pretty cool! Benton doesn't quite manage to explain the cladistics revolution, despite being deeply involved in it, though a data and algorithm driven approach to deriving past patterns of evolution is perhaps a little abstruse for a popular science book.

Benton's love of the field and appreciate for his fellow paleontologists shines through. This book pulls back the curtain, and is an interesting read.

Manliness and Civilization is a classic Foucauldian study of the Discourse (capital D intended) around gender and race in the Progressive period. Bederman tracks a shift from a Victorian conception of manliness as based around self-restraint of urges to a more modern one of active and powerful sexuality, using case studies of anti-lynching activist Ida Wells, psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall, feminist author and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and president Theodore Roosevelt, rounding out the detailed case studies with Black boxer Jack Johnson and the fictional character Tarzan.

Bederman's analysis shows that these three major themes of civilization, race, and masculinity, are impossible to separate. Civilization, the way not just in which we live now, but the better ways in which we intend to live tomorrow, as exemplified by the Chicago World's Fair, was tied up with the idea the civilization is a product of a biologically distinct racial universe. In the thinking of the times, Americans are the preeminent White Race, at the head of humanity as a whole, with a mission to civilize and lead the lesser races of the world. Civilization is a product of men primarily.

This book is at its best when it digs at the contradictions of the era's idea of civilization. The digressions on the deprecated mental illness neurasthenia, and how both Hall and Gilman struggled with it as individuals are fascinating stuff (though to be fair, also closest to my own scholarly interests). Wells, using the discourse of civilization to shame Americans about lynchings via the British press, is a fascinating ploy.

Unfortunately, the core case studies of the book don't quite connect, or at least don't make it beyond the first level. Once you accept that both Roosevelt and Gilman saw their political reforms in thoroughly racist frames, the racism is unsurprising. Whiteness is hoary nonsense, but extremely powerful hoary nonsense, and Bederman isn't critical enough.

The Broken Sword is Viking infused epic fantasy, with a war between elves and trolls centered on two uncanny brother. Scafloc was kidnapped from his human parents and raised as a prince of the elves. Valgard is the fae changeling left in his place. When a evil witch reveals Valgard's true heritage, he embarks on a campaign of violence that slays his false human family and kicks off a brutal war. Scafloc survives the first assault, develops a relationship with his/Valgard's sister Freda, and reforges an acient sword of terrible evil power.

There's sagas, swordplays, sisters (ew), and the dark winds of Ragnarok in the background. What's not to like? And compared to modern fantasy, the story moves swiftly from peak to peak.

In the 1970s, James Tiptree Jr stunned the world of science fiction with a series of dazzlingly provocative short stories, tying up sex and death and xenophilia. Tiptree carried on a deep correspondence with major figures in the field-Philip K Dick, Ursula K LeGuin, and Joanna Russ. Tiptree was an urbane older gentleman who cultivate an air of mystery as an international traveler who worked for an intelligence agency based in McLean, Virginia and loved guns and fishing. Tiptree was described as ineluctably masculine in anthology introductions, scifi's own Hemingway.

Of course, Tiptree didn't exist. He was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, a 60 year old woman and fascinating character in her own right. Phillips traces Sheldon's life-story and literary career, trying to draw out the distress at the heart of her soul.

Alli (her preferred nickname) grew up as a child of privilege in the 1920s. Her mother, Mary Bradley, was a socialite, author, and explorer. At 6 years old, Alli accompanied her parents on a 1400 mile trek across Africa to investigate the Mountain Gorilla, a fantastic journey made possible by hundreds of African porters. Long treks in colonial Africa and Asia were interspersed with a smotheringly protective childhood in Chicago and Wisconsin. Alli was a precocious youth, but her mother was a commanding if distant presence, and Alli never really fit in at a succession of expensive finishing schools. She read Astounding Stories and dream of traveling to Sirius, while struggling with anger, depression, and sexual urges the straight-laced morality of her upbringing left her unable to comprehend. As Philips puts it, Alli was faced with a double-edged sword. She could not do anything worthwhile and become a failure, or she could surpass her mother and become a traitor.

Alli chose a form of rebellion available to rich and pretty debutants, a quick marriage at 19 to William Davey, a Princeton student with poetic aspirations and a drinking problem. The two of them moved to California to continue their studies, and their lives spiraled into chaos. They drank, used drugs, had affairs, abused each other. Alli got pregnant and had an abortion. Their artistic skills didn't match their ambitions, as Davey's long autobiographical novel wandered, and Alli failed to find her voice as a painter in her psychological turmoil. The couple separated in 1937, and were divorced by 1940.

The Second World War offered a chance to serve, and Alli enlisted in the WAAC, where she eventually became a photo-intelligence analyst. 1945 saw her posted to Europe, part of a project to exploit captured Nazi images, where she wound up marrying her commanding officer, Col. Huntington Sheldon. Ting was a stable older man, a former bank who's solid façade concealed a lively inner life and tragic past (a prior wife had gone insane, and he'd essentially abandoned her and their three kids). Alli and Ting tried to run a chicken hatchery, then sold it and wound up back in intelligence at the CIA, where Ting was fairly senior on the analytics side for 17 years, and Alli worked for 4 before quitting. She went back to school, finishing her undergrad and a PhD in psychology, but at the end she was too odd, too old, and too female to make it as an academic in 1967. But she'd written some science fiction stories in the throes of finishing her dissertation, and as Tiptree, she sold. The stories were good!

And what followed was a decade of astounding productivity and deep relationships forged through letters to other authors. Tiptree cultivated a mystique, with Allie and Ting's fishing trips to Canada and Mexico transformed into secret missions to unknown destinations on CIA orders. In the 1970s, science fiction was struggling with feminism, and Tiptree served as an example of a man who got it, who could write women despite unimpeachable manly credentials. But when Tiptree mentioned that his mother, an African explorer, passed away in Chicago, some of his correspondents got newspapers and connected it to the obituary of Mary Bradley, survived by her daughter Alice Sheldon. The gig was up, and while the scifi community forgave the deception, but without the mask Sheldon had trouble finding her voice again.

A major theme of the book is that being Alli was exhausting and frustrating. Alli was too smart and too opinionated to sit back and be a good wife as society demanded. Her lifelong struggles with depression made it hard to maintain friendships. Sex and gender is at the heart of this book, and Phillips is clear that Alli was always more attracted to women than men, but that this attraction was something she never really acted on. Terrified of death and aging, she resolved to make herself sexless for most of her marriage to Ting, and apparently succeeded. I think "lesbian" is a fair descriptor of Sheldon, but a deeper read on gender is trickier. Tiptree was accepted as one of the guys, where Alice would have always had 'woman' prefixed to 'author'. Being someone else let Alice be confident and flirtatious in a way that was hard under her own name. She seemed to have such a commitment to absolute Truth that being able to take a step away and say "well, it's not the truth, but it's Tiptree's version of the truth" was a game that made writing and friendship possible. While Sheldon had a deeply negative to ambivalent relationship with her own femininity, it's hard to separate being a woman from being a woman in 1930s America, which was objectively pretty awful.

And its hard to separate Alli's pained identity from her own struggles with depression and drug addiction (Dexedrine as an anti-depressant, valium to take the edge off the dex, and morphine for arthritis. They just pumped housewives full of drugs). As Alli and Ting aged, she began to get more obsessed with death and with avoiding the slow decline that had claimed her mother. Ting, a decade older, declined first, becoming nearly completely blind. And in May 1987, she killed him and then herself, leaving a suicide note dated 1979. A dramatic end for a dramatic life.

There are flaws in this biography. Phillips takes an uncritical look at Sheldon's wild youth, leaving open key questions like whether Sheldon ever had a successful same-sex relationship against allegations that her first husband caught her going down on another woman at a party and threw her through a window, putting her in the hospital. A possible incestuous encounter with her own mother is similarly impossible to verify, though a similar plot point in the novella A Momentary Taste of Being is evidence in favor, given how much of Tiptree was drawn from life. And despite the ample letters, an adequate summary of Tiptree's role in the 1970s science-fiction community doesn't quite emerge. It's good, but not perfect.

Still, Alli is a fascinating character, and while I'm sympathetic for her pain and wish it were lessened, at least we got some first rate stories out of it.

Dreamland is a true capitalist success story. In The Wire, Stringer Bell's animating force is a drug trade of pure economics; heroin to cash via the arms of addicts (and please ignore the human wreckage). No corners, no soldiers, no gangster bullshit, just money. Stringer Bell died a failure, shot down by players he tried to play, but in the real world, two very different groups succeeded at this dream, with horrible costs for the rest of us.

The first was the sales team at Perdue Pharmaceutical. Perdue manipulated standards of care and safety evidence through the 80s and 90s to push two points. First, pain was the fifth vital sign and patients have the right to be free of pain. And second, Perdue's new drug OxyContin was non-addictive and perfectly safe even in high doses. In towns across America, but especially prominent in the Appalachian Rust Belt, pill mills sprang up, staffed by unscrupulous doctors who prescribed ever higher doses to their patients.

Small-town Oxy addicts were the perfect target markets for the Xalisco Boys, a franchise operation of Mexican heroin dealers. Traditionally, heroin has been defined by long international chains where everybody steps on the product. These complex hierarchical structures are worthy targets for major busts by law enforcement. The Xalisco Boys played by different rules. Addicts would call a cell phone number, and within a few minutes a driver would be on the way, pre-measured balloons of heroin in his mouth. Xalisco Boys avoided confrontation, and since they carried only a few grams of drugs, they'd be deported rather than charged. They worked on salary, their shit was pure, and in the unstable world of junkies, they were reliable. They were basically like any other Mexican immigrant working in agriculture or construction or food, reliably doing a job White Americans won't, except that the product was drugs.

Two different business models for "clean" dope; doctors and easy prescriptions orchestrated by pharmaceutical marketers, and an "internet of drugs" run by Mexican gangsters. Together, it meant that by 2008 drug overdoses were exceeding automobile accidents as a cause of death.

Quinones has a real fondness for ranchero culture and the world of the Xalisco Boys, as exhibited by a couple of prior books on the subject of rural Mexico, so those parts are incredibly well done. By comparison, the story of the white coat epidemic feels pro-forma, without much venom for the people who twisted the medical system to their ends, or much detail on how an epidemic of pain mismanagement was created. The third part, the sociology of addiction, again falls into hoary generalities. Unlike prior heroin epidemics or the ongoing War on Drugs, this wave hit middle class white kids hardest, the valedictorian-star athlete-cheerleader child of professionals and civic pillars. It's easy to castigate other heroin users as avante garde degenerates or the products of failing families, but this time around it was people just like us. Quinones has some phrases about a wall of respectable silence that kept people from acknowledging the epidemic until it was far too late, and about the loss of community in places like Portsmouth, Ohio.

But I keep thinking about the thick description of The Corner, and about how Burns and Simon let junkies and junk speak for themselves. And while Quinones has plenty from dealers, cops, public health officials, and grieving parents, he shies away from the addicts and the drugs, from what it's really like at the center of epidemic. And this flinch weakens the book.

Addicts are people just like us. But they're not us.

We're better.

So far.

The Inheritance of Rome is one of those magisterial books that I almost regret reading. Wickham is a senior historian, and he covers 600 years across Europe and the Near East with deliberative detail. His goal is to cast aside the standard view of the period, that they were a Dark Ages where hairy barbarians destroyed the great culture of Rome, and a combination of brutish strongmen and close-minded priests ruled over impoverished dirt farmers for millenia. Contrary to all that, there was a lot going on in this period. The Eastern Roman Empire out of Constantinople survived for centuries. The Umayyad Caliphate maintained a military aristocracy on top of a complex multi-faith society across North Africa and the Near East. The Carolingians embarked on a massive moral-political reform that set the pattern for future developments in Europe.

Yet, there are the ugly facts of the period. The population of major cities declined drastically, especially Rome and Constantinople, which as ex-imperial capitals lost their public grain subsidies from agricultural provinces. Other cities suffered similar declines in population. And it's not like the countryside was doing better, as land fell out of cultivation. Material culture fell back almost everywhere to relatively crude local production, with the fine craft centuries of antiquity forgotten. 476 and the replacement of the last Western Roman Emperor with an Ostrogothic rex Odoacer is as a good as date as any for the end, but the classically educated civilian elite of the Roman Empire continued to write to each other in sophisticated Latin for decades. But by 600 or so, this was all gone in the West, as economies devolved into little regional self-sufficiencies.

Wickham's thesis about the inheritance of Rome is one of the public square, a line from the processions and games at Imperial height, the continuation of these traditions in the East, the Islamic public gathering of faith, and the Western idea of the juridical assembly, but it strikes me that these connections are somewhat ad hoc, aside from the idea that a public space exists. Rather, a better measure that Wickham uses is one of political protagonism. A few exceptional states and individuals had the ability to make sweeping conquests and reforms. But mostly, it seems like struggles became ever smaller, over specific locals, the loyalties of a few hundred warriors, wooden huts rather than marble cities.

Grant is an absolute doorstopped of a book that presents an interesting picture of great American, but one which makes the fatal flaw of falling in love with its subject. Grant's life and legacy are a complex subject, and while Chernow is at the foremost ranks of popular historians, and provides a much needed corrective to the conventional wisdom of Grant as drunk, corrupt, and ineffective, his lack of objectivity hinders this book.

Grant was born to middle class parents in Ohio, his father Jesse was a tanner and merchant. He graduate West Point, where he was a average student and notable horseman. He graduate in 1843 and saw action in the Mexican-American war, where he served with distinction as a quartermaster, though he did not have the kind of combat command that would lead to promotion. He also married Julia Dent, the daughter of a prosperous Missouri planter and slaveowner. The 1840s and 50s were a time of darkness and drifting for Grant. He was posted to the Pacific coast, drummed out of the Army for his drinking problem, and failed repeatedly as a farmer and businessman.

Grant's relationship with alcoholism is one of the main themes of the book. It's hard to exaggerate just how sodden American culture was in the mid 19th century. When being able to hold your liquor was one of the marks of a man, Grant was resolutely unable to hold his. It seems small amounts of booze rendered him a slurring, stumbling object of mockery, and lead to multiday benders. While accusations of drinking dogged his public career, Chernow finds that in action Grant was always sober. It was when away from his family and inner circle with time to kill, that Grant lost himself in the bottle.

In 1860, no one would have pegged the shabby and broke Grant as anyone of importance. But as the Confederacy seceded and Lincoln called for volunteers, Grant found his place as an officer and general. In the opening stages of a war fought mostly by amateurs, Grant was both a professional and a visionary, with a keen awareness of his own forces as well as an intuitive ability to understand his enemy's limits. In a series of brilliant campaigns in the west, Grant secured the border states, captured critical Confederate forts, and defeated the armies sent against him.

In 1864, Grant was made supreme commander and also took command of the Army of the Potomac. The Army of the Potomac had been repeatedly defeated by the Army of Northern Virginia, with General Lee assuming a supernatural ability in the minds of soldiers. Grant had fought alongside Lee in Mexico, and knew he was just a man. Grant's strategy was simple in conception. The Union could replace losses, while the Confederacy could not. He would engage Lee until one of their armies was destroyed as a military force. Meanwhile, Sherman and Sheridan would prevent other Confederate armies from coming to Lee's aid, as well as conducting a scorched earth campaign against regions where the Confederacy drew its logistical strength. This strategy lead directly to Lee's surrender in 1865 and the end of the war. While contemporary accounts castigated Grant as a butcher, he understood the essence of war and how to command. No one with as many battles as Grant can entirely escape tactical blunders, and while he did order some futile frontal assault, these occasional missteps were in the service of sound military objectives. There's a world between Grant deliberate strategy to pin Confederate armies and destroy them, and the indifference to mass slaughter to move the general's drinks cabinet six yards closer to Berlin that characterizes a true military butcher.

Postwar, Grant suffered through the erratic and tumultuous administration of Andrew Johnson at general of the army, and then won election to the presidency in 1868. He faced a nation still grappling with the traumas of the Civil War, where the rights of freed slaves were under continual attack. Chernow takes a solidly revisionist account of Grant's presidency, one which I cannot agree with.

Grant's efforts were undermined by two major personal failings. The first was his taciturn and reticent nature. As a general, Grant had pondered the strategic situation and sent out orders, relying on his superior insight to guide victory. Senators could not be ordered around, and Grant crossed swords with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner (of the Sumner caning) over a plan to incorporate San Domingo into the United States. Hostile relations with the Senate hampered Grant's legislative agenda.

The second problem was one of trust. Once Grant bestowed his loyalty on someone, he almost never withdrew it, a trait reinforced by how much he valued those who stood by him in his hardscrabble years. And Grant trusted too many scoundrels, including members of his own staff and family. In a broader political context, he found that machine politics Stalwart Republicans reliably stayed bought, while reform-minded Liberals opposed him in key votes, especially over San Domingo annexation. Trading loyalty for loyalty, Grant became head of an intrinsically corrupt patronage system. While he accepted gifts, including large funds and houses from wealthy admirers, he did not personally benefit from systematic corruption.

Grant's record on Reconstruction is similarly mixed. While he became a convinced abolitionist during the war, a supporter of freedman's rights, and an opponent of White Terror, the fact remains that Reconstruction ended with Grant's second term. While he used the US military and the new Department of Justice to target Ku Klux Klan terror, by the time he left office, most southern states were back in the hands of former Confederates, leading Black citizens had been assassinated, and White Supremacy firmly entrenched.

In other issues, the Grant administration lacked the financial tools to deal with the Panic of 1873, and his hard money policy likely made the depression worse, though Wall Street benefited immensely. The Alabama settlements, over British support for the Confederacy, were properly resolved. But scandal and a lack of lasting successes were Grant's political legacy.

Out of office, Grant travelled the world for over two years, an immensely successful diplomatic tour, and toyed with running for a third term in 1880, though he was defeated at the Republican convention. Grant invested all of his money with Ferdinand Ward, a confidence man, and was ruined financially and diagnosed with throat cancer in the same year. Out of a desperate need to provide for his family, he wrote his memoirs in a year and died, beloved by his country.

Grant is an interesting book about and important American. It stands against period political slander and the long and corrupt legacy of the Dunning school on Civil War historiography. But it's also very long, and I'm skeptical it's the final word. Chernow argues that Grant did very little wrong, when the record suggests major and systematic errors, especially outside of military affairs. Love is blind; history cannot be.

I read a lot of air power related books, so this is up my alley. Piano Burning is an apology (in the classical sense) for the strange and unique culture of fighter pilots. Fighter pilots are a rare breed, jet-age warriors beset on all sides by budget cuts, changing technology, dwindling numbers, angry spouses, and an official Air Force culture which doesn't tolerate rowdy individuality. It says a lot that despite the elite selection process, millions of dollars in training, a job which consists of flying the coolest machines in existence, and hundred thousand dollar retention bonuses, the USAF can't retain fighter pilots. As per official policy, the beatings will continue until morale improves.


The F-22 Raptor, Burgon's fighter

The first and most useful part of this book is a description of a day in the life of a pilot, a 14 hour ordeal where a single short training mission is bookended by hours of briefings before hand, and hours of debriefing afterwards. Every shot and maneuver is reworked in exhausting retrospective to ensure that a split second decision in the heat of combat is the best decision. On top of the pilot specific work, there's the kafka-esque requirements of military duty, and the unending bureaucracy.

So what fighter pilots live for is Friday night, and the honored tradition of Roll Call, a rowdy celebration of milestones achieved, stupidity survived, and comrades gone but not forgotten. An air combat mission is a 4-D tangle where things can go wrong very very quickly, and coming out victorious requires skill, luck, aggression, and an unbreakable bond with your bros (Burgon's term of choice for other fighter pilots). Building that bond means challenges, drunken antics, and making sure that you're never the weakest link on the team.

A mission to keep this book PG-13 means that Burgon has to pull his punches in some of the stories. And frankly, fighter pilots are lousy historians who rarely write things down, too much risk of having a document return as Exhibit A; and have a cultural rule that at least 10% of a story must be true which makes it hard to source the true origin of any tradition. Burgon isn't Ed Rasimus, the poet of the Vietnam War generation of pilots, but he's an engaging writer who provides unique insight.

Looking at the cover of this book, you'd think that this is milSF trash (even with the Nebula nomination), and you know what, you'd be right. Fire Ant is solidly middle of the road in every way.

Beth is a scout pilot for an interstellar corporation, spending long days in the coffin-cockpit of her solo starship scanning systems for heavy metal asteroids and the jackpot of habitable planets. She's very short, because small people need less life support which means a cheaper scout, and she's also a Filipina contract worker, because in the future capitalism somehow sucks even worse.

Beth's latest mission brings her into contact with an unknown bogey which launches near-lightspeed torpedos at her. She escapes with a daring gravity assist, is dropped into corporate purgatory, and then rescued by the Navy. As the only person who's made contact with what the Navy believes are aliens and survived, Beth is a vital addition to a secret first contact unit. Which is a US Navy carrier fighter squadron.

Yeah, with the same personnel structure, a VF number, same pilot problems, flying FA-18X Super Space Hornets with Maverick and Iceman. Okay, in fairness in the book the fighters are Wasps, and other pilots are Red Devil and Bull, but tomato tomahto. I checked and the author was Marine infantry, not aviation, so while the military culture is spot on (write what you know), the space fighters are more tropey than grounded. Beth meets the squadron, goes through training, gets sent out to investigate an anomaly with the squadron and there's a dogfight around a binary star. The Navy gets the crap kicked out it by similar but slightly superior alien technology, but Beth goes in hard and comes home a hero.

On the plus side, this book is competent and quickly paced. On the minus side... if you read military scifi, you've read this book already, and there's not much new here. Beth's background could make for some interesting conflict, but it doesn't really come up. For the price of free, I'm not disappointed, but I'm not sure it's worth more than that.

As Americans, we invaded and wrecked Iraq, so the least we can do is read some Iraqi literature. As editor Hassan Blasim puts it, the Arab world has a dearth of genre literature. There is no Arab Tolkien or Asimov, no living or historical author who links the myths of the Muslim world to a modern retelling, or the present to the future. to paraphrase his introduction, the Arab imagination has been buried by authoritarian politics, religious fundamentalism, and foreign shock therapy. This 2013 collection, a decade after the sack by the latter day Hulagu Khans, Bush and Blair, imagines many futures for Iraqi in 2113.

The writers are exceptional, judging by the bios in the back. This is the creme of Iraqi literati, both in Mesopotamia and in exile. For all their literary skills, they are only okay at the art of speculative fiction. The best of the stories have the acid satire of Russian literature. The interesting ones find future peace in Iraq's history as the cradle of civilization. The average ones gripe about the injustice of occupation and sectarian warfare, and too many, roughly half by my count, fumble with the basic tools of speculative literature, getting so lost in imagination that they forget to add characters, or a plot.

I enjoyed reading this book, but I can't really recommend it either.