Weapons of the Weak is a provocatively framed book about peasants survive under systems that would exploit and oppress them, which loses its way in an exhaustively detailed ethnographic case study of a Malaysian village, and a dense mass of Marxist analysis leavened with Gramsci. As Scott argues, peasant rebellions are rare events, but outbreaks of revolt are interspersed with a dense array of survival techniques, most unmarked by histories which are preforce written by elites for other elites. Despite their foundational role in human history, and prominence in the dueling literatures of People’s War/Counter-Insurgency from the 1950s onwards, peasant voices are rarely heard.

Scott’s focuses his study on Sedaka, a rice-farming village in Malaysia which in the years just prior to his case study saw the effects of the Green Revolution. Irrigation meant two rice crops a year, a chance for doubled incomes for all, but in practice the now more capital intensive farming strategies benefited rich farmers, who could most benefit from the combine harvester, fertilizer supplied by partisan corrupt rural development agencies, and most key, could manipulate the basic structure of field rents and leaseholding in their favor.

Against this, the poorer quartiles of Sedaka have few weapons. Derision and scorn are most prominent, as they use tradition and Muslim norms of charity to castigate the rich as stingy and greedy. There are moments of solidarity and sabotage, which fail to stop the combine harvester or their decline in real wages. But the sense that I get is one where in all the terms that matter, the rich farmers of Sedaka have won all the benefits from the Green Revolution, and talk about “counter-hegemonies” is so much air.

I admire Scott most as a synthesist, so seeing this careful case study shows another side of his ability. But unless you specifically care about rural Malaysia circa 1980, this is a tedious work that does not generalize well.

Pyenson is the Smithsonian Curator of their whale collection, and one of the foremost authorities on whales. This book is tour through the recent science of whales, structured around his personal discoveries. The love of science comes through, but Pyenson is a paleontologist, and in his own words he’s not a whale hugger, so there’s an intellectual distance here.

Whales as a clade are roughly 50 million years old, descending from a creature that looked more like a modern dear than their current ocean adapted form. They evolved detailed aquatic specializations: blowholes, blubber, echolocation, as well as an atrophied legs, become the specialized sea creatures we know today. A major part of the narrative describes a dig in Chile, where hundreds of well-preserved whale skeletons have fossilized in four distinct events. Another section describes the gory business of anatomy at an Icelandic whaling station, where Pyenson and a collaborate discover specialized sensory organs in the jaw while help baleen whales gulp as much water and krill as they can.

The modern life of whales is inescapable from their near extinction at the hands of industrialized whaling, carried out not by the romantic sailors of Moby Dick but by in the 20th century by the brutal machinery of industrialized fisheries. Since their protection, some whales have bounced back. Humpback whales are nearly at their pre-extinction population levels. Other species are not doing so well, gigantic Blue Whales are still rare, and river dolphins at great risk everywhere. Pollution and climate change are key threats, and we do not (and possibly never will) understand the strange intelligence of these animals that we share the oceans with.

Spying on Whales does a fantastic job conveying the excitement of science, and a weaker job with the whales. Still an interesting book in the popular science genre.

The Dawn of Everything is a tour de force. Graeber and Wengrow aimed high, to redefine human history and our own understanding of our present and potential as a species, and they for the most part succeed.

Grand narratives of humanity follow one of two major themes. In one, we fell from an Edenic origin, Rousseau's noble savage or Christian myth to our current greedy corruption. In the other, we were violent brutes saved from Hobbes' war of all against all by gods, kings, and bureaucracy. Either way, the yoke of civilization is no more than what we deserve. Rousseau and Hobbes can be forgiven, because they were writing thought experiments at the dawn of modern political philosophy and had little actual evidence of our origins. The authors who cannot be so easily forgiven are their modern descendants, Jared Diamond (ecological geography), Yuval Harari (medieval history), and Steven Pinker (cognitive science), who present a grand narrative of humanity that is blinkered, boring, and wrong.

The essence of Graeber and Wengrow's work is to argue that a synthesis of research from anthropology and archeology shows that the modern world, defined by agriculture, industry, debt, domination, and war is not inevitable. Against the argument that cities and complex societies require hierarchies of control, Graeber and Wengrow show that simple chronology indicates that cities and agriculture arrived thousands of years before the chains of civilization, and that kings and debt slavery are late arrivals to people who made fundamental advances in domestication, pottery, metallurgy, and textiles.

The people of the Americas provide a second strand to this story. Graeber and Wengrow take period accounts of contact between the French and indigenous people of the northeast to show that the French regarded average the Huron or Iroquois as equal to one of their leading scholars in rhetoric and erudition, and by comparison Native Americans saw the French as little more than slaves. The peoples of the Americas had complex long-distance trade networks. Their political systems could be remade if they did not match their values. And in every aspect of quality of life, their lives seem better than their European contemporaries.

In a moment of discontent, possibly even one of breach, Graeber and Wengrow make a specific argument that rather than talking abstractly of equality and freedom, we need to think instead of the protection of three fundamental liberties: The freedom to move away from one's surroundings, the freedom to disobey orders, and the freedom to shape entirely new social realities. The apparatus of social science, laid down by conservative men in the 19th century, has been one of limits. Instead, we need to think in terms of potential, and know that in the past and in other places, people had freedoms we can only dream of.

This book is a dazzling display of evidence that better worlds are possible, and a fascinating refutation of the standard lies we learned in school, which we trimmed to fit the colonialist ideologies of the past. I've complained about Graeber's sourcing in the past, but it looks fine to me, and my wife, who is an actual professor of archeology instead of some guy with an unrelated doctorate, will double check. For all its brilliance, there are some flaws. I think that the two Davids could have benefited from a more explicitly feminist approach to their topic, or at least another chapter with a feminist standpoint. The argument that the democratic and constitutional philosophies of the Enlightenment owe their origins to contact with Native Americans are plausible, but I would love a period scholar to really nail down the links, aside from the statements that everybody was reading period accounts of contact, and that Native ambassadors and Enlightenment philosophers were in the same city at the same time. Even so, these weaknesses point out fruitful areas for future work, and not major errors.

Read this book. You'll enjoy it, you'll learn something, and from a narrowly tactical sense, it takes the prior grand histories I mentioned above and stomps them in the dust.

Descendant of War is Mass Effect: Renegade Interrupt - The Book. Commander Reeves is a guns-blazing human Space Navy officer, and also the distant descendant of characters from one of Ogden's other series. When he goes too far in pursuit of pirates, he's exiled to command of Conclave/The Abyss, a massive space station that servers as neutral territory for the six civilized races, and also a hive of scum and villainy for all their criminal elements. Along with his XO, Major Katee Kane, he has to bring justice to the void of space at the point of a blaster pistol and his plasma trench knife. The situation goes from bad (human extremists out for him personally, local criminals, idiot diplomats) to awful when mankind's ancient enemy returns through rifts in shadow space, threatening terrible revenge, which only Reeves can stop. See more in books 2-6!

So, I did not expect crackling writing or originality from the description or the price point, and even so, I feel let down. The sole bright spot is that the background details are not directly copied from the inspirations of Babylon 5 and Mass Effect. Enough is shuffled to make it not a carbon copy, though the aliens are still very much "planet of hats". But everything else is a study in artlessness. At least it's a quick read.

Gubat Banwa is a bold and colorful tactical RPG, set in a fantasy world inspired by the 16th and 17th century Philippines. You are a Kadungganan, an elite warrior with an awesome martial arts style, embroiled in larger than life drama. You fight for glory, for ideology, and for your datu (the local nobility).

So the good news is that this setting is holy-fucking-amazeballs cool! You can ride a giant rainbow rooster into battle, turn your soul into a sword, or unlock the necromantic power of flowers. When it's time for drama, one of the two modes of the game, you test your convictions and become enmeshed in a web of debts. And when you switch to tactical violence, everything plays out in a grid-bases system reminiscent of D&D 4e or Final Fantasy Tactics.

This is where I get a little skeptical. Admittedly, I have Opinions about tactical RPGs and my preferred design goals might not align with those of the authors, but on a read the tactical system strikes me as complicated and fiddly and perhaps not terribly deep. There's 10 damage types, dozens of conditions, and interlocking systems of keyword based combos. I like crunchy systems, and this one is hard enough to break teeth. There's stuff I like: no attack rolls, the tactical use of space and movement with charge attacks that hit all enemies in a line, minimum ranges for ranged attacks, the "precise" keyword which lets you roll multiple dice and take the higher, but there is a lot going on, and I worry that the sum is less than the whole of the parts.

"Not terribly deep" is a harsh criticism, and I'd like to justify it a little. Deepness can come two elements. The first is in tactical positioning and use of resources. There should rarely be an obvious best move, and you position vis a vis allies, enemies, and terrain should dictate the battle. Powers in Gubat Banwa are mostly at will, and powers within a Disciple/Class seem to form a closed set of abilities within the theme of the class. In terms of build, you get your Discipline, and as you level you can choose to learn 4 Teachings of increasing difficulty, 3 with 2 Techniks/Powers and a single Enlightenment Art which can dramatically shift the battle. Each teaching has 3 levels of Mastery to learn. But you can't really mix and match across Disciplines, and finding a broken Technik and Mastery combo (there are many) and beelining for it is a failure state in character design.

This is a maximalist game. It's very much tied to one specific vision and it's not your grandad's dungeon fantasy. But if you're up for it, there's a lot here.

The Princess Diarist is Carrie Fisher's last book, structured around two major themes. The first is the (possibly shocking?) affair that she had with Harrison Ford while filming Star Wars. The second is the weirdness of still being Princess Leia 40 years on.

So the first theme. As a 19 year-old making her first major movie, Fisher had a crush on her older co-star, who was as cool, cynical, and gruff as his character. When she got drunk at George Lucas's birthday party, Ford rescued her from the crew (I hope it wasn't as bad as it seems), and they wound up making up in the back of a car, and then went back to their place. While making the movie, they carried out an affair about which they wouldn't speak. Ford was married, and Fisher projected a mask of adult sophistication over deep immaturity. The excerpts of her yearning for a real connection with her emotionally unavailable co-star are very raw and very real. I remember being 19, and it hits hard.

The second theme is a little fuzzier. Princess Leia was more than a role, it was an ICON, and Fisher never really figured how to escape the shadow of Star Wars. It's weird seeing the icon, printed on the side of the building and frozen in perfect eternal youth, as you get older and more human. A corrupt business manager meant that Fisher had to duck into the easy cash of 'lap dances', her term for fan meet-and-greets and autograph signings, to make ends meet. And I don't know, be nicer to your icons. You don't really know them, don't project too much parasociality on to them. Please, for the love of all that is holy don't tell them about how you masturbating to them. Ultimately, Fisher really wanted to be loved for being herself (who doesn't), and being loved for being Princess Leia isn't quite it.

I've not read anything by Fisher before, and she was a writer for far longer than she was an actress, so this has a great if slightly scattered tone. It's not a perfect book, but it's a lot of fun.

The Chip is a humanistic look at one of the key inventions of the 20th century, the microchip which undergirds every digital change to our life. Thanks to chips, "just put a computer in it" has been a solution to almost every engineering problem, and the cause of a similar number of engineering problems.

In the 1950s, the electronics industry was carrying a blade with no handle. The silicon transistor had opened up vast possibilities by replacing large, power-hungry, and unreliable vacuum tubes. But the new solid state circuits were still built the same way, by wiring together discrete components like resistors, capacitors, and transistors, and the labor cost of hand wiring all these components was stalling future growth. Worse, as the complexity of circuits increased, their reliability went way down, a fatal flaw for aerospace and military applications.

Kilby at Texas Instruments and Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor hit on the key idea at roughly the same time. If you could lay down resistors, capacitors, and wires inside silicon, you could make a circuit as a monolithic unit. Kilby was first by several months, but Noyce figured out how to get the leads between the chip and world laid down, which is a very important step. Doing everything in silicon is counter-intuitive, by raw materials it's comparable to building a boxcar out of solid gold, but the advantage in not having to wire together components is incredible. Cue the digital revolution that we know, though from the perspective of decades on the revolution was slower than we remember. The first few years of production went entirely to the military. The consumer product which blew the world open was the pocket calculator, which came out in 1971, 15 years after the invention of the chip.

Reid follows the rise of Japanese firms in high tech, as well as the divergent careers of Noyce and Kilby. Noyce went on to become the patriarch of Silicon Valley and a billionaire investor. Kilby kept inventing, though never with the same success. He was finally awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000, but neither of the two are household names despite their impact as inventors.

Reid also makes some odd choices in the technical explanations. There's a lot on Boolean algebra and binary logic, which is key to how chips work, and precisely nothing on photolithography, which is key to how they're made. This is an older book, which is beneficial because there's nothing like interviews with your subjects to get the right feeling across, and Noyce and Kilby are no longer available for interviews.

Okay, so The Art and Soul of Dune is glossy marketing material for obsessive Dune fans, of which I am one. Concept art is interlaced with behind the scene pictures and stills from the movie, along with brief passages describing the production. In an age of access, Art and Soul conceals more than it reveals. But Dune doesn't need help, the movie stands on its own as a masterpiece.

One thing that comes through is Denis Villeneuve's uncompromising production design. Villeneuve loves Dune. He had "Muad'Dib" engraved on the inside of his high school graduation ring. The fact that he's a very talented filmmaker and also the only person on the planet who loves Dune more than me is at the heart of the movie's success. Villeneuve gets great people and brings out their best, from the gaffer's assistant up to the stars. That obsession, to get the big picture right and to get all the details right, is the soul of the movie.

So what did I learn? Well, the ornithopter was an actual physical prop so large it had to be shipped around the world by An-124, the world's second largest cargo plane. A 300 ton crane operated by a Jordanian man who didn't share a language with the production made it fly in the desert. A film studio in Budapest was taken over to create the massive brutalist sets that Villeneuve loves.

Some of the roads not taken are interesting. Apparently there's another few hours of footage floating around, including the Arrakeen dinner scene (and by the way, I would do a lot to see those deleted scenes), though a fair number are introductions not used. An early version of the Atreides castle on Caladan is almost like a cross between a D-Day bunker and Falling Water. Some preliminary sandworm designs look unfortunately like leeches or uncircumcised penises, so I'm glad we got the version we did.

It's interesting reading this book against Naha's The Making of Dune, about the 1984 Lynch film. We know the ending, but the sense that comes out of Naha's book is how amateurish Lynch's film was. Not that it didn't have talented people involved, but many of them had never made a scifi epic of this scale. And while Dune is bigger than Villeneuve's previous films, it's a step in a progress that includes Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival by someone who's been thinking about how to make this exact film since he was 12.

About Face is Hackworth's first book, the one he really wanted to write, and a damn fine memoir about loving the Army, building a career, and then burning it to the ground after decades of systemic betrayals. Hackworth grew up as an orphan in California, and lied about his age to join the Army in 1946, when most people were glad to be getting out. He learned the trade in the elite occupation forces at Trieste (TRUST), and then the hard way in Korea with the 27th "Wolfhounds" Infantry Regiment, where he was battlefield commissioned as an officer. Between Korea and Vietnam Hackworth bounced around the civilian world and Nike missile anti-aircraft units, marked as a soldier with the potential for stars, even as he was caught between his abrasive nature and the '100% efficiency' culture of the New Army; a 100% efficiency often achieved by fudging results.

Vietnam was what finally broke Hackworth. He fought with the 101st Airborne, and remade and commanded the 'Hardcore Recondo' battalion (see Steel My Soldiers' Hearts), but he became incredibly cynical at the hamfisted use of firepower, the ticket-punching attitude of careerist officers, and the way that a combination of strategic obscurity and improper training in infantry basics was getting thousands of American soldiers killed for no damn reason at all. Despite time in command, in training schools, and in the Pentagon, Hackworth couldn't move the machine, and so in 1971 he blew everything up by giving a candid interview to ABC's Issues & Answers where he dramatically countered the "Vietnamization/Light-at-the-End-of-the-Tunnel" Pentagon line. The response was immediate and drastic. Hackworth was followed, wiretapped, investigated for numerous crimes, and finally forced to resign, where he fled to Australia ("As far away as I could get from America and still speak English") to make his own way. And then after 18 years he writes this book, and uses it to launch a second career as a war reporter and defense analyst.

That's the duality of Hackworth. Unquestionably a brilliant soldier; uneducated orphans lying about their age to enlist do not get groomed for the highest command without an immense amount of talent, luck, and energy, Hackworth was also an egoist and a braggart of the highest order. Rules simply did not apply to him, and Hackworth and his men stole jeeps, partied hard on base, ran brothels, scavenged everything they could get their hands on, dealt out 'NCO justice', slept with other men's wives, lied about everything that might get them in trouble, etc. etc. There's a lot to learn from in Hackworth's earlier career (sweat the details, an organization only learns what the boss checks, focus on the fundamentals, loyalty runs downwards before it runs up), but the big deal, his Issues & Answers interview, seems mostly like the last futile gesture of a broken man. What could be done in 1971 to save the war? What did the American people not know, that was heroically revealed? The timeline reveals that Hackworth's alleged crimes were dug-up mostly as a response to the blatant attack of his TV interview; other officers got away with the same or worse. But I have a sense that in some grander sense, his interview was all for the best. General Hackworth would have imploded hard enough to take out a side of the Pentagon.

Everything in this book is written to contrast 'Hackworth the Warrior, Stud of Studs, Master of Battle' against the 'Perfumed Princes' who lies failed to achieve victory in Korea or Vietnam, and who betrayed the trust of their troops and the American people by defending a cabal of incompetence that covers up inadequate training and shoddy procurement. The writing is pulpy, the stories slanted, but this is his first book and both writing and facts are more considered and balanced, before years of "Hack the Great War Correspondent" went to his head. Whatever else, Hackworth had charisma, and it shines through. Even though I don't want to like him, I can't help it.

It's a rare technical book that is worth a damn after five years, let alone more than 50. While technology has changed immensely, the basics of computer programming remain the same. Weinberg offers a social study of programming, followed by questions for programmers and programming managers.


4 of 5 developers enjoy code review

These questions are the best part of the book. "When was the last time you read a program written by someone else? When was the last time someone read one of your programs? Was it your manager?" Like, what did I do to get called out like this?. There are good sections on motivation, and how money is rarely enough for good programmers, which is true (though looking at levels.fyi I could use a raise, and software is the only career in this capitalist hellscape that is actually well compensated), and how egoless programming helps build robust software. Simply posing these questions to your software engineering team could reveal some very interesting truths and issues.

There's also a lot of thoroughly deprecated engineering culture here. The example language is PL/I, the example machine an IBM 360 series mainframe. While we no longer line up to submit our batches of punchcards to the almighty computer, we still have organizational barriers between developers and infrastructure. While process protects us from technical debt, security holes, and general anarchy, process is a greater barrier to getting things done at my job than any technical issue.

The reason why I've docked this review a star is that while I think Weinberg is right, he's right in theory and often lacks the evidence to support his claims, evidence which according to Valia's review of this book is now available. The one experiment, which is fascinating, compares groups of programmers on the same task. One group was told to write an efficient program, the other group to just get it done. The efficient group took 5x the time, but their programs used 10% of the computing resources on average.

The Psychology of Computer Programming has many fascinating and provocative questions, but gets lost in a tangle of arguments without evidence. And there's also a faith that despite 50 years of exponential change in processor speed, memory, and quality of tooling, the fundamentals of programming are the same.