Binding Passions is a fascinating microhistory that is both serious scholarship, and also might have been substantially more interesting in the hands of a narrative non-fiction writer rather than a historian.

The subject is Venice in the late 16th century, as revealed by the archives of the Venetian Inquisition, and relating to matters of marriage, sex, and magic. Of these, marriage in a society defined by Catholicism and aristocratic lineages is a big deal. The wrong marriage can cause a spiral of ruin, wrecking not just the lives of the people involved, but also the fortunes of their families. Matters of class, promised engagement, and willing consent all were tested in these times. One of my favorite cases involved a claimed marriage between two young people, where the man was found in bed with the woman by her father and brothers, was hastily married that night, and took off for the hinterlands with a "uh, sike!"

While marriage is bound by time and place, horniness is a human universal. Another area that gets covered is how people have sex, and in particular female sexuality in a deeply patrichal era. At the top are courtesans, who can choose their suitors, relying on looks and good culture. The best venetian courtesans had a different man for every night of the week in a long term stable arrangement, and absolute freedom in their days. The book opens where one of them was accused of bewitching a young noble into marrying her, a sudden social catapult that threatened the peace of the Most Serene Republic.

Which leads to magic. In the pre-scientific 16th century, there is a blurring between esoteric real knowledge, prayer, and sorcery. People made figures of wax, wrote up contracts selling their soul to the devil, and used enchanted oils as love potions. And as a quote goes, 60% of the time, it works every time.

This book is dense, a fascinating exploration through the archives, but it fails to give a real sense of what it was like to live in these times. I wanted to know why a young woman might turn to magic to resolve difficulties in her love life, or how a pater familias might worry about his wife's strange friends. And the book was a little too scattered and objective to give me that sense

Attachment theory is a popular categorization for why your relationships always seem to fail in the same way. Basically, depending on what happened during your childhood, you'll fall into one of four attachment styles: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. Secure people are "healthy", able to mix vulnerability and self-sufficiency in equal measure. Everyone else keeps tripping over themselves in some way.

After a brief introduction, this book moves through a summary of basic mindful techniques. You know, when you feel big emotions, acknowledge them, step back, and don't let them drive your words and actions.

It's glossy, it's superficial, it's very Instagram (derogatory). I'm not saying it's wrong... I can see my own dismissive-avoidant traits and why I keep winding up with women with anxiety disorders, it just doesn't offer much beyond that.

As with most anything by Beevor, you're guaranteed a good book, if not a great one. Countless books have been written about the Normandy campaign. This is a strong survey which goes from just before the landings to just after the liberation of Paris, looking at each of the major beaches and fronts in turn.

Beevor uses the wide survey to make several points. The first is about the overall brutality of the combat. The Allies were extremely liberal in their use of high explosives, both artillery and air, which leveled major cities and killed tens of thousands of French civilians. This grinding attrition was faced against a dense concentration of Nazi firepower. Roughly 10 divisions, including multiple SS Panzer divisions, on a 60 mile front, as compared to the same number on a 600 mile front in Russia.

Nazi soldiers fought skillfully and fanatically in defense, using the local tactical superiority of Tiger tanks and the FlaK 88 to dreadful effect. The Allied soldiers were often unwilling to push aggressively in close contact, with a desire to survive the war. Infantry suffered high casualties nevertheless, exceeding 70% for the branch as a whole, and over 200% for some units. While all sides had failures both tactical and strategic, Beevor has especially harsh criticism for the British, who's line troops had a "not my problem" attitude that e.g. burnt out vehicles in the road were for the infantry, or that an assault could pause to brew tea. While all generals made errors in judgement, Montgomery's perennial shifting objectives, failure to communicate with Eisenhower, and egotism proved a particular problem for the Allies, all out of proportion to his military or political skills. De Gaulle was a pain in the ass, but it would have been hard to liberate France with French opposition.

There were a couple of points that could have used some editing, like repetitions on the ineffectiveness of tactical air support compared to claimed kills, or hard ciders filling Sherman tanks, but overall this is a solid work that is likely the baseline for WW2 histories.

Before 36 Streets, T.R. Napper wrote a cycle of short stories set in the long future history of his setting, centered on Australia, Vietnam, China, and the memory editing technology of the Kandel-Yu device.

As a cyberpunk fan, these stories are fantastic, easily some of the best additions to the genre in the 2020s. The stories are stark and harrowing, full of addicts, post-traumatic cripples, and renegades who have slipped the bounds of sanity and madness. Napper has a feel for the pacing of a short story which eluded his subsequent novel (which is good, but writing is hard), and allows the beautiful cruelty of his prose to shine.

As someone who has looked back at days-weeks-months and wondered where the hell the time went, the subtitle is outright mispractice on the part of the publisher. I was hoping for a way to regain the focus I used to have, after all, these books won't review themselves.

Instead, what we have is a summary review on the psychological literature of distraction. In short, multitasking is impossible, context switching increases errors, and the high accessibility of addictive technologies, primarily social media and the endless feed, make concentrated effort very very hard.

Against this onslaught of distraction, there are a few bits of good news. Task performance is positively associated with a medium level of psychological arousal, between boredom and terror. Setting reward breaks can work, say fifteen minutes on and five minutes distracted. And listening to music, at least familiar music, doesn't impede concentration.

Otherwise, if you were hoping for techniques to build the muscles of focus, you'll be profoundly disappointed.

Gladius is an extensive, thematically organized look at the life of the Roman soldier, focusing on the long era Republican conquests around the Carthaginian Wars and the Christianization of the empire under Constantine.

Bédoyére draws from historical documents, archeological evidence, and primarily tomb inscriptions to depict a military world that was central to Roman society. After the Marian reforms, legionnaires were core parts of the administration of the empire, manning posts from lonely borders to dense trade hubs and doing everything that needed doing, not merely war.

The legions were both strongly standardized in terms of size, structure, and camp size, and also idiosyncratic in naming, command, and the attachment of auxiliary units of archers and cavalry. While centurions were veterans promoted from the ranks on the basis of experience, high officers were often inexperienced military tribunes drawn from the young men of the senatorial class.

This is a popular work (the author is a TV presenter, rather than a professor), which has the advantage of the writing being actually good. The thematic organization is well done. I particularly enjoyed the defeat-victory-atrocity triad of chapters, as well as looks at under appreciated elements, like the Roman navy, retirement, and side jobs.

Holy. Shit.

I'd heard Blindsight was good for ages, and never got around to reading it despite it being released as CC. Well, that gap has finally been rectified.

Siri Keeton is a synthesist, a specialist in translating the research of cutting edge post-human scientists into terms mere humans can comprehend. He's part of a small crew sent to make contact with an alien artifact, along with a linguist who's cut her consciousness into multiple personalities, a soldier commanding a squad of combat drones, a biologist who has traded motor function for extra senses, all commanded by a vampire. (Yes, vampires are real, and scientific).

They are the best humanity can produce. They are utterly inadequate. The alien artifact, an immense wreath of spikes orbiting a dark gas giant in the Oort cloud, calls itself Rorschach and warns the explorers to stay away. It torments them with magnetically induced hallucinations, and it is inhabited by perfect predators.

Blindsight is grim, atmospheric, and ultimately an extended argument on the philosophy of mind. Watts is down on consciousness as slow, metabolically inefficient, and just plain suboptimal in an evolutionary sense. Rather, the universe belongs to pattern recognizers without the illusion of "I", intelligences unburdened by the problems of the self.

Dark, brilliant, and grim, a technofetistic masterpiece, Blindsight is every bit as good as I told it was.

One of the great mysteries of history is the Sea People. They arrived from somewhere in the 12th century BC, sacked the palaces of the literate civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, caused the collapse of the intricate society of the Late Bronze Age, and vanished.



Cline aims to explain what happened, but archeology is as much art as science, and despite ample ruins and inscriptions, including diplomatic correspondence, we simply don't know. There were webs of trade and communication, and then they stopped, cities burned, and people stopped writing anything for centuries. It's frustrating, because along with the mystery of the Sea People, two great epics of Western civilization are set in the Late Bronze Age, and extra-textual evidence for both the Iliad and Exodus is scanty at best.

Cline points at a multitude of causes: earthquake, drought, disease, and invasion. He draws labored comparisons to our own integrated and global world. One key factor was that bronze requires tin, which at the time only came from a region that is now Afghanistan. This single tenuous land link was an obvious vulnerability, though not one that is much discussed. It's a long way from Mycenae to Afghanistan. What was traded for tin?

I found Graeber's Debt a much more interesting exploration of the period.

Flying Blind is a story about 347 murders. 346 of those were human beings, smashed to pieces as the out of control jetliner they were flying in impacted the ground at incredible speed. Those murders only happened because the Boeing company had first been killed, its once world-class engineering culture hollowed out by glossy-eyed executives worshipping the Cult of Shareholder Value. This book is the gripping true crime thriller of how that happened.

The proximate causes of the two crashes, the Indonesian Lion Air and Ethiopia Air Lines, is a simple and stupid engineering failure. A piece of software in the new 737 MAX, deemed MCAS, took control of the airplane from the pilots on the basis of a single malfunctioning angle-of-attack sensor and flew the airplanes into the ground.

But MCAS only existed because of a series of horrendous decisions made by Boeing executives. The 737 MAX is an update of a 60 year old airplane, and MCAS compensates for aerodynamic changes caused by bigger and more efficient engines which are positioned in front of, rather than below the wing, allowing Boeing to argue to the FAA and airlines that the MAX was essentially the same airplane as the prior 737-800, and could enter into service without significant pilot training.

No responsible engineer or regulator would have approved the design, an obvious single point of failure, but there were no such people left. Building airplanes is a hard, complex business. Boeing had traditionally been focused on engineering first, with robustly tested designs evaluated in a tight loop between various flight groups, test pilots, and training. But the 737 MAX was developed after decades of cost-cutting by GE and McDonnell-Douglas heritage executives.

Reporting lines went right to management, who didn't want to hear bad news, anything that would jeopardize schedules, and who didn't understand aviation and didn't care to. Internal warnings that the MAX was flawed went unheeded. FAA regulators, who were supposed to approve the plane, were actually reporting to Boeing rather than their own chain of command, with performance incentives to approve the MAX and no power to stop it going into service.

The lessons of this book are twofold. First, the red tape of regulations are written in blood. Second, corporate American management in the style of GE's Jack Welch is mere pillaging of productive assets. In the years prior to the 737 MAX, Boeing made over $25 billion in stock buybacks, enough to easily fund R&D on a true next-generation single aisle jetliner. The shortcuts made in developing the MAX (and I've barely scratched the surface) were ultimately far more costly than doing it right.

If you fly, you've likely been on a 737 and will likely be on a MAX at some point. But more to the point, what happened to Boeing is what's happened to America, where a bunch of sociopaths in suits are willing to cause a little bit of harm to millions of people to make themselves a dollar. Utopian me says that we need a way to effectively punish management which is incompetent to the point of murder. Pragmatic me will settle for a ban on stock buybacks, which are clearly market manipulation and allowed only by a quirk of Reagan-era deregulation which can be reversed.

Flying Camelot is a fascinating look at how the aggressive and hypermasculine fighter pilot culture reached its apogee in the F-15 and F-16 fighters, and then collapsed with the 80s Military Reform Movement. The movement's intellectual leader, Colonel John Boyd, is a divisive figure, lauded as a genius by supporters and a braggart failure by opponents (caveats: I'm a moderate Boydian). Hankins tries to take an objective look, which mostly comes down against the Military Reform Movement, and tells a fascinating story in the process.




The F-16 was designed as the ultimate dogfighter, and became a much heavier all-weather strike aircraft. Or to quote Vito Corleone, "Look how they massacred my boy"

In Hankins analysis, fighter pilots are distinguished by five pillars* of aggressive individuality and identification with their airplanes. The acme of fighter pilot skill is the turning dogfight, with a nostalgic link to the silk scarf days over the trenches of the Western Front. In the 1950s and 1960s, these traditional skills were sidelined in an Air Force culture focused on strategic nuclear bombers, high speed interception, and tactical interdiction. Worse, the Air Force wound up flying the gunless (!) two-seat (!!) Navy (!!!) F-4 Phantom. When Phantoms faced MiGs over North Vietnam, the American pilots were shockingly outclassed, and the guided missile dangerously useless.

At the same time, Boyd was a key part of a project to design the next generation Air Force fighter, the plane which became the F-15. Boyd's energy maneuverability theory provided a mathematical engineering assessment for the benefits of a powerful and maneuverable aircraft. Part of the Military Reform Movement's program has been systematically amplifying the Boyd legend, so while he was important, the F-15 didn't spring forth from his brow like Athena from Zeus.

While the F-15 was a success, the production aircraft was more expensive and complex than Boyd and his allies wanted, and they turned to the next generation Lightweight Fighter Program, which produced both the F-16 and F-18, to get the plane they really wanted. This would be a dayfighter armed with a cannon and two Sidewinder missiles, with minimal avionics and complex gizmos. The goal was to make the ultimate fighter pilot's airplane, one where dogfighting would be the best and only option.

Boyd's fighter mafia, including Pierre Sprey and William Lind, among others, broadened into a political movement through the 80s, arguing against bloated procurement projects and the failures of the Vietnam War and Operation Eagle Claw in favor of simple and cheap weapons that enabled individual initiative and aggressiveness. The military reform movement attracted bipartisan political support in Congress, as well as a spate of articles in the public press. But its historical and material analysis was as blinkered and flawed as the establishment they critiqued.

And when the rubber met the road in Desert Storm, they were proven comprehensively wrong. The qualitive edge of Coalition equipment: stealth fighters, laser guided bombs, AWACS radars, the M1 Abrams tank, and so on shattered the Iraqi Army in one of the most one-sided routs in history. While a fullscale test of equipment and doctrine, NATO AirLand Battle vs Soviet Deep Battle in a tactical nuke-pocked Europe, thankfully never happened, in a limited war, the complex equipment the reform movement railed against surpassed all expectations.

Hankins has written a fascinating and enjoyable study of fighter pilot culture, the power of nostalgic design (see my review of The Charisma Machine for more on that topic), and the genesis of two of the best aircraft of the 20th century.

*I can't tell you what the five pillars are because I foolishly bought this book off of the publisher's website rather than Amazon, and had to read it with Abode Digital Editions, which is one of the worst apps I've had the displeasure to use.