What is there to say about a book everybody reads in high-school? Certainly, I read it, thought it was "alright", and set it aside. Decided to reread it at the end of summer to see what I had missed. There's no use belaboring what 1000 Cliff's Notes sites have done better, but this is a really beautiful, really sad book. It's about dreams, and memory, and love, and losing, and in its subtle prose manages to capture something quite precious and perfect about how the mistakes we make define us.

It's definitely wasted on high school students. You need to have lived at least a little bit of failure, a little bit of escape, to appreciate Gatsby

An odd book. Basically, evil genius Dr Belsidus decides to exact revenge against Whitey, by building a new Black Empire in Africa. It's totally amoral, focusing of subterfuge, unconventional warfare, and Science! Supposedly, there's a deeper message here, but all I see is second rate Golden Age sci-fi mixed with Black Nationalist paranoia.

I am disappoint. Everybody says these are the best of the Star Wars EU books, before it goes totally off the rails. The book follows the protagonists of the movies, Luke, Leia, Han, and Lando, as they attempt to build up the fragile New Republic against the predations of the cunning and brilliant Grand Admiral Thrawn. Unfortunately, for me the space combat didn't have any sense of scale or zip, along with most of the characterization. Thrawn is as awesome as internet rumors lead me to believe, but the other of the new characters (Talon Karrde, Mara Jade), fall flat, and the beloved Star Wars protagonists feel kinda flat. Guess I'll stick with EU books I'm actually nostalgic for.

Disclosure time: Sarewitz and Allenby are two of my favorite professors, and I generally believe that they're very smart. That said...

The Techno-Human Condition starts by examining transhumanism, the belief that human being can and should improve their bodies using technology, and the common arguments for and against it. Allenby and Sarewitz soon drop the idea, as both sides hold flawed and simplistic views about technology and its ability to solve problems. They advance a theory of Level I, II, and III technologies. Level I technologies imply a simple cause-and-effect relationship: cars allow you to get from Point A to B easily. Level II, technosocial systems, have more complex effects: many cars create traffic and a lack of parking. Level III, Earth systems, are almost unknowable in their implications: cars redesign cities and ways of life, create foreign entanglements in pursuit of gas, and change the composition of the atmosphere with unknown effects.

Coping with Level III technological conditions is the aim of the book. Allenby and Sarewitz propose flexibility and options above all else. Since the effects of technology are prima facia unknowable, we must be ready to change direction at any moment, not to forestall debate, and to always be prepared to reflexively examine our values. This is an ambitious program, and its ambition and ambiguity weakens its real-world relevance--people with simple solutions will always implement their plans faster than those with more complex ideas. But it also might be the only way to survival.

Agent to the Stars is a cute book, that's the only way to describe it. Kind, professional, sarcastic Hollywood agent Tom Stein gets the ultimate job, introducing a race of blob-like aliens to the world, while at the same time dealing with every egomaniac, diva, and paparazzi in LA. The characterization is more charicaturization, but the plot pops and sizzles, and Scalzi is at his best taking wacky ideas and throwing them at the wall. And hey, it's a free ebook, so what do you have to lose?

Well, this is certainly a book. I can't say much more, due to the elliptical multi-narrators stream of consciousness style, but it's about Black faith healers somewhere in the South, and um, something happens, I don't know what. Guess my Patriarchy Pants are just on too tight.

Szasz makes a frontal assault on the power of psychiatry, arguing that mental illness is a myth and that the power accorded to psychiatrists to decide if people are legally responsible for their actions, have them committed to hospitals, and prescribe various psychotropic medications is fundamentally misfounded. The basic premise of his argument is that only organs can be sick, and the mind is not an organ. Rather, what we see as mental illness are the results of rule-breaking behavior by "mentally ill" people, an attempt to game their social interactions to receive the socially beneficial role of a "sick person" as accorded by Judeo-Christian morality and modern standards of care.

While there is some benefit to challenging the hegemony of mental illness (a recent paper says "Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year."), Szasz's argument fails on two major grounds.

The first is modern understanding that cognitive events are linked to neurological events, or in other words, that mental illness are in some way brain disorders. We can draw a spectrum from something totally neurological--Parkinson's disease, to something totally psychological--Borderline Personality Disorder, say, and put things like schizophrenia, depression, bipolar, and their related pharmacological treatments and neurological origins somewhere between them. It's unfair to hold a book published in the late 1960s to modern beliefs, but again, Szasz doesn't have much to say about this.

The second problem is more damning: even if we accept Szasz's belief that the mentally ill are just playing the game of life by different rules, what is to be done with them? As any good historian of mental illness knows, the lines between insane, criminal, and sinful are far from clear. Psychiatry is the modern way of dealing with malcontents, of offering a source of power and authority that people can draw on to change their lives and social behaviors. Szasz might be right in his argument that psychiatry probably isn't medicine, and it certainly isn't science, but he doesn't engage with the notion that psychiatry is something, and that it performs a socially necessary role. Rather than assailing psychiatry as an evil system of fraud that makes people crazy, we must ask how unhappy people can be helped, how their complex problems can be untangled, and what resources are necessary for that to happen.

It's pretty much what it says on the tin. Lt Col Hambleton goes down behind enemy lines in the midst of the 1972 Easter Offensive, and after 12 days manages to make his way to safety. This book is readable enough, but some of the dialog is, well, maybe fighter pilots did talk like that, I don't know, it's hard to believe. Lots of square-jawed USAF heroics, a few swipes at politicians and hippies, but all in all a decent enough account of a tense operation. Unfortunately, one of the major characters turns out to be a composite, and while I understand the literary reasons for doing that, it really weakens the emotional resonance of the book.