Understanding Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a decent, if somewhat dated-feeling glossary of ABA jargon, and a primer on the fundamentals of ABA. ABA is a widely used approach for caregivers working with autism and ADHD symptoms. Since it has a foundation in the behavioral psychology of B.F. Skinner, there is a lot of jargon: Discriminative stimulus, establishing operation, positive and negative feedback, and various types of reinforcement schedules. The practice of ABA is also inspired by Skinner. Usefully, having defined a vague unwanted category such as "aggression" into a specific behavior, like "throwing paper airplanes at the teacher when she is writing on the blackboard", the child's caregivers set up a system of monitoring, reward, and punishment to shift the behavior in a normative way.

So what is good is that this is a short (164 page) book which will equip you, as a parent, with the words to not be blustered by various disability professionals, and to demand the assistance that you need. Staring at about 100 pages of ABA reports for my own kids, having a place to start to cut through the boilerplate and figure out what the hell is going on is useful. And I also agree that as a rule, you get what you measure, so clarifying "be good" into discrete behaviors and consistently tracking them is necessary, but not sufficient.

What I am much less convinced of is the validity of ABA as a human practice. I deleted the word 'therapeutic' from earlier in this review because ABA is not therapy. It is dog training. I'll agree there are some behaviors that should be managed, that are so disruptive or self-harming that the needs of the caregivers for order outweigh the needs of the child for expression. But by and large, we should try and approach our children as human beings, and work with them to develop a shared understanding of how to grow up as a flourishing human. ABA is not something you'd do to anyone you want to flourish.

And on a second note, Albert Kearney is a senior scholar with a long record in the field, who has committed one of my personal pet peeves for senior scholars writing books, in that he recommends further reading based on when he finished his dissertation in the 1970s. I love books, I love old books, and there are fields where foundational work was done decades ago and has not been surpassed. Parenting advice is not one of those. Please recommend something written this decade.

Cleric-Historian Chih is on a journey north with the mammoth riders, when her party is waylaid by tigers, which in this universe are more like weretigers, who can assume human form and speak.

Chih avoids getting eaten by saying that they knows the story of a famous romance between a scholar and tiger. The tigers know the story too, but the human version is wrong. If Chih falters in storytelling or angers the audience, they'll be eaten. Getting through the night means getting the story straight.

It's a solid novella, but the first one was perfect, and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain doesn't quite manage to hit that mark. The heart of the story is the romance between the woman and the tiger, but while I'm convinced that people can love things that are very dangerous (we do it all the time), I'm less convinced that tigers can see us as partners and not food.

***

I'm a little more well-disposed towards this book the second time around, more comfortable with the fantastic elements, but not enough to change my assessment.

Samuel Delany was the enfant terrible of the New Wave Science Fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s, with a number of fascinating stories. At some point, he made the shift into being a card-carrying member of the MFA-Writing Workshop-Complex, while keeping up an active role in literary criticism, experimental writing, the paraliterature of pornography, and just generally being himself. Writing has always been the central pillar of Delany's life--there is a fantastic quote where he describes at 20 deciding to be a writer and the toll it has taken on him in terms of everything else, and he's thought deeply about the big question of what it takes to produce a great novel. About Writing is his collected thoughts on the subject.

The first thing to note is that Delany carries deep psychic scarring from 40+ years running MFA workshops and reading umpteen tens of thousands of mediocre stories. In Delany's categorization, there is bad writing, "good" writing, and talented writing, all of which are evaluated by their effect in the reader. Most writing is bad: hasty drafts that barely communicate anything, hampered by blatant cliches and grammatical errors. "Good" writing adheres to a handful of stylistic conventions and has been basically proofread, and is "good" in quotes because it's had all the life beaten out of it. Talented writing is the point of the game, and is surprising, emotive, and artistic.

Talent is subjective, but for Delany it has three key fields. The first is keenness of observation, the ability to see all the necessary sensory, emotional, psychological, historical, political, etc details of the story and then transcribe them into text. The second is an awareness of the structure of this text as it relates to great art that has gone before it, primarily the romantic and modernist canon. And the third is the enthusiasm or spiritedness it takes for an author to see a text through to its end, to pull the story out of their soul like a psychological autodissection. Do this right, and the text produced will not be thin, will not be incoherent, and will be done. After that... well perhaps you have talent and perhaps this text will find its readers. Some things are out of our hands.

That's the writing advice, most of it right there, but there is a lot more in this book, some of which is repetitive (I get it Chip, you've read a lot of Romantic literature that most people have not), some of which I find abstruse, such as meditations on the importance of highly constrained experimental literature like Alphabetical Africa. Thoughts on the maintenance of the literary canon as mediated by the opinions of literary professionals as a group, and the key role of teachability in the late 20th/early 21st century as a criteria for inclusion are interesting, if peripheral. And someone looking for deep thoughts on Black, Gay, or Science Fictional literature will likely come away disappointed, despite Delany's contributions in each of those areas.

This is a long, cantankerous, and somewhat disorganized book. But it's also deep, opinionated, and charming. Original thinking and clear writing are rare gifts, a special genius out of step with the democratic spirit of mass literature as it exists. About Writing is not a path, nor even a guide. Instead it is a moment when the clouds separate and a distant peak reveals itself, glacial cap shining against the azure sky. Not everyone will reach the base, let alone the summit, but to know it's existence, to see it once, is worthy of the human soul.

Fire on the Mountain is a compelling, if some what confused book about the tragedy of the South Canyon Fire. In 1994, 14 firefighters, including 3 Smokejumpers, 9 Prineville Hot Shots, and 2 Helitacks, were killed when the wildfire they were fighting on Storm King Mountain blew up, and overcame a significant portion of the team.

The book is best when it focuses on the men and women who died, especially Don Mackey of the Missoula Smokejumpers. Wildland fire fighting is a tough life. It's a solid, if irregular source of hard cash for tough people from economically depressed western towns. Firefighting has decades of heroic associations, many of which are true. It's about people measuring themselves against immense natural forces, striving at the edge of skill and endurance to save lives. Yet there are immense contradictions in the work. Urban firefighters do save lives, but most calls are simple paramedic incidents. Actually storming into a burning building to pull someone out is rare. Wildfires, by their nature, take place far from human activity. The smart thing to do is to evacuate in a timely manner. Wildland firefighters act mostly to protect property, and the lives that they can save (or doom) are their own.

Yet as someone behind a keyboard, it takes a unique kind of person to jump out of an airplane or climb up a mountain and battle a fire that may be hundreds or thousands of acres with hand tools. The basic work is cutting line, clearing a perimeter of free fuel around the fire so it doesn't spread. The reason why people do it is the purpose, and the people they work besides. Maclean takes us deep into the insular culture of wildland firefighters, and stays as close as he can to the people killed, up to that moment when all knowledge fails. The writing is a moving tribute to the dead.

Yet, the main question of the book is "Why did these people die?". The crude answer is that someone fucked up, and as investigators we have to find out who and why. Starting from the end, the dead failed to flee the fire. While 14 firefighters died, over 30 survived. The people who lived were better positioned and faster to run. Two mistakes belonging to the dead is that they carried their tools far longer than is reasonable, and Mackey going back into the fire to check on the others. Yet, it is hard to fault the urge to support the people you are responsible for, and not abandon the implements of your job. To drop tools and run would be to surrender to panic, and for firefighters to abandon their professional identity.

At another level, the dead should not have been in the position they were in. This is where the narrative begins to falter. I understand that the western flank line, on which 12 of the 14 people died, was an unusual location for a fire line. The firefighters were cutting through dense oak scrub with limited visibility and lookouts were not set. A local weather forecast warned of sudden gusts starting at the exact time the fire blew up, a prediction made that morning which proved accurate within minutes, and which never reached anyone on the mountain. But they key points about the western flank line and the sequence of events desperately needs a good map, and the one at the front of the book lacks scale, time, and the progress of the fire. This is the authorial/editorial choice that knocks this book down from five stars for me.

And at an operational level, wildland firefighting is a lot sloppier than outsiders would expect. Generally, wildfire response faces a problem of scaling. The forces involved on a fire can go from a handful of people and a single helicopter in support to an army of thousands with corresponding air support. Deciding who is in charge and getting everybody up to speed on those changes through the daily and hourly evolution of a fire is a hard problem, and one which the supervisors on the South Canyon Fire absolutely dropped the ball on. While scaling multi-jurisdictional scratch units is always a present challenge, at South Canyon, the two HQs involved, the BLM Grand Junction District and the Western Slope Coordinating Center, cordially (and not so cordially) despised each other, and their decade long feud contributed to getting people killed. These sorts of bureaucratic conflicts can be tricky to write about, and I didn't get much about this one from the book, except that it existed.

And finally, since 1999 when this book has been written, there has been an opened debate about the strategic wisdom of immediate and heavy response to all fires, as has been done in the 20th century. The American West is a pyroscape, an ecology evolved to burn regularly. A century of fuel suppression has meant that what would have been a more-or-less harmless creeping ground fire now has enough fuel to explode up in a devastating firestorm. The canyons full of dry wood and leaves that the firefighters hacked through, and which ultimately killed them, were the consequence of a century of "victory" over fire.

At 25 years on, Fire on the Mountain has not aged into a true classic. It's of the 90s, without explaining the 90s to those who weren't there. The book is good, but the absence of a comprehensive map is inexplicable.

EDIT: https://coloradofirecamp.com/south-canyon-fire/chronology.htm has a chronology with good maps and a clearer technical explanation.

Now we're getting into the meat of the war. 1965-967 covers the most optimistic period of the war, when American ground troops decisively defeated Viet Cong units, but America had not yet lost it's war. The series continues to provide invaluable details and anecdotes about the war, such as the flamboyant Premier Ky, Marine General Lewis Walt taking a bridge from Buddhist rebels, the Fulbright hearings, strategic debates in Hanoi, and the heroism of American soldiers, sailors, and medics, fighting along the DMZ and in the Delta.

Along with this micro-level story-telling, this section provides a clearheaded look at the totality of the American defeat. The numerous pacification plans were failures, never executed with enough knowledge, resources, or persistence. Militarily, the big war put the American strategy of attritting the VC against Giap's strategy of attritting the American will to fight. The war was casualties against time, but since the VC controlled the tempo of the war, they could ensure their losses were bearable simply by delaying action. According to US military statistics, 50% of combat encounters in Vietnam were ambushes, and 88% were initiated by the enemy. These defeats might have been acceptable if they covered for successful nation-building, but on the whole, battles simply forced the civilian population into refugee camps, straining the economy and the political system of the South.

The Great Edition Wars have begun, and because of that, I've been going back and looking at some 4e classics. The first DMG was a really solid book, covering playing psychology and the elements of adventure design. In fact, I thought that it was praiseworthy because it was the first DMG that I'd seen where somebody who had never played an RPG before could pick it up, read it, follow the steps, and run a semi-competent adventure.

DMG2 continues the trend, but focuses on designing more complex Paragon Tier adventures. The strongest parts of the book concern how the build an adventure out of encounters, how to make interesting combats and skill challenges, fixing one of the major problems in the original 4e rules (the example diplomacy skill challenge is brilliant). DMG2 has great advice on how to build organizations, how to reskin and modify game rules, and how to solicit player input to improve your game.

The most interesting parts of the book where the parts devoted to explaining the 4e philosophy. More than anything else, 4e is actually inspired by television. Action occurs in encounters/scenes, 4 or 5 encounters make an adventure/episode, and about 10 adventures makes for a tier/season. The book advises that a scene that doesn't move the adventure forward in some way is essentially wasted, and also proposes using flashbacks, guest characters, dream sequences, and other TV tricks to spice up the adventure. Really, all those people say that 4e is like and MMO haven't read the books, let alone played the game. On the other hand, episodic TV is a very different narrative than the old Gygaxian dungeon crawl. Maybe that's why people don't like 4e.

What I didn't like was the space devoted to traps (I hate traps. 4e had an interesting idea with making them a combination of monster and terrain that can be used by friend or foe), not significantly improving the 4e treasure system, which I still don't understand how to make fun, and finally the lengthy chapter devoted to Sigil. If you like Sigil, you probably already know all about it. If you don't care for Sigil, this section is useless. I'd rather have seen a blurb for the Manual of the Planes, and more ideas for alternate planar hubs or tools to build cities, in the same way that they gave tools to build NPCs, artifacts, and organizations.

War Without Guns is a fascinating little historical artifact. Written by a group of US civilians, the book describes the activities of the United States Operations Mission (USOM), a branch of USAID that sent two advisors into each of the provinces of Vietnam to conduct rural economic development. Published in 1966, it seems to have been aimed to shore up a kind of elite support for involvement in Vietnam as part of a civilizing mission.

The three chapters, respectively authored by advisors in the Mekong Delta, the Central Highlands, and the coast by Da Nang, provide a candid picture of the bucolic life of the Vietnamese peasant, the good work that American advisers are doing in providing building materials, new agricultural tools, and schools and hospitals. There's also a lot of frustration with a Saigon bureaucracy that can't seem to coordinate the simplest of aid projects, such as moving textbooks from warehouses in Saigon to schools around Da Nang, and military operations that fail to dislodge the Viet Cong and provide security for the peasants.

Reading from a distance of fifty years, it's easy to see why USOM failed. They saw their actions as part of an 'economic war' to improve the standard of living of the Vietnamese peasant. Their military colleagues were responsible for the 'war war' to seek out and destroy the Viet Cong. Comparatively, the Viet Cong never lost sight of their objectives in 'political warfare', to create a system of meaning and opportunity for the peasants that lead towards Communism, and to destroy the credibility and legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government. For a variety of reasons (lack of knowledge, lack of authority, short term tours etc), Americans in USOM could not improve their Vietnamese counterparts in the Provincial governments, who always looked up at their masters rather than down towards their constituents. By such was America doomed to fail.

This is an odd but delightful book. General Hackett was an officer of some talents; commander of one of the paratrooper brigades at Arnhem and later NATO commander of the British Army of the Rhine, and these are his thoughts on military virtues and leadership in the guise of a history. As a history book, I can't recommend it all--aside from some very nice colour plates it is Eurocentric in the extreme, skipping from Sparta to Frederick the Great in about a dozen pages. His sociology of the development of the mass army and the modern nation-state is at a mere primer level.

Where this book shines is when Hackett gets personal, and you'll enjoy it to the extend that you enjoy cranky British ramblings. In short, Hackett sees the military as primarily a virtuous institution built around courage, duty, and loyalty. Leadership, the measure of men and the ability to transfer their faith onto a commander to become greater than the individual or the unit, is the supreme requirement of the officer, and one that is separate from the purely technical skills of logistics or tactics. Hackett has some weird and unPC quirks (class differences are essential to the success of the British army. The Wehrmacht was an honorable enemy.), but if you can put those aside, its a lot like having a cup of a tea with a soldier who's learned a lot of lessons the hard way.

This is one of those Vietnam War memoirs that rises above the rest. Ketwig was basically a kid when he enlisted in 1967, hoping to avoid getting drafted and sent to Vietnam the only way an ordinary kid from upstate New York could. The recruiter promised him he'd be fixing trucks in Germany, but he wound up at a military scrap yard near Pleiku, with 365 days of war to survive.

There are the standard scenes; ambushes, terror, dead bodies, Army brutality, whorehouses and drug-fueled benders. Ketwig witnessed a few truly atrocious things, including Green Berets executing a prisoner with a firehose, and truly bizarre, like getting stoned with NVA soldiers on the night Bobby Kennedy was shot. But what makes this book exceptional is the emotional honesty; Ketwig bleeds on the page, working out a decade of suppressed memories, and the cultural context. The boys who went to Vietnam, and they definitely went as boys, were a generation raised on TV, muscle cars, the Beatles and the Space Race. They were people with tremendous dreams, fed into a meat grinder of a war to justify lies. Ketwig has used this book as the foundation of a career speaking out against the military-industrial complex, and he is brave and right to do so.

Since I do read a lot of these, one thing that separates out Ketwig as a volunteer is that he had a second year in the Army, which he spent in Thailand. Thailand in 68 and 69 seems like a fascinating place, and Ketwig explored and appreciated the culture as much as is possible, while also getting his head in some kind of shape to come back to America. Too many of these books are just that one year, And a Hard Rain Fell explains how that year matters in the course of a life.

Music recommendation: The Electric Flag

Know Thine Enemy is really three books in one, and all of them mis-titled.

The 'present' of the book is the mid-90s, as Shirley (psuedonym of Reuel Marc Gerecht, former CIA case officer specializing in the Middle East and presently a moderately hawkish DC policy type) goes on a long dreamed of trip into Iran. I can only describe this as the worst idea ever, as it involves smuggling himself over the border in an excruciatingly small hidden compartment in a truck. Shirley will get to see the land-at night, illuminated by headlights, a few cement cities much like any other in West Asia, truckstop tearooms, small apartments, one trip to the bazaar, and a few ancient tombs and citadels. The penalty for being discovered by a wandering patrol of the Revolutionary Guard would be horrific, but Iran is far from an Iron Curtain police state, and Shirley makes it in and out safely--obviously, or else this would be a very different book.

The second part is a kind of anthropological study of the Iranian national character, and the progress of the Islamic Revolution. Shirley describes himself as someone who fell in love with Persia in college, his love comes through in his description of the language, the poetry, and the history of Iran. This, however, is not a textbook and the cultural study is somewhat haphazard and disorganized. Summing up an entire nation is an exercise in futile generalizations, although it is probably fair to say that though the Iranians may chant "Death to America" sincerely, it is not the only thing that they believe about America, and that Persian culture is shot through with contradictions, sudden reversals of Good and Evil, and conspiracy theories. The Iranians are, in Shirley's estimation, a people with martyrdom in their blood. They have been betrayed by their rulers for centuries: Ottoman and British colonial powers, the corruption and brutality of the Shah, the senseless bloodshed of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. They love Islam, they hate the Mullahs. They despise the Shah, and want him restored. They are more afraid of American intervention than anything else, and hope America will save them. Do not enter the Middle East expecting simple answers.

The third, best, and sadly briefest parts of the book are when Shirley talks about his career as a spy and gripes about the CIA. Some parts of it are as expected, bemoaning the rise of mediocre bureaucrats instead of culturally sensitive field officers. Some of it is quite insightful, like when Shirley dissects his own thought process on encountering an Iranian businessman in a consulate in Berlin, and goes about probing his opinions as a prelude to recruiting him as an agent.

This book is more than the sum of its parts, but the sum depends on how much you believe the Iran soul can be "known", and whether that knowledge is still relevant. I'd say no, and there's just too much filler about being in that damn coffin in the truck for me to recommend this book.