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As the introduction to this book makes clear, so much Vietnam War historiography, both popular and academic, is about assigning blame for the losses, both political and personal. Was it Kennedy or Johnson, hawks or doves, a conscious choice or a historical inevitability? Particularly when this book was written in 2005, at the height of the Iraq War, the question of political responsibility for a war going badly was particularly acute.
Counterfactuals are somewhat absurd. History is a matter of interpreting evidence, but there is only one past. The methodological dispute between counterfactual and virtual history is somewhat arcane, but the method here has some validity. Blight and his co-authors assembled a panel of about 20 distinguished individuals: 3 Kennedy-Johnson officials (low level ones, the only one I'd heard of was Bill Moyers, and that's because he's been a newscaster for decades since being LBJ's press secretary), and evenly matched teams of 'skeptical' academics who believe Kennedy would have acted much as Johnson did, and 'radical' academics who thought he would have done differently, had he lived. Participants read a 1000 page briefing document of mostly primary sources, a selection of which are at the back, and then met for three days of spirited discussion at the Musgrove Conference Center in Georgia.
The book consists of a mix of summarizing commentary by the authors, direct quotes of participants, and primary sources, and is therefore most immediately useful as a model of how historians debate. The questions focused on three key moments in 1961, as Kennedy decides whether to commit to Laos, 1963 as Kennedy decides to remove Diem from power in a CIA-orchestreated coup, and then "long 1964", where Johnson starts Operation Rolling Thunder and eventually deploys the Marines to Da Nang.
The matter of Kennedy vs Johnson is a fascinating one, because the two men were of the same party, had comparable attitudes on muscularly interventionist anti-Communism, and practically the same foreign policy team. The differences, as the skeptics argue, were in psychology and foreign policy expertise. Having been burned by trusting hawkish advisors during the Bay of Pigs, and gained confidence during the Berlin Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was more confident in foreign policy, and more skeptical of good military outcomes. Additionally, while the foreign policy team (Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, etc) was very similar, Kennedy was better at tolerating internal dissent and going against his advisors. Finally, assuming that South Vietnam was teetering on the brink of collapse in 1965, Kennedy would be in his second term and much less vulnerable to public pressure of the 'Who lost China?' variety.
The radicals lay out an argument that Kennedy has made a private decision to limit the American commitment to Vietnam to advisors only, and that he was prepared to let South Vietnam fall before sending in American troops. The skeptical counter is that while this private decision may be in character for Kennedy, there's no actual evidence of it, even in masses of private letters and audio tapes, that Kennedy did massively escalate the advisory commitment between his inauguration and assassination, and that decisions about 'withdrawal' may have been a token 1000 advisors, who were in fact withdrawn and replaced with a new set of 1000 advisors, out of roughly 17000 Americans in-country at the start of 1964.
There's no argument that Johnson made the war a psychological referendum on his own character and resolve, and that he and his administration agonized over the decision for months, while Johnson and Walt Rostow worked tireless to suppressing dissenting views. Ultimately, we'll never have an answer to this question, but the key lesson is that a short victorious war isn't.
Counterfactuals are somewhat absurd. History is a matter of interpreting evidence, but there is only one past. The methodological dispute between counterfactual and virtual history is somewhat arcane, but the method here has some validity. Blight and his co-authors assembled a panel of about 20 distinguished individuals: 3 Kennedy-Johnson officials (low level ones, the only one I'd heard of was Bill Moyers, and that's because he's been a newscaster for decades since being LBJ's press secretary), and evenly matched teams of 'skeptical' academics who believe Kennedy would have acted much as Johnson did, and 'radical' academics who thought he would have done differently, had he lived. Participants read a 1000 page briefing document of mostly primary sources, a selection of which are at the back, and then met for three days of spirited discussion at the Musgrove Conference Center in Georgia.
The book consists of a mix of summarizing commentary by the authors, direct quotes of participants, and primary sources, and is therefore most immediately useful as a model of how historians debate. The questions focused on three key moments in 1961, as Kennedy decides whether to commit to Laos, 1963 as Kennedy decides to remove Diem from power in a CIA-orchestreated coup, and then "long 1964", where Johnson starts Operation Rolling Thunder and eventually deploys the Marines to Da Nang.
The matter of Kennedy vs Johnson is a fascinating one, because the two men were of the same party, had comparable attitudes on muscularly interventionist anti-Communism, and practically the same foreign policy team. The differences, as the skeptics argue, were in psychology and foreign policy expertise. Having been burned by trusting hawkish advisors during the Bay of Pigs, and gained confidence during the Berlin Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was more confident in foreign policy, and more skeptical of good military outcomes. Additionally, while the foreign policy team (Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, etc) was very similar, Kennedy was better at tolerating internal dissent and going against his advisors. Finally, assuming that South Vietnam was teetering on the brink of collapse in 1965, Kennedy would be in his second term and much less vulnerable to public pressure of the 'Who lost China?' variety.
The radicals lay out an argument that Kennedy has made a private decision to limit the American commitment to Vietnam to advisors only, and that he was prepared to let South Vietnam fall before sending in American troops. The skeptical counter is that while this private decision may be in character for Kennedy, there's no actual evidence of it, even in masses of private letters and audio tapes, that Kennedy did massively escalate the advisory commitment between his inauguration and assassination, and that decisions about 'withdrawal' may have been a token 1000 advisors, who were in fact withdrawn and replaced with a new set of 1000 advisors, out of roughly 17000 Americans in-country at the start of 1964.
There's no argument that Johnson made the war a psychological referendum on his own character and resolve, and that he and his administration agonized over the decision for months, while Johnson and Walt Rostow worked tireless to suppressing dissenting views. Ultimately, we'll never have an answer to this question, but the key lesson is that a short victorious war isn't.
Anybody who's been following the news for the past couple years or decades knows that we're on the cusp of one of those terrifying revolutions in military affairs, where the hard-won skills of previous generations gets shredded by new technologies, along with the flower of whatever generation has the misfortune to be on the frontlines. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is clearly the first major action, but before that, there was the almost forgotten 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. This book, written in 2021 and published a few weeks before Russian columns headed towards Kiev and were turned back by Bayraktar drones and Javelin missiles, is a mixed bag: a decent summary of a conflict not much covered in the west, breathless and naive transcription of defense industry brochures, and a muddled sketch towards a futurism of the "kill web".
But first, some music!
"Atəş" - a music video released by the Azerbaijani military on the eve of the war, which 'unfortunately slaps' according to a Vice article on the dueling songs of the conflict
First the war. Nagorno-Karabakh was an ethnically Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, which had been an autonomous region since Armenia won the first war in the 90s after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan, flush with oil wealth, spent years preparing for a rapid war of conquest, investing in Turkish and Israeli drones and loitering munitions. In the runup to the war, Azerbaijan's military budget was comparable to Armenia's GDP. Armenia's strategy rested on the strength of traditional defense in mountainous terrain, and hopes of intervention from Russia. At the end of September 2020, Azerbaijan provoked a casus belli and attacked. The coordinated effort involved a wave of obsolete An-2 biplanes converted into flying bombs to activate the Armenian air defense network, which was then comprehensively destroyed by Bayraktars and loitering munitions. With Armenian air defenses degraded and destroyed (and notably, the Soviet-era SAM systems seemed totally unable to deal with relatively low and slow flying Bayraktars), Azerbaijani drones worked down the target list of artillery, command, tanks, and infantry bunkers. Meanwhile, conventional armored forces made attacks through the mountain passes, and Azerbaijani special forces infiltrated and seized the strategic town of Shusha, which dominated the M-12 highway. After 44 days, Russia negotiated a ceasefire. Armenia suffered a crushing defeat, both sides sustained real casualties, approximately 3000 out of 17000 soldiers for Azerbaijan, and 4000 casualties out of an unpublished force for Armenia, and tens of thousands of civilians of both ethnicities were forced from their home.
The strategic narrative that Antal pushes is the kill web, a distributed, automated, rapid and precise expansion of the kill chain that links detection of a target to a weapon system and its destruction. In particular, drones like the Bayraktar enable a low-cost combined reconnaissance-strike package, where a single platform can spot targets, fire missiles at them, and accurately evaluate the results. But this seems like a jargon laden excuse to note that traditional infantry and armor have limited range, undirected artillery is random, and jet pilots are notorious for overclaiming the effects of bombing. The defensive counterpart to the kill web is masking, an all spectrum use of camouflage and mobility to prevent the enemy from acquiring your own weapon systems.
The tech is a read of drones and electronic warfare circa the late 2019s, at about the level that you might get from skimming a Lockheed Martin press release. Antal is obsessed with active camouflage systems, everything from hexagon panels of Peltier junctions to scramble IR silhouettes to metamaterial cloaks that would bend light around soldiers. Plato wrote about Gyges' ring as a cautionary tale, but it would be strategically useful.
My critical take is that we are definitely moving towards a new fighting of war, but kill webs and masking are insufficient theories. Some serious questions I have are:
1) Kill webs rely on high-bandwidth video transmission, while masking requires minimizing electromagnetic signatures. Who transmits and under what circumstances? How can jammers survive against home-on-jam anti-radiation missiles?
2) War is economic. A $10,000 drone is not worth shooting with a $100,000 interceptor, unless firing would protect a $1,000,000 tank or similar asset (and scale for more sophisticated weapons and strategic targets). What is the economic balance of offense and defense?
3) Guided weapons stocks run out very rapidly in most recorded conflicts. How can Western militaries ensure both adequate munitions stockpiles and the ability to rapidly replenish them?
4) What level of command proper for integration of various drone forces? Platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division. Should drones be organic to fire/maneuver units, or a supporting enabler, or both?
5) Are FPV drones the future, or is there a hard counter in terms of jamming, directed energy weapons, or just old fashioned airburst shells?
But first, some music!
"Atəş" - a music video released by the Azerbaijani military on the eve of the war, which 'unfortunately slaps' according to a Vice article on the dueling songs of the conflict
First the war. Nagorno-Karabakh was an ethnically Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, which had been an autonomous region since Armenia won the first war in the 90s after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan, flush with oil wealth, spent years preparing for a rapid war of conquest, investing in Turkish and Israeli drones and loitering munitions. In the runup to the war, Azerbaijan's military budget was comparable to Armenia's GDP. Armenia's strategy rested on the strength of traditional defense in mountainous terrain, and hopes of intervention from Russia. At the end of September 2020, Azerbaijan provoked a casus belli and attacked. The coordinated effort involved a wave of obsolete An-2 biplanes converted into flying bombs to activate the Armenian air defense network, which was then comprehensively destroyed by Bayraktars and loitering munitions. With Armenian air defenses degraded and destroyed (and notably, the Soviet-era SAM systems seemed totally unable to deal with relatively low and slow flying Bayraktars), Azerbaijani drones worked down the target list of artillery, command, tanks, and infantry bunkers. Meanwhile, conventional armored forces made attacks through the mountain passes, and Azerbaijani special forces infiltrated and seized the strategic town of Shusha, which dominated the M-12 highway. After 44 days, Russia negotiated a ceasefire. Armenia suffered a crushing defeat, both sides sustained real casualties, approximately 3000 out of 17000 soldiers for Azerbaijan, and 4000 casualties out of an unpublished force for Armenia, and tens of thousands of civilians of both ethnicities were forced from their home.
The strategic narrative that Antal pushes is the kill web, a distributed, automated, rapid and precise expansion of the kill chain that links detection of a target to a weapon system and its destruction. In particular, drones like the Bayraktar enable a low-cost combined reconnaissance-strike package, where a single platform can spot targets, fire missiles at them, and accurately evaluate the results. But this seems like a jargon laden excuse to note that traditional infantry and armor have limited range, undirected artillery is random, and jet pilots are notorious for overclaiming the effects of bombing. The defensive counterpart to the kill web is masking, an all spectrum use of camouflage and mobility to prevent the enemy from acquiring your own weapon systems.
The tech is a read of drones and electronic warfare circa the late 2019s, at about the level that you might get from skimming a Lockheed Martin press release. Antal is obsessed with active camouflage systems, everything from hexagon panels of Peltier junctions to scramble IR silhouettes to metamaterial cloaks that would bend light around soldiers. Plato wrote about Gyges' ring as a cautionary tale, but it would be strategically useful.
My critical take is that we are definitely moving towards a new fighting of war, but kill webs and masking are insufficient theories. Some serious questions I have are:
1) Kill webs rely on high-bandwidth video transmission, while masking requires minimizing electromagnetic signatures. Who transmits and under what circumstances? How can jammers survive against home-on-jam anti-radiation missiles?
2) War is economic. A $10,000 drone is not worth shooting with a $100,000 interceptor, unless firing would protect a $1,000,000 tank or similar asset (and scale for more sophisticated weapons and strategic targets). What is the economic balance of offense and defense?
3) Guided weapons stocks run out very rapidly in most recorded conflicts. How can Western militaries ensure both adequate munitions stockpiles and the ability to rapidly replenish them?
4) What level of command proper for integration of various drone forces? Platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division. Should drones be organic to fire/maneuver units, or a supporting enabler, or both?
5) Are FPV drones the future, or is there a hard counter in terms of jamming, directed energy weapons, or just old fashioned airburst shells?
Guerillas is a fascinating survey of five guerillas movements researched between 1988 and 1992: the mujahedin of Afghanistan, the FMLN of El Salvador, the Karen of Burma, the Polisario of Western Sahara, and a group of young Palestinians fighting against Israel in the Gaza Strip.
At it's best, it lets the fighters speak, lets the clarity of their need to remake the world come through. Guerilla life is hard life, one of deprivation and sacrifice, but the idea of a better world on the other side of the struggle is worth everything. These are people who will never give up.
Combat is random, somewhat distant. The FMLN has a liberated zone, occasionally bombed by government forces. The Polisario have an immense wall across a harsh desert. The mujahedin engage in close combat with government forces, while the Karen are pushed back by superior firepower. The Palestinians work amongst Israelis, but live separate lives, with violence spilling over from long tensions of occupation all around: mob violence met with massive firepower.
35 years on, the guerillas have met with mixed results. The FMLN became one of El Salvador's major parties, and even won control of government, thought the president was forced to flee on corruption charges and gang violence is worse than the civil war. The mujahedin conquered Afghanistan, lost Afghanistan, conquered it again; and the country has only suffered. The Polisario and the Karen bouth brokered ceasefires, and returned to the battlefield around 2020. And I think everybody knows how the Palestinian intifada has gone.
Other reviews have noted some of the flaws. Anderson almost entirely overlooks women, exoticizes his subjects, and takes public relations, particularly from the media savvy Polisario, on face value. Still, this is some fantastic non-fiction reporting.
At it's best, it lets the fighters speak, lets the clarity of their need to remake the world come through. Guerilla life is hard life, one of deprivation and sacrifice, but the idea of a better world on the other side of the struggle is worth everything. These are people who will never give up.
Combat is random, somewhat distant. The FMLN has a liberated zone, occasionally bombed by government forces. The Polisario have an immense wall across a harsh desert. The mujahedin engage in close combat with government forces, while the Karen are pushed back by superior firepower. The Palestinians work amongst Israelis, but live separate lives, with violence spilling over from long tensions of occupation all around: mob violence met with massive firepower.
35 years on, the guerillas have met with mixed results. The FMLN became one of El Salvador's major parties, and even won control of government, thought the president was forced to flee on corruption charges and gang violence is worse than the civil war. The mujahedin conquered Afghanistan, lost Afghanistan, conquered it again; and the country has only suffered. The Polisario and the Karen bouth brokered ceasefires, and returned to the battlefield around 2020. And I think everybody knows how the Palestinian intifada has gone.
Other reviews have noted some of the flaws. Anderson almost entirely overlooks women, exoticizes his subjects, and takes public relations, particularly from the media savvy Polisario, on face value. Still, this is some fantastic non-fiction reporting.
Nolo is a long-time publisher of DIY manuals for people with legal issues. How to Do Your Own Divorce in California was an instant classic back in 1971, since I guess a lot of people woke up with some bad hangovers from the Summer of Love, and Divorce Without Court is an update for the 21st century.
The writing isn't as engaging as I Just Want This Done, but it makes a strong case for not going to trial, and provides some useful advice and checklists about how to pick a mediator and what to expect at various stages in the mediation process.
The writing isn't as engaging as I Just Want This Done, but it makes a strong case for not going to trial, and provides some useful advice and checklists about how to pick a mediator and what to expect at various stages in the mediation process.
Lieutenant Fusilier is a love letter to Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series, with the central conceits transposing the setting to space and replacing the main character with a sapphic robot. It's a rollicking adventure which approaches and then tragically backs away from some hard questions in service to the source material.
Sean Bean as Sharpe. I honestly didn't know dudes could look this slutty
Theodora Fusilier is a soldier in a future British Army which got frozen in amber at the Battle of Waterloo. Optical muskets, bullet resistant red coats, purchased commissions, and most importantly mechanical soldiers. The army is Theodor/a Fusiliers, of varying models depending on introductory date, with human officers. Our narrator has spent her entire career saving up the 700 pounds sterling to be commissioned as a lieutenant, which is Simply Not Done. No formal rule against it, but mechanicals are designed to serve, not to lead.
The first half of the book is a social comedy as Dora deals with being very much out of water. The social life of the regiment centers around the mess hall, which is a difficult place for a being that doesn't eat or drink. While her fellow human officers are distant, the other Fusiliers are actively hostile to the idea, including my favorite character, Theda the Prussian, who despises Theodora for doing something she can't, and tries to organize a minor mutiny. Meanwhile there are minor issues like finding a date for the Duke's ball and learning to fence properly.
(Aside: The regiment includes exchange soldiers from other nations. Theda carriers her needle gun rather than the issue musket, though in this case the weapons are a personal railgun firing a variety of needle slugs and an optical musket is basically a tunable laser cannon than can melt a contemporary tank with a full power shot. Another notable exchange is the American Theo Rifleman, who is very clear that he isn't a soldier, he's a Marine. If you laughed, this book is probably for you.)
But the life of a soldier isn't all dances and social awkwardness. An archeological team on a nearby world trips something, and the regiment is dispatched to save the civilians from an enemy deemed the Stalkers, crab-like bipeds with extremely tough physiologies and just enough brains to exercise tactics. Stalkers and Fusiliers are even matches for each other, and in the conflict, Dora's unit is forced to retreat through an alien gateway, which strands them on a world with genuine sentient aliens at about a 19th century level of technical and social development. Dora has to navigate first contact and her own ethics to get her unit back home in one piece.
Napoleonics in spaaaaace is a popular enough framework that I can think of at least three series offhand (Honor Harrington, Nicolas Seafort, Alexis Carew) that are transparently inspired by the Horatio Hornblower series. Lieutenant Fusilier leans into the absurdity and does it well. While the aesthetics are early 19th century, the actual nuts-and-bolts make a cohesive whole. There are gaps in the society's technology: space travel, artificial people, and energy weapons are commonplace; radio is a novel and flaky technology. While a lot of these books uncritically romanticize the politics of the past (cough, David Weber, cough), Chappell knows that imperialism and strong social striations are awful.
Making the entire economy work via mechanical people is a bit of a dodge to avoid some hard questions that drive dramatic tension. The mechanicals are an ideal working class, designed such that they're only unhappy when they don't have work, and with minimal material needs. That something is deeply off about this universe, and that Dora doesn't have enough experience to figure it out is lampshaded, but everyone is so fundamentally bloody decent that tensions analogous to those caused by Richard Sharpe's low social origins hit with padded blows. No one doubts that mechanicals are people, (almost) no one doubts that Dora can make tactically sound choices, and the question of "Should there be a Field Marshall Dora?" is left hanging, along with "And what the hell happened to all the regular people?"
The other missed opportunity is Dora's extreme psychological repression. It's natural for her character and it does work in some aspects, but it also blunts the two romances, one with mechanical romance writer Bea, and the other with Diana Kennedy, a human artillery lieutenant. People who shut down their emotions in service to professional advancement are very real, but I was hoping for some more passion. Dora has a heart of steel, literally (okay, technically I recall the mechanicals are air-cooled and battery powered, so no heart-analog, but you get the point), but the motivation for Dora's choice to be an officer, and the sacrifice it takes rings hollow against the stated motivation to prove herself and to get a human out of harm's way. I feel like there's a missing motivation here, or an opportunity to play with how mechanicals are designed to a purpose and their personalities implanted, which deserves more love.
Ultimately, I'm pushing back on these two points because this book is really good, and could be great. Of this microgenre, it sits right up there with the first four Honor Harrington books, and is soundly better than the rest I mentioned above. I can't say I actually know Erika Chappell, except in a parasocial internet way, but her RPGs Patrol, Flying Circus, and the upcoming Torchship are genius games about the toll of combat and the complexities of finding where duty lies. I also know what she thinks about authors who use subtext (they are all COWARDS), and I'm excited to see where book 2 takes our lovably useless gay robot hero.
Sean Bean as Sharpe. I honestly didn't know dudes could look this slutty
Theodora Fusilier is a soldier in a future British Army which got frozen in amber at the Battle of Waterloo. Optical muskets, bullet resistant red coats, purchased commissions, and most importantly mechanical soldiers. The army is Theodor/a Fusiliers, of varying models depending on introductory date, with human officers. Our narrator has spent her entire career saving up the 700 pounds sterling to be commissioned as a lieutenant, which is Simply Not Done. No formal rule against it, but mechanicals are designed to serve, not to lead.
The first half of the book is a social comedy as Dora deals with being very much out of water. The social life of the regiment centers around the mess hall, which is a difficult place for a being that doesn't eat or drink. While her fellow human officers are distant, the other Fusiliers are actively hostile to the idea, including my favorite character, Theda the Prussian, who despises Theodora for doing something she can't, and tries to organize a minor mutiny. Meanwhile there are minor issues like finding a date for the Duke's ball and learning to fence properly.
(Aside: The regiment includes exchange soldiers from other nations. Theda carriers her needle gun rather than the issue musket, though in this case the weapons are a personal railgun firing a variety of needle slugs and an optical musket is basically a tunable laser cannon than can melt a contemporary tank with a full power shot. Another notable exchange is the American Theo Rifleman, who is very clear that he isn't a soldier, he's a Marine. If you laughed, this book is probably for you.)
But the life of a soldier isn't all dances and social awkwardness. An archeological team on a nearby world trips something, and the regiment is dispatched to save the civilians from an enemy deemed the Stalkers, crab-like bipeds with extremely tough physiologies and just enough brains to exercise tactics. Stalkers and Fusiliers are even matches for each other, and in the conflict, Dora's unit is forced to retreat through an alien gateway, which strands them on a world with genuine sentient aliens at about a 19th century level of technical and social development. Dora has to navigate first contact and her own ethics to get her unit back home in one piece.
Napoleonics in spaaaaace is a popular enough framework that I can think of at least three series offhand (Honor Harrington, Nicolas Seafort, Alexis Carew) that are transparently inspired by the Horatio Hornblower series. Lieutenant Fusilier leans into the absurdity and does it well. While the aesthetics are early 19th century, the actual nuts-and-bolts make a cohesive whole. There are gaps in the society's technology: space travel, artificial people, and energy weapons are commonplace; radio is a novel and flaky technology. While a lot of these books uncritically romanticize the politics of the past (cough, David Weber, cough), Chappell knows that imperialism and strong social striations are awful.
Making the entire economy work via mechanical people is a bit of a dodge to avoid some hard questions that drive dramatic tension. The mechanicals are an ideal working class, designed such that they're only unhappy when they don't have work, and with minimal material needs. That something is deeply off about this universe, and that Dora doesn't have enough experience to figure it out is lampshaded, but everyone is so fundamentally bloody decent that tensions analogous to those caused by Richard Sharpe's low social origins hit with padded blows. No one doubts that mechanicals are people, (almost) no one doubts that Dora can make tactically sound choices, and the question of "Should there be a Field Marshall Dora?" is left hanging, along with "And what the hell happened to all the regular people?"
The other missed opportunity is Dora's extreme psychological repression. It's natural for her character and it does work in some aspects, but it also blunts the two romances, one with mechanical romance writer Bea, and the other with Diana Kennedy, a human artillery lieutenant. People who shut down their emotions in service to professional advancement are very real, but I was hoping for some more passion. Dora has a heart of steel, literally (okay, technically I recall the mechanicals are air-cooled and battery powered, so no heart-analog, but you get the point), but the motivation for Dora's choice to be an officer, and the sacrifice it takes rings hollow against the stated motivation to prove herself and to get a human out of harm's way. I feel like there's a missing motivation here, or an opportunity to play with how mechanicals are designed to a purpose and their personalities implanted, which deserves more love.
Ultimately, I'm pushing back on these two points because this book is really good, and could be great. Of this microgenre, it sits right up there with the first four Honor Harrington books, and is soundly better than the rest I mentioned above. I can't say I actually know Erika Chappell, except in a parasocial internet way, but her RPGs Patrol, Flying Circus, and the upcoming Torchship are genius games about the toll of combat and the complexities of finding where duty lies. I also know what she thinks about authors who use subtext (they are all COWARDS), and I'm excited to see where book 2 takes our lovably useless gay robot hero.
informative
There's a lot of pressure on the college years. It's the best four years of your life, where you meet valuable friends and partners and make the relationships that'll impact the rest of your life. You'll learn ancient wisdom, postmodern theory, difficult math, and the latest scientific break-throughs. We expect a lot from colleges, especially elite ones. They should admit the best students, without compromising the diversity that is America's strength. The system should be fair, but also allow for human imperfection and holistic assessment. Oh, but what we really want is the assurance that our Precious Child Will Go To The College of Their Dreams, and all those other loud, ugly, stupid teenagers won't knock them out of a slot at Harvard.
The decision about where to go to college is one of the most consequential in a person's life. And that admission decision will be made in less than eight minutes by two poorly paid bureaucrats.
Excuse me. This is the part where if I were closer to the admission process than a decade in any direction I would start laughing until I became the JONKLER.
Selingo is a journalist and editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education (my source for all the news fit for a Vice-Chancellor of Innovation Practices), and he combines his deep knowledge of the field with an insider's study at three schools: University of Washington, Davidson, and Emory. Admissions is a fraught topic, with the Varsity Blues cheating scandal where wealthy B-list celebrities hired a con artist to gin up athletic admits for their fail children, and the ongoing saga of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which argues that Harvard is discriminating against highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of white legacies (something like a third of Harvard is a legacy admit).
Selingo categorizes colleges into sellers, the big name-brand schools that you've heard of, and buyers, which are everybody else. Sellers get too many applicants and have to be incredibly selective, while buyers get too few and have to figure out to fill their classes. There's a similar divide in applicants, with drivers applying to over ten schools, having high parental involvement, and a whole industry of college counseling against passengers, who don't understand the unspoken rules of the game and apply to just a few schools, often with mediocre grades and test scores.
Most of the anxiety is on the part of drivers trying to get into seller schools, and the simply fact that there are too many straight-A students with perfect SATs for all the spaces at Harvard and Stanford. What is mixed good news is that colleges attempt to weigh students against the opportunities available to them at high school, and also that all that high school CV building pays off. The kid from an inner city or rural high school with minimal extracurriculars and APs has a chance to catch the eye of an admissions officer where that exact same file from a wealthy suburban school district would get an instant rejection. Conversely, while you can't buy a seat at an Ivy League school, all that prep does work, and something like just 20% of high schools supply most of the students to elite colleges.
The most important part of the application is the college transcript. The good news is that 9th grade doesn't really matter, but colleges want to see students taking a hard course load and doing well at it. Take as much calculus as you can, and don't neglect physics and chemistry if you're pre-med. Poor grades or an easy cruising course load can sink an application. Doing well at school, as far as your school allows, is something which is not as easy to grade.
There are a few side doors. Athletics can be one, since coaches have limited discretion to offer slots to otherwise qualified candidates. Amherst (1,855 students) has more college athletes than University of Alabama (31,670 undergraduates, and football as religion). Contrary to what March Madness and Bowl Season would have you believe, student athletes are overwhelming rich white kids in sports that no one watches. The impact of student athletics is mixed, some studies say that they have lower grades and are otherwise uninvolved with campus life, while others say athletics is valuable. As a chubby nerd myself, I'd say cancel them all and let god sort it out, but they jocks may disagree.
For the data driven, college rankings like those produced by US News and World Reports are key, but the rankings have introduced their own perverse incentives. Selectivity, the percentage of students who apply that are admitted, and yield, the percentage admitted that say yes, are key parts of most metrics. So colleges attempt to lock in students with early decision, which requires a student to agree to attend a college in December before most applications close. This boosts yields, and helps the college increase selectivity for the general admissions. While admissions officers interviewed talk an idealistic game about shaping the class and holistic diversity, at the end of the day a college is a business, and the goal is to figure out who can pay increasingly steep tuition. One secret that Selingo reveals is that for the typical upper-middle class student, merit financial aid is available, but likely only a "buyer" school, and not the "sellers" that they've applied to.
But the part that makes me want to start injecting Joker venom into random passerbys and taunting the dark knight is that college is likely the most expensive purchase that a person will make, with the exception of buying a home, and it's done on no information! We check reviews when we buy a phone or car, we get houses inspected, but 18 year-olds sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive education based on gut feeling and reputation. It is essentially impossible to figure out what college costs, until you're well into April. Bad ideas driven by college marketing and teenage emotions, like a desire for distance from family or a classic red brick campus experience, may blind family to better and cheaper schools.
The dirty secret is that most colleges will be just fine for most students. Systematic surveys show that while grades and SATs are a decent predictor of life-time earnings, where you go to college has no effect. The true elite, Fortune 500 CEOs, bankable talent, national politicians, have their own networks of privilege and influence which overlap with elite universities, but which can't be cracked simply by going to Yale. And as much as these schools compete on US News and World Reports rankings, undergraduate education is a tertiary concern, after the endowment, research, and the professional schools. What you do, an attitude of flexible exploration while also committing to a mastering a distinct field of knowledge, matters far more than where you do.
Just for the love of all that is holy turn you assignments in.
The decision about where to go to college is one of the most consequential in a person's life. And that admission decision will be made in less than eight minutes by two poorly paid bureaucrats.
Excuse me. This is the part where if I were closer to the admission process than a decade in any direction I would start laughing until I became the JONKLER.
Selingo is a journalist and editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education (my source for all the news fit for a Vice-Chancellor of Innovation Practices), and he combines his deep knowledge of the field with an insider's study at three schools: University of Washington, Davidson, and Emory. Admissions is a fraught topic, with the Varsity Blues cheating scandal where wealthy B-list celebrities hired a con artist to gin up athletic admits for their fail children, and the ongoing saga of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which argues that Harvard is discriminating against highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of white legacies (something like a third of Harvard is a legacy admit).
Selingo categorizes colleges into sellers, the big name-brand schools that you've heard of, and buyers, which are everybody else. Sellers get too many applicants and have to be incredibly selective, while buyers get too few and have to figure out to fill their classes. There's a similar divide in applicants, with drivers applying to over ten schools, having high parental involvement, and a whole industry of college counseling against passengers, who don't understand the unspoken rules of the game and apply to just a few schools, often with mediocre grades and test scores.
Most of the anxiety is on the part of drivers trying to get into seller schools, and the simply fact that there are too many straight-A students with perfect SATs for all the spaces at Harvard and Stanford. What is mixed good news is that colleges attempt to weigh students against the opportunities available to them at high school, and also that all that high school CV building pays off. The kid from an inner city or rural high school with minimal extracurriculars and APs has a chance to catch the eye of an admissions officer where that exact same file from a wealthy suburban school district would get an instant rejection. Conversely, while you can't buy a seat at an Ivy League school, all that prep does work, and something like just 20% of high schools supply most of the students to elite colleges.
The most important part of the application is the college transcript. The good news is that 9th grade doesn't really matter, but colleges want to see students taking a hard course load and doing well at it. Take as much calculus as you can, and don't neglect physics and chemistry if you're pre-med. Poor grades or an easy cruising course load can sink an application. Doing well at school, as far as your school allows, is something which is not as easy to grade.
There are a few side doors. Athletics can be one, since coaches have limited discretion to offer slots to otherwise qualified candidates. Amherst (1,855 students) has more college athletes than University of Alabama (31,670 undergraduates, and football as religion). Contrary to what March Madness and Bowl Season would have you believe, student athletes are overwhelming rich white kids in sports that no one watches. The impact of student athletics is mixed, some studies say that they have lower grades and are otherwise uninvolved with campus life, while others say athletics is valuable. As a chubby nerd myself, I'd say cancel them all and let god sort it out, but they jocks may disagree.
For the data driven, college rankings like those produced by US News and World Reports are key, but the rankings have introduced their own perverse incentives. Selectivity, the percentage of students who apply that are admitted, and yield, the percentage admitted that say yes, are key parts of most metrics. So colleges attempt to lock in students with early decision, which requires a student to agree to attend a college in December before most applications close. This boosts yields, and helps the college increase selectivity for the general admissions. While admissions officers interviewed talk an idealistic game about shaping the class and holistic diversity, at the end of the day a college is a business, and the goal is to figure out who can pay increasingly steep tuition. One secret that Selingo reveals is that for the typical upper-middle class student, merit financial aid is available, but likely only a "buyer" school, and not the "sellers" that they've applied to.
But the part that makes me want to start injecting Joker venom into random passerbys and taunting the dark knight is that college is likely the most expensive purchase that a person will make, with the exception of buying a home, and it's done on no information! We check reviews when we buy a phone or car, we get houses inspected, but 18 year-olds sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive education based on gut feeling and reputation. It is essentially impossible to figure out what college costs, until you're well into April. Bad ideas driven by college marketing and teenage emotions, like a desire for distance from family or a classic red brick campus experience, may blind family to better and cheaper schools.
The dirty secret is that most colleges will be just fine for most students. Systematic surveys show that while grades and SATs are a decent predictor of life-time earnings, where you go to college has no effect. The true elite, Fortune 500 CEOs, bankable talent, national politicians, have their own networks of privilege and influence which overlap with elite universities, but which can't be cracked simply by going to Yale. And as much as these schools compete on US News and World Reports rankings, undergraduate education is a tertiary concern, after the endowment, research, and the professional schools. What you do, an attitude of flexible exploration while also committing to a mastering a distinct field of knowledge, matters far more than where you do.
Just for the love of all that is holy turn you assignments in.
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
How many awful meetings have you attended? Disoriented business planning sessions that end with no plan; bloviating academic conferences and charity galas; empty rituals of religious services and family feasts. Don't you owe it to your community and yourself to stop wasting time and do better?
Parker is a professional facilitator specializing in dialogue across fraught groups, and this book is a distillation of her wisdom and experience. It is fantastic, a 21st century version of Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People, and absolutely critical reading for anybody who plans to host an event of any sort. I'd place it next to Wiggins and McTighe Understanding by Design for most impactful professional advice I've encountered.
Parker's method is fairly straight forward, with a few counter-intuitive wrinkles. The first thing to do is to figure out the real purpose of an event, which may not be obvious. A couple might want to throw a dinner party to repay a prior invitation, build new friendships, and catch up with old friends, but odds are that the dinner which tries to do all three will be a flop. Similarly, an organization like a business or an academic disciplinary network, should figure out what its goals actually are. A corporate offsite with a goal like "have fun in a different setting" is pointless. Ending the feud between sales and marketing is worth trying.
Having figured out the what of your event, the next step is the 'who'. Parker advocates for four reasonable scales of events (6, 15, 30, and 150 people), and considered inclusion and exclusion. The best events aren't just "everybody who shows up", but the right people. And while there is a natural urge to add more people, especially for an existing group the goals and well-being of the group should be balanced against the tendency for unconsidered expansion.
Next is getting the guests in the right mood. A host should use their generous authority to protect, equalize, and connect guests. Do this, and people will feel special and invested. Abdicating authority in the interest of being chill does not erase power, it simply lets the most strong-willed guests bend the event to their own ends, with harm to the experience as a whole and to other guests. And similarly, don't go mad with power. If the purpose of your event is to gather audiences to celebrate you and your organization, perhaps try something different.
Parker is a big fan of temporary rules to create special circumstances at an event. Traditional codes of etiquette are a double edge blade, which excludes those who haven't been raised to the unspoken rules, while also serving to blunt realness in the spirit of 19th century nicety. "No phones" is a simple liminal rule, while odd dress codes and focused limits on conversation like "no work talk" can avoid overly rehearsed stump speeches and elevator pitches in favor of weirder sprout speeches. Sharing personal stories is a favored ploy to build human connections which can be leveraged to make cognitive and social breakthroughs later on.
And finally, the little stuff, like logistics. Events begin and end with a certain energy, and that energy should never be dissipated on details like travel arrangements or what's for dinner. There's a good ritual element to closing down an event, which a host should attend to with equal care as to the beginning.
For all my griping, I have been to some good events, and Parker's advice resonates with the ones that succeeded. Coming from a game studies and tabletop gaming background, much of the advice cross-applies for running an immersive game session. Now that we're emerging from our featureless voids, it'll be good to have some structure to the things we're going back to. Try this book, I promise that it can't hurt the thing that you're planning.
Parker is a professional facilitator specializing in dialogue across fraught groups, and this book is a distillation of her wisdom and experience. It is fantastic, a 21st century version of Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People, and absolutely critical reading for anybody who plans to host an event of any sort. I'd place it next to Wiggins and McTighe Understanding by Design for most impactful professional advice I've encountered.
Parker's method is fairly straight forward, with a few counter-intuitive wrinkles. The first thing to do is to figure out the real purpose of an event, which may not be obvious. A couple might want to throw a dinner party to repay a prior invitation, build new friendships, and catch up with old friends, but odds are that the dinner which tries to do all three will be a flop. Similarly, an organization like a business or an academic disciplinary network, should figure out what its goals actually are. A corporate offsite with a goal like "have fun in a different setting" is pointless. Ending the feud between sales and marketing is worth trying.
Having figured out the what of your event, the next step is the 'who'. Parker advocates for four reasonable scales of events (6, 15, 30, and 150 people), and considered inclusion and exclusion. The best events aren't just "everybody who shows up", but the right people. And while there is a natural urge to add more people, especially for an existing group the goals and well-being of the group should be balanced against the tendency for unconsidered expansion.
Next is getting the guests in the right mood. A host should use their generous authority to protect, equalize, and connect guests. Do this, and people will feel special and invested. Abdicating authority in the interest of being chill does not erase power, it simply lets the most strong-willed guests bend the event to their own ends, with harm to the experience as a whole and to other guests. And similarly, don't go mad with power. If the purpose of your event is to gather audiences to celebrate you and your organization, perhaps try something different.
Parker is a big fan of temporary rules to create special circumstances at an event. Traditional codes of etiquette are a double edge blade, which excludes those who haven't been raised to the unspoken rules, while also serving to blunt realness in the spirit of 19th century nicety. "No phones" is a simple liminal rule, while odd dress codes and focused limits on conversation like "no work talk" can avoid overly rehearsed stump speeches and elevator pitches in favor of weirder sprout speeches. Sharing personal stories is a favored ploy to build human connections which can be leveraged to make cognitive and social breakthroughs later on.
And finally, the little stuff, like logistics. Events begin and end with a certain energy, and that energy should never be dissipated on details like travel arrangements or what's for dinner. There's a good ritual element to closing down an event, which a host should attend to with equal care as to the beginning.
For all my griping, I have been to some good events, and Parker's advice resonates with the ones that succeeded. Coming from a game studies and tabletop gaming background, much of the advice cross-applies for running an immersive game session. Now that we're emerging from our featureless voids, it'll be good to have some structure to the things we're going back to. Try this book, I promise that it can't hurt the thing that you're planning.
informative
slow-paced
This was what the library had at a moment of crisis, when my five month old decided that rather than sleep through the night he would scream continuously until exhausted. After the second such night, we had to do something.
On the plus side, Dr. Weissbluth had simple clear advice which worked. According to his long experience in the field, most babies with sleep problems are simply overtired. To avoid this, the cure is to move bedtime up, even to as early as 5:30 if you think your baby has sleep deficit. And while there are many approaches to sleep training, at some point your baby has to learn to go to sleep on his own, and 'extinction' or 'cry it out' is a rough few night that simply works. More complex graduated extinction processes mostly just take more time and energy, and actually deliver worse results since kids can learn things other than "I must go to sleep on my own."
And you know what? Dr. Weissbluth was absolutely right! My son's nap times have been better, he's figured out how to go to bed in 10 minutes, and we're all sleeping through the night. Collective familial madness adverted.
So why three stars? First, this book needs a hefty editing pass. It's 600 pages long with lots of redundancy. I read quickly and getting the information I needed was still a slog. There's a really excellent 250 page book in here. And second, the opening chapters take a hysterical tone towards sleep hygiene, as poor sleep habits now can doom your child to a life of mental illness and failure. I get that defending sleep is Dr. Weissbluth's whole career, but it's the wrong tone to take with stressed parents who are already worrying about so much.
On the plus side, Dr. Weissbluth had simple clear advice which worked. According to his long experience in the field, most babies with sleep problems are simply overtired. To avoid this, the cure is to move bedtime up, even to as early as 5:30 if you think your baby has sleep deficit. And while there are many approaches to sleep training, at some point your baby has to learn to go to sleep on his own, and 'extinction' or 'cry it out' is a rough few night that simply works. More complex graduated extinction processes mostly just take more time and energy, and actually deliver worse results since kids can learn things other than "I must go to sleep on my own."
And you know what? Dr. Weissbluth was absolutely right! My son's nap times have been better, he's figured out how to go to bed in 10 minutes, and we're all sleeping through the night. Collective familial madness adverted.
So why three stars? First, this book needs a hefty editing pass. It's 600 pages long with lots of redundancy. I read quickly and getting the information I needed was still a slog. There's a really excellent 250 page book in here. And second, the opening chapters take a hysterical tone towards sleep hygiene, as poor sleep habits now can doom your child to a life of mental illness and failure. I get that defending sleep is Dr. Weissbluth's whole career, but it's the wrong tone to take with stressed parents who are already worrying about so much.
adventurous
informative
I watched the 1955 Dam Busters movie on tape repeatedly as a kid, and the movie has become iconic, as well as the source of the Death Star trench run in Star Wars, but as Holland points out, only a handful of historical books have been written about the operation (subsequently, Hastings published his Chastise). This one aims to correct the record, focusing primarily on the pilots who carried out the attack, though there is a solid delve into organizational and technical details.
An attack on the Ruhr dams was the obsession of Barnes Wallis, who had focused on the strategic chokepoints of natural resources. His initial plan involved a six-engined super bomber and multiton earthquake bombs, but an afternoon playing with his children made him realize that a specially designed bomb could be skipped over the surface of the reservoir like a stone. It'd sink and explode in contact with the dam face, where the magnifying effects on an underwater explosion would enable a charge of a few thousands pounds to crack the dam.
This was an easier lift. All it'd require is developing an entirely new type of weapon, modifying Lancasters to carry it, training crews in precision low-level attack, and doing it during the full moon when the dams were highest, which meant the operation had to be mid May 1943, or not at all. Bomber Command Chief Arthur Harris was profoundly against any panacea superweapon attack, which he regarded as a distraction from his strategy of night area bombing. "Bomber" Harris believed that only constant bludgeoning of cities could meaningfully disrupt Nazi military production and shorten the war, and in 1943, he finally had a force that was just barely capable of finding and destroying cities in night raids. Pulling twenty precious Lancasters and elite crews wasn't in the offing.
Barnes Wallis was far from the brilliant rogue outsider he's portrayed as, and along with F.W. Winterbotham, maneuvered the byzantine British defense establishment, into approving the raid. Once he'd been ordered to carry out a job, Harris put his reservations behind him and set one of his favorite commanders, Guy Gibson, as commander of the new specialist 617 squadron. The problem was it was now February 1943, and there were barely 10 weeks to figure out the raid.
Training and development was one of those continuous brilliant improvisations which characterized the best of British success in World War II. Gibson's pilots practiced flying the mighty Lancaster at 100', just above the ground. Elementary trigonometry, in the form of angled spotlights that merged at the right altitude, and fixed pin bombsights that aligned with towers of the dam for range, helped the crews drop their bombs at the right distance and altitude. The bomb had worked exactly once, in testing, by the time mid-May arrived, but that was enough to give the go ahead.
19 Lancasters took off late on May 16th, headed for the Ruhr. Low-level navigation was a channel, and Holland argues that a failure in the weather reporting system means that the crew was unaware of winds over the English challenge, meaning that many of them crossed into Europe over flak concentrations rather than the planned weak spots. Two planes turned back with critical damage, two flew into power lines, and six were shot down, for nearly 50% casualties on a single attack. And while bailing out of a Lancaster at 10,000 feet was hardly safe, it was possible. When things went wrong at low altitude, they were inevitably fatal.
The survivors made their attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams, destroying the first two. The devastation was incredible, spreading miles downstream. Thousands were killed (many of them slave laborers, unfortunately), bridges were torn away, and steel manufacturing severely impacted. The end effect was less than Wallis had hoped, as Albert Speer embarked on a crash plan to rebuild the dams, but the propaganda was spectacular, and the systemic effects may have impeded building Atlantic Wall defenses before the Normandy invasion.
Holland has presented a fascinating and informative exploration of the famous raid, and its human cost.
An attack on the Ruhr dams was the obsession of Barnes Wallis, who had focused on the strategic chokepoints of natural resources. His initial plan involved a six-engined super bomber and multiton earthquake bombs, but an afternoon playing with his children made him realize that a specially designed bomb could be skipped over the surface of the reservoir like a stone. It'd sink and explode in contact with the dam face, where the magnifying effects on an underwater explosion would enable a charge of a few thousands pounds to crack the dam.
This was an easier lift. All it'd require is developing an entirely new type of weapon, modifying Lancasters to carry it, training crews in precision low-level attack, and doing it during the full moon when the dams were highest, which meant the operation had to be mid May 1943, or not at all. Bomber Command Chief Arthur Harris was profoundly against any panacea superweapon attack, which he regarded as a distraction from his strategy of night area bombing. "Bomber" Harris believed that only constant bludgeoning of cities could meaningfully disrupt Nazi military production and shorten the war, and in 1943, he finally had a force that was just barely capable of finding and destroying cities in night raids. Pulling twenty precious Lancasters and elite crews wasn't in the offing.
Barnes Wallis was far from the brilliant rogue outsider he's portrayed as, and along with F.W. Winterbotham, maneuvered the byzantine British defense establishment, into approving the raid. Once he'd been ordered to carry out a job, Harris put his reservations behind him and set one of his favorite commanders, Guy Gibson, as commander of the new specialist 617 squadron. The problem was it was now February 1943, and there were barely 10 weeks to figure out the raid.
Training and development was one of those continuous brilliant improvisations which characterized the best of British success in World War II. Gibson's pilots practiced flying the mighty Lancaster at 100', just above the ground. Elementary trigonometry, in the form of angled spotlights that merged at the right altitude, and fixed pin bombsights that aligned with towers of the dam for range, helped the crews drop their bombs at the right distance and altitude. The bomb had worked exactly once, in testing, by the time mid-May arrived, but that was enough to give the go ahead.
19 Lancasters took off late on May 16th, headed for the Ruhr. Low-level navigation was a channel, and Holland argues that a failure in the weather reporting system means that the crew was unaware of winds over the English challenge, meaning that many of them crossed into Europe over flak concentrations rather than the planned weak spots. Two planes turned back with critical damage, two flew into power lines, and six were shot down, for nearly 50% casualties on a single attack. And while bailing out of a Lancaster at 10,000 feet was hardly safe, it was possible. When things went wrong at low altitude, they were inevitably fatal.
The survivors made their attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams, destroying the first two. The devastation was incredible, spreading miles downstream. Thousands were killed (many of them slave laborers, unfortunately), bridges were torn away, and steel manufacturing severely impacted. The end effect was less than Wallis had hoped, as Albert Speer embarked on a crash plan to rebuild the dams, but the propaganda was spectacular, and the systemic effects may have impeded building Atlantic Wall defenses before the Normandy invasion.
Holland has presented a fascinating and informative exploration of the famous raid, and its human cost.
Do you think exploring all of military history might be a little ambitious? Yeah, but McNeill pulls it off, explaining how technology, markets, and command authority have combined again and again to win wars, and create modern society. If there's any weakness in the book, it's that it skims WW2 and the Cold War, and treats innovation and technology as an autonomous force, but for a comprehensive military history, it's amazing.