Oof. I can't say I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm happy that I read it. This book is a detailed history of 1987-1994, when Sematech, a public-private R&D consortium, literally saved the US semi-conductor industry. Unfortunately, the book gets too caught up in the weeds of personalities and anecdotes, and the lessons extracted at the end are couched in management doublespeak. Could have used more context, and a more critical examination of the state of the semi-conductor industry before and after Sematech.

Stross is back in form with the sequel to Halting State, a grimly humorous cyberpunk police procedural set in Tomorrow's Scotland, where nobody knows what an honest job is anymore, and household appliances are murdering spammers.

I won't spoil the book, but Stross is at his best when he takes Big Ideas, twists them upside down, and shows you how they could happen. In Rule 34, he on the relationship between the police state and the Panopticon, and how at the end of the day, our system of laws requires a technological architecture capable of enforcing what the politicians put in place. Business, crime, and government are melding together in Stross' world, something which seems all too familiar given the revolving door between Wall Street, the White House, the CIA, and a shallow grave in Central Asia. And Detective Liz's memetic crime unit seems like something that we already need, given public hysteria about synthetic drugs like Spice and Bath Salts (or maybe we could, you know, legalize drugs that have a long history of Not Totally Fucking People Up, instead of putting police and black chemists in a Red Queen's Race, with ordinary drug users the losers.)

The style is dense, packed full of internet-speak and Scottish brogue, but it's Stross's native tongue and the style fits perfectly. It's a throwback to old-school cyberpunk eyeball kicks, and a welcome diversion from the usual fair. The soapboxes rants at the end are a new and useful perspective on security and power.

The sequel to Fiasco, The Gamble is the story of two insurgencies; one fought one the streets of Bagdad with AK-47s, RPGs, and IEDs, the other fought in the halls of power with email, power point, and political connections. By 2006, Iraq was in shambles, and fast descending into civil war. In Ricks' appraisal, it was primarily the insight of General Petraeus and his skill at navigating the political tides than enabled the Surge that ended the insurgency. Unlike his predecessors in Vietnam, Petraeus brought not just larger numbers, but a change in strategy, bringing American forces into contested neighborhoods and cutting deals with former insurgents. In doing so, he broke the cycle of violence and positioned the Americans as the most neutral and trustworthy force in Iraq. Of course, even today Iraqi politics are far from stable, and the long term success of mission remains in doubt.

Compared to the previous book, this one is less critical and less interesting. It's harder to find general lessons in it, the anecdotes more scattered and frequently hard to relate to COIN or the methods of leadership. But for that, it's an interesting and important tale about how large institutions can adapt and win, when before they were headed for defeat.

Into the Wild is simply incredible. Stark, philosophical, insightful, Krakauer examines what would make a man forsake society, take incredible chances, and ultimately die, starving and alone in the Alaskan brush. Some people say this book glorifies stupidity and recklessness, but I'm not so sure. Chris was arrogant and unprepared, certainly, but he lived his brief life almost entirely on his terms. Most of us make peace with the necessary hypocrisies and injustices of life; Chris never did. He died, but would surrendering have been any better for him? Not everything needs to have a purpose, and while nobody should feel obliged to emulate Chris, his actions were in their own terms, noble and important.

Oliver Sacks does cognitive science in the best sense. Away from neurons, and systems, and syndromes, and into reality of perception, and different kinds of perception. From a artist who loses his color, to a man who regains his sight, he delves into altered perceptions to find out how the mind works to understand reality. The final half of the book is concerned with autism, and the profoundly strange and isolating world of the autistic. Some people, Temple Grandin particular, have learned to function without any natural theory of mind, treating their time on Earth as a task of brute-force social pattern recognition, being an 'anthropologist on Mars'

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

Blending the lyricism of Samuel Delany and the cynicism of the cyberpunks, Mosley takes us on a tour of an all too familiar world of the future, where the worst tendencies of the 20th century, in terms of labor, urban density, and racism have been doubled and redoubled. Unfortunately, the book is more style than substance, flashy ideas like an "infochurch" that double as an educational institution and intelligence network controlled by the richest man alive taken up and dropped without deep exploration. Amusing stories, but they ultimately don't have much to say about today, or tomorrow.

Ah, Heinlein, nobody spins an adventure tale like Heinlein. Glory Road is a departure from Heinlein's hard-SF roots, into a distinctly twisted take on the monomyth, as a young, down-at-the-heals veteran is recruited by an dimension-hopping princess for a dangerous Quest. Dragons are slain, perils braved, and our hero goes toe-to-toe with the Eater of Souls. But this book is really about a lot more than heroism, with long meditations on sex, marriage, government, and all the rest. As a novel, it's neither one thing or the other, not quite swashbuckling enough for a pure adventure, and not quite thoughtful enough for a philosophical exploration. But it does happen to be surprisingly psychological realistic, and quite a lot of fun. As little excursion for an author at the height of his powers (Glory Road was published after Stranger in a Strange Land and before The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), it makes for a welcome bridge between early Heinlein and later "brain worm" Heinlein. The afterward by Samuel Delany is worth the price of admission alone. Only really necessary for the Heinlein completionist, it's still a good read for the general SF fan.

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.