Some of the best new science-fiction I've read in a long time. McAuley takes us on a sprawling ecological space opera from a post-ecological collapse earth, to the transhuman moons of the outer system. The war of the title is notably quiet, it's a war of subversion and deceit, much like this book inverts the typical action-packed space opera tropes. But it's smart, insightful, full of fantastic images, and best of all, has three capable female main characters.

Cyberpunk, and Gibson's cyberpunk in particular, is defined by a gritty, tactile, future. The brands, the computers, the specificity of object and place serve to make good cyberpunk dense and hard. This is not good cyberpunk, rather, to borrow an image from the book, it's a lacquered full-scale replica of a cyberpunk novel. All the surfaces are there; the AI love story, the post-modern technological mercenaries, simulated realities, and philosophical musings on a plastic celebrity culture, but when you lean on it, there's nothing underneath. But hey, Gibson on his worst day is still better than the Baen back catalog.

The definitive account of America's slow slide into the Vietnam War, McMaster explores how the Kennedy administration disabled the formal Joint Chief's advising process in favor of ad hoc committees of civilian advisers, cutting the military out of the decision-making loop. This insularity, coupled with President Johnson's duplicity and Secretary McNamara's arrogance lead America into war without a real decision on "why", or "how much." The consensus demanded by Johnson to foster his domestic agenda concealed a lack of strategic thought, a desire to avoid making any decision until it was too late. McNamara's strategy of "graduated pressure" was fundamentally flawed, and the outmaneuvered JCS were unable to force the issue. But by buying into the administrations lies, in the 1965 Congressional hearings on the war, the JCS fundamentally abrogated their duty to the American people and Constitution.

The topic of America's entry into Vietnam is complex, McMaster's account is readable, but frequently repetitive, and occasionally more opinionated than history warrants. On the other hand, it beats going to the primary source material.

This book beggars description. It is haunting, lyrical, utterly personal, as Balaban takes us through an often hidden side of the war. A Conscientious Objector who goes to Vietnam to understand the conflict that is tearing his country apart, Balaban meets CIA agents, doomed heroin rock-and-rollers, dedicated doctors and nurses, paper-blooded bureaucrats, and mystical monks. He fights in the Tet Offensive, spends months helping get wounded children to America for reconstructive surgery, and then returns with his wife to record Vietnamese oral poetry. The small details, story, and quiet introspection of this book are a picture into a forgotten world.

Everybody should read this book.

Davidson begins with a fascinating premise. What if we seriously considered the ways in which we think, especially the ways in which we selectively pay attention to and ignore the world around us, and then formed our educational and workplace environments around our brains, rather than trying to hammer our polygonal personalities into round holes?

It's an idea so simple you'll be shocked you didn't have it. Anybody who's in school or the workplace will tell that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, and as Davidson reveals, our standardized test obsessed education system is the historical legacy of a system designed to take farm kids and immigrants and get them ready for assembly line industrial jobs. The modern office complex, with cubicles and corner offices and HR departments, is the white collar equivalent. The problem is that standardized education is pointless and alienating, it lacks rigor, relevance, and relationships, and assembly line careers are as dead as the Edsel. Rather, the future is collaborative and creative. Videogames and internet culture are far better models for productive endeavors than the old top-heavy bureaucracies.

Davidson's exploration of education, and her own experiences as a professor at Duke teaching radically new classes is very well done. Unlike certain people (Jane McGonigal *cough* *cough*) she isn't drinking her own kool-aid. The periphrial material, on the science of attention and on new business models, is less inspiring, more in the genre of 'superficial TED-talks a la Malcolm Gladwell and Howard Rheingold' (why isn't that a real genre yet?) But the central message of the book, that standardized tests measure only what they measure, and not anything externally worthwhile, is something that should be hammered into the heads of every politician, educator, and parent on the planet. Your kids know what's up, why don't know?