A fun little book that blends the author's personal experiences hunting for the Lost Dutchman mine with the historical record behind the legend, and the ways that it has drawn people to the Superstitions, many to their deaths. It's a slice of Arizona that I don't see a lot of in 2012, where my life is mostly snowbirds and grad students.

On a scale of 1-5, Snow Crash is a solid "Hell yeah!", an instant classic, and one of my favorite books. Sure, it's not perfect. The long expository passages on Sumerian mythology drag. YT's character is problematic. And the book doesn't so much end as stop. But that aside, the hyper-kinetic writing is like nothing else. Sentences pop and sparkle like luminescent gems. The ironic tone is spot on, the satire of America as a capitalist, post-rational, franchise purgatory unfailing and all too familiar.

You all better have a really good reason why you haven't read this book.

It doesn't take a pundit to know that American politics are screwed up beyond measure. Congress is stuck in gridlock, the economy is stalled, elections are decided by culture war attack ads, and politics itself is derided as a pursuit for lying hustlers. Everybody has a a scapegoat, but Mettler actually has some evidence backing her theory.

The key issue is not the government we see, but the government we don't, the vast tangle of tax breaks, public-private partnerships, and incentives that Mettler deems 'the submerged state'. The size of the submerged state is astounding, 8% of the GDP, or half the the size of the visible state (Medicare, social security, Medicaid, the military, servicing the debt, and the relatively minuscule discretionary funding that covers everything else the government does, from transportation to education to NASA and foreign aid).

Mettler deploys economic and social statistics to show that for all it's expense, the submerged state is a failure on nearly every level. Whatever your politics, there is something to dislike about the submerged state. It represents a transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy, when most Americans abstractly support reducing inequality. It is a distortionary government influence on the workings of the free market, without even the relativity clarity of direct purchases or regulations. It often fails to accomplished stated policy goals of improving access to education, healthcare, or housing. It leads to civic disengagement, as those who benefit fail to see how the government has helped them, or how they can meaningfully impact politics through voting. And above all, it is corrupt, as it replaces broad public participation with the lobbying of narrowly constituted wealthy interests groups.

This book is not perfect. Mettler is a liberal political scientist, and she has the biases of her profession: that conservatives are responsible for much of what's gone wrong with America over the past 30 years (disclosure: I agree), and that citizens would vote 'better' (I.e. for liberals) is they were just better informed. She is also not quite up to the task of sinking the submerged state. But these are minor quibbles. In the social sciences, I evaluate theories on their explanatory power, and Mettler has provided a powerful lens for seeing many divergent policies as part of a unitary whole.

In a just and reasonable world, the 2012 Presidential campaign would about Mettler's book. Unfortunately, we're still living on Earth, and so it's going to be about Obama's socialism and Romney's tax returns.

On Speed is a comprehensive, if sometimes problematic history of amphetamines. Rasmussen does yoeman's work, tracing the history of amphetamines from a minor decongestant in the 1930s, to a military enhancement medicine in the 1940s, to widespread prescription as an antidepressant and diet drug in the 50s, it's role in the Beat and Hippie subcultures, and eventual prohibition in the 1970s after a series of 'speed kills' campaigns. Rasmussen's historical record of people, discoveries, new usages for old substances, drug production and legislative events is a great source for anybody working on related problems. The section on military use of amphetamines in WW2, and the way that speed hollowed out Haight-Ashbury were particularly interesting.

Unfortunately, he is on less solid ground when talking about the social effects of amphetamines, particularly the recent (1990 onwards) explosion of illegal methamphetamine and the exponential increase in ADHD diagnoses. Rasmussen takes the standpoint that the psychological effects of amphetamines are mostly an increase in self-confidence, well-being, and energy, and that addiction and psychosis is a nearly inevitable result of exposure to amphetamines. This is a common opinion, and not necessarily wrong, but a more reflexive examination of the topic might postulate the reality of both benefits and harms, instead of a knee-jerk pharmacological puritanism. Similarly, the 'scientific idea' of amphetamine, in terms of its functioning, gets short shrift, being described mostly in the economic terms of drug development.

On the whole, however, this is an invaluable and well-researched historical book. My political disagreements with Rasmussen cannot detract from his scholarly accomplishments.

Fiasco is one the best games I've ever played. This companion isn't quite as a good as the rules themselves, which are paragons of clarity and effective design, but it's still a valuable addition to anybody who wants to do more with Fiasco. This isn't a philosophical laser that slices through Fiasco to expose the One True Way to use the game (that'd probably be impossible), but it's a useful collection of anecdotes, tips, advice for designing new playsets, and interviews with people using Fiasco for education, writing, and improv.

No matter what you do in life, you will never be as awesome as Ludwik Fleck. A Jewish Polish doctor most active in the interwar years, Fleck published 120 medical articles in 6 languages, wrote a proto-STS tract, invented a typhus vaccine while imprisoned in the ghetto by the Nazis, survived Auschwitz, testified against Mengele and co at the Nuremburg trials, and finally fled Soviet occupied Europe to Israel in 1957. They were a different breed then.

Fleck traces syphilis from the 16th century to the 20th century, from a moral scourge to one of many genital ulcerating diseases, to a bacteria, to the contemporary Wasserman antibody test. But syphilis merely serves as the primary example for a much grander project in what Fleck terms comparative epistemology, as he explains how scientific knowledge work. Fleck develops a detailed theory around 'thought collectives' and 'thought styles', the collective work that determines what it regarded as scientifically valid, the circulation of knowledge, and the definition of relevant problems and details.

It's a clear precursor to Kuhn and Foucault, in terms of genealogical approaches to understanding previous scientific theories as true in their time, not as false ideas to discarded in the Whiggish march to absolute truth. Fleck, however, does not share Kuhn's belief in incommensurability, choosing instead a more continuous view of scientific history. The approach to communities of individuals, techniques, tools, tactic knowledge, and norms, prefigures Bruno Latour's lab ethnography and the social constructivist turn.

However, this is a strange, strange book, the scholarly equivalent of a coelacanth. It's not much formally cited (I don't think I've ever seen it in a contemporary paper). Later authors took the form of Fleck's ideas, while discarding his terminology. The medical details that Fleck uses to support his claims are often hard to follow. While the assertions sparkle ("A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking"), they're embedded in a glutinous mass of anti-Vienna school sociology. I can't really say that anybody should read this book, but if they'll do, they'll be a better person.

Hi, my name is Michael, and I'm a procrastinator. So when I heard about this book from a friend, I felt a brief flame of hope that this would help me conquer what ails me, finish my dissertation in a timely manner, and ride off into the sunset in a blaze of glory. Or something like that.

This book is mostly an affirmation of the idea that you can be procrastinator and still get things done. Perry introduces the theory of 'structured procrastination', based on Robert Benchley's quip that "Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing." You make a to do list, set something huge and cosmic and unattainable at the top, and then while procrastinating on that do all the little things you need to do. It's a decent enough idea, and I look forward to trying it out, but there's not much else in the book; just some anecdotal advice and half-hearted affirmations that its okay to procrastinate. I finished it in about a half hour, looked up, and said "Is that it? I payed $10 for that?" I feel burned by the short length.

Maybe it's just better to poke around Perry's website http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

There has to be something wrong with you if you don't like submarine movies. Hunt for Red October, Das Boot, Crimson Tide, even relatively schlock like K-19 is solid in my book. Take a bunch of men, cram then in a steel tube deep beneath the waves, throw in a nuclear reactor and a dozen ways to end the world, and you have instant drama.

Well, sometimes the truth surpasses fiction. Blind Man's Bluff covers some of the most harrowing intelligence battles of the Cold War from the point of view of American submariners, and the scientists and engineers who supported them in trailing Russian missile subs, recovering lost warheads, and tapping cables in the Soviet Navy's backyard. The book is gripping, detailed both personally and technically, and simply an amazing piece of history.

This book has earned a well-deserved place on my "you will never be this badass shelf."

This is an unusual history, linking together grand ideas with the live of the author, who very much "was there, and did that." The first chapters stumble in the dark, as Disch tries to establish the links of science-fiction to the very American tradition of the Big Liar, the confidence man who is so outrageous that we go along with the swindle gladly out of a sense of fun. The mostly forgotten Ignatius L. Donnelly, who's books on Atlantis and ancient aliens prefigured the New Age, is the leading figure of this era, while the populist/trash writers Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne are its perfection. This history of SF is interesting, if not particularly well balanced or supported.

Once the book gets into the period when Disch was most active, the late 50s through the 80s, it really takes off. He is a cutting cultural critic of the work that SF has done in making the atomic Armageddon livable, supporting the indefinite expansion of the military-industrial critic into space, and normalizing and familiarizating the 'office of the future', as epitomized by Star Trek. Sex, consumerism, war, and death are the major themes of the book. There isn't much on the Campbellian Golden Age, or on the Cyberpunk Movement, but other people have written about that. A fascinating, if partial look at my favorite genre.

Maybe I read this in two short of time, but I just didn't like it as much as Bridge of Birds. The plot seemed complicated instead of intricate, and the characters and setting were not as refreshing as the first book. Think I'll take a break before starting the last of the trilogy.