Joseph Dumit’s new book, Drugs for Life, is subtitled “How pharmaceutical companies define our health.” He has a clear perspective, and one that makes his ‘apoplectic’ (his own words, page 177); that pharmaceutical companies in the latter half of the 20th century have misused science to manufacture a population perennially at risk, so as to satisfy the capitalist demand for ever expanding markets and increasing profits, at the expense of both truth and health. But in some cases, if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention, and Dumit has performed a valuable service in tracing and revealing the constructed nature of the facts that underpin the modern healthcare system.

Dumit frames his book around a double insecurity: that we as modern biocitizens can never be sure that our bodies are not concealing some future illness, and that knowing this, we can never be sure how best to react to this risk. He argues that the randomized clinical trial model developed in the 1950s established illness as invisible and unknowable, except in statistical terms. This would not be a problem, except that by and large the only organizations with the resources necessary to conduct clinical trials are pharmaceutical companies, and they’re motivated to expand the size of their market above all else.

This conflict of interest means that the number of sick people, and the attendant personal and social cost of illness, has consistently risen over the past 70 years. More aggressive screenings for cancer, heart disease, and mental illness, and broader diagnostic standards, mean that larger number of people become patients and potential customers. The logic of NNT (number-needed-to-treat), becomes perversely twisted. A NNT of 1 (everybody treated improves) is the worst from a financial standpoint, while higher NNT means a less effective drug, and great financial returns. Similarly, direct comparative study between similar drugs, research on tropical diseases, and acute cures over chronic disease maintenance, are all discouraged.

Dumit’s sources for these “revelations” are the textbooks and journals produced by pharmaceutical executives themselves, analyzed using Actor Network Theory(ish) approaches to epistemology, and how facts circulate through society, and a theory of power and political economy strongly influenced by Marx. The theoretical framework is workable, but not brilliant. Marks-The Progress of Experiment, is a better book on randomized clinical trials in a historical context.

Where this book shines is in the ethnography of patient types, about how people respond to living in a culture of “surplus health”. The Expert Patient, critically engaged with the latest scientific literature, is the neoliberal ideal of the engaged and critical consumer. In practice, most of us are the Fearful Subject, perennial under threat from all directions, only able to achieve a paranoid vigil against illness that will inevitably fail. And at some point, a person reaches a balance with Better Living Through Chemistry, believing that they can trade off risks and pleasures through a studied management of ignorance.

Having read a few of these books (Epstein-Black Coat, White Hat and Conrad-The Medicalization of Society), Dumit is equally outraged but a little bit more balanced. He sees the corruption as systemic rather than personal, as something that patients and doctors are forced to buy into as part of becoming informed users of the latest medical data. The (unstated) problem for is not so much that health has become commoditized, but that we are unwilling to face up to our own mortality.

Michael Sellers has done something impressive with this book. He's made the disastrous marketing campaign and boardroom politics that sabotaged John Carter nearly as thrilling as one of Edgar Rice Burrough's planetary romances.

Sellers has an ax to grind. He's the man responsible for thejohncarterfiles.com, the amazing fan-trailer, and as longtime Barsoom fan, he's using this book to push for sequels. Just because he has an agenda does not necessarily mean that his facts or interpretations are wrong, despite his CIA background*.

Sellers starts by contextualizing the 100 year history of the Barsoom books and attempted film adaptations, and their impacts on modern science fiction. Then the story moves into one about an expensive and complex movie that had its executive support cut out from it when it needed it most. Despite costing $250 million to make, and director Andrew Stanton taking more time than typical for reshoots, the film was completed within its budget and schedule. The Hollywood rumor-mill blew the scale of into an 'out-of-control rookie filmmaker' narrative to feed its unending lust for schadenfreude. Early promotional material was lackluster; dusty desert shots instead of the lush living world of Barsoom. A name change, from 'John Carter of Mars' to 'John Carter', poisoned the opinion of elite early opinion makers and stripped the film of its 100-year pedigree. The marketing team was replaced twice, and never devoted its full attention to the movie, using lackluster trailers and spots. And finally, just 10 days into the theatrical run, Disney killed its own film by labeling it a bomb, writing down losses, and pulling Asian distribution.

All of this is true, you can check the footnotes and the media links (although David Iger would probably tell you a different story). But what sealed the deal for me were the numbers that Sellers pulls. Compared to its Spring 2012 peers, The Hunger Games and The Avengers, John Carter had orders of magnitude lower presence on Facebook, Twitter, and in the industry press. This doesn't even account for the mind-boggling qualitatively superior marketing effort, in terms of engagement and multimodal tie-ins, for the other movies. Sellers describes John Carters marketing effort as "something an intern would do in 5 hours a week at a Burbank Starbucks", and he'd know, having set up a better marketing effort with thejohncarterfiles.com in his spare time using only public resources.

This book won't tell you how to sell a blockbuster. Mostly, it's an amazing picture of a trainwreck. I disagree with Sellers' categorization of John Carter as a misunderstood classic; I think it was a strictly average action-adventure flick that needed more of a heart. But that said, this book is a fascinating look inside Hollywood, and the first and last word on the John Carter story. A movie that had great potential was killed because nobody had the vision or courage to stick their neck out and save it.

*Sellers actually is a retired CIA agent. But that's just a joke, please don't drone me, bro.

Morozov is on a crusade against 'Internetic-centric foreign policy' and 'cyber-utopianism', which he describes as a constellation of power interests linking Silicon Valley tech companies (Google, Twitter, Facebook) with Cold Warriors (Cheney, Clinton, Rumsfeld) in a profoundly misguided and dangerous effort to promote democracy overseas through technology. He argues that rather than being an unalloyed force for freedom, the internet can be used in many ways that strengthen authoritarian regimes.

The evidence for that last claim is overwhelming: I doubt a single case of 'internet abuse' between 2005 and 2010 has been left out of the book. For that first claim, that the tech companies and Cold Warriors are in alliance, Morozov's evidence is much more hand-wavey. A few speeches, a few NSA sponsored trips, some conference reports.

What this book does not have, and what it really needs, is a theory to organize these disparate elements into a coherent whole. Political power and the governance of internet technologies are complex issues, but the role of the public intellectual to render these complex issues, if not simple, at least comprehensible. Morozov gestures at the fact that the tools used to crack down on pedophiles, terrorists, media piracy, and spam in the West are the same tools used to crack down on activists and dissidents in authoritarians regimes, but he doesn't explain what this conflict means for those of us who would enjoy both a free world and an orderly internet. Likewise, he doesn't address why some states are 'democracies' and some states are 'authoritarian'. Sure, the US just throws Code Pink activists out of Senate hearings while Russia murders journalists, but why is some power legitimate and some illegal?

Most tellingly, for someone who is all about promoting 'cyber-realism', he is blurry on the specifics of what should be done (aside from localizing policy-which leads to embarrassing situations like the tweets from the US Embassy in Egypt). These days, both democracies and authoritarian regimes use the internet for the same reason they use trucks to transport soldiers, or have their citizens breath air; it'd be impossible not to. But a covert organization has different information strategies from a mass protest, and a mass protest is different from a revolutionary army or transitional government.

This lack of theory exacerbates the other problem with a lack of theoretical perspective; the inability to incorporate new information. This book was published in 2011, which means it was probably written in 2010, but Morozov hasn't substantially updated his thinking to include the Arab Spring and divergent outcomes in Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Syria etc. (the fact that they're different might mean that he's right, but still, they all occurred simultaneously...) Wikileaks barely gets a mention, despite the diplomatic cable leaks beginning in February 2010. If there was a theory to The Net Delusion, you could ask how new information fits into or changes the framework. Even in a popular book that is less rigorous than an academic treatise, you need to do more to contextualize your ideas than wave at Foucault, Langdon Winner, George F. Kennan and so on.

Think about the internet in 2002. No Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit or mobile anything. eBay was huge, as was Yahoo, Wikipedia was just a year old, the hottest meme was 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' and the DotCom Bust had dropped napalm on a host of bad ideas. Weinberger takes us back that time, when he tries to explain how the web works.

Part of it, which might be exotic to surfers circa 2002, is common knowledge to pretty much anybody who isn't dead today; the blend of anonymity and authenticity that characterizes the multiple interactions that make up the web. But Weinberger draws a possibly erroneous connection between the distributed architecture of routers, and the distributed architecture of sites. The homebrewed, stitched together, hobbysites he writes about are very different from the slick, siloed internet that we experience today.

An interesting, if slightly outdated, philosophical look at the web.

This might be the best of the Blue Ant trilogy; a densely woven and deeply paranoiac take on the early 21st century, again centered around the enigmatic Hubertus Bigend and the krewe of misfits he collects around himself, in furtherance of incredibly abstruse ends.

What separates this one from the others is that Gibson finally takes the trilogy full gonzo. The previous two books I read and thought something like "That's it? I see weirder stuff in my inbox before breakfast." I refuse to spoil Zero History, but finally the objects of desire are worthy of Gibson's innate weirdness.

As always, the language is a masterpiece of materiality, the perfect post-industrial rendering of designs and artefacts. The characters, are, well, Gibson characters, but then you read these books for the sentences, and the sparks of strangeness that seem to be ripped from the headlines.

This is the complete history of the Red Eagles, a squadron of American pilots that flew MiGs to train other pilots how to fight the Russians and their clients. Davies apparently interviewed almost everyone associated with the Red Eagles, and left no stone unturned. On the downside, this means lots of boring details about changes in command. But buried in the mass of the book are real nuggets of military history gold: black bureaucracy, fighter pilot hijinks, the difficulties of maintaining Russian aircraft without the benefit of spares or manuals, and of course, the stone-cold badassery of the pilots who went up in these airplanes day after day, and mostly brought them back home through the worst conditions. I won't spoil the good bits in this review, but the MiG-23 is just not a good airplane, and it is amazing that it only killed one American.

Starting in 1966, the Science Fiction Writers of America began presenting annual Nebula Awards for the best novels and short stories. A few years later, they decided to go back and do a retrospective on the best stories published before '66. This is that collection, and it is damn good. All the greats are represented (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke... Zelazny), along with stories and authors that have been mostly forgotten. The quality is universally high, and while some of the stories are dated--particularly the gender politics--you can watch the evolution of the genre in terms of theme, literary merit, and intellectual complexity from year to year. This is one of my new favorite anthologies, and I've read a lot of Golden Age scifi.

Generation Kill is the definitive cultural history of the invasion of Iraq, an honest account of war and the men who fight in it, and a damn good read.

Wright spent the invasion embedded with Bravo Company, First Marine Recon, and he mostly lets the men speak for themselves, liberally quoting their personal philosophies, reflections on battle, and back-and-forth bullshit. These vignettes are balanced by Wright's personal reflections on being shot at, mortared, and taking part in what I can only describe as History's Worst Roadtrip.

A little criticism and comparison. Wright occasionally flubs some technical military stuff (how mortars work, FLIR) which some people might find annoying. He gives more 'screen-time' to outspoken Marines who match his attitudes, like Espera and Reyes, than the quieter and more conservative southerners. This is a just a month-long slice of the American military at the peak of its power and confidence, before the worst effects of the Long War took hold. Compared to the HBO miniseries, the book is better paced--war truly is long periods of boredom interspersed with absolute terror--and that makes for problematic TV. Generation Kill is generally easier to read and grasp than Fick's One Bullet Away because Wright, like most of us, is an outsider to the Marines (not that Fick is a bad writer: he's quite skilled, but Wright makes a living with the pen and there's a clear difference), while at the same time being more sensationalized. Really though, there's no reason not to check out all of these versions of the story.

The Marines of First Recon are depicted as supremely skilled killers eager to test themselves against the Ultimate. They're ironic patriots, mocking the Marines indoctrination and moto BS while enthusiastically basing their identified around warrior machismo. The best of them balance cold-blooded sharpshooting with moral sensitivity. They keep going, despite nonsensical orders, no sleep, no supplies, and a mission that they didn't train for.

Generation Kill is a great book, one that can only be described with the two most important words in the whole Marine Corps: Get some!

Part of me loves the hell out of Eclipse Phase-the setting is freaking amazing transhumanist post-apocalyptic existential horror cyberpunk.

On the other hand, I have some problems. The d100 system is... workable, I guess, but the skill list not particularly inspired, which is a problem given that you have to spend 700 of 1000 character points on it.

For RPGs, a big question is always "what do you do?" Kill monsters and get treasure; lounge around being depressed and drinking blood, get screwed over by some corporate Mr. Smith douchehole. In Eclipse Phase, the default setting has you as agents of Firewall, a distributed intelligence agency/conspiracy that preserves transhumanity from existential threats. While I haven't read the GM guide, Firewall appears to send poorly equipped agents on suicide missions. Not much fun there.

A second question is the materiality of the setting, and this is another area where Eclipse Phase falls short. Okay, minds are software, bodies can be bought off the rack, and everybody lives off of nanoreplicators in space, but I think there should be a more serious engagement with the value of information vs kilowatts and reaction mass, the dangers of high-powered weapons in glorified tincans, and how polities fragment when point-to-point travel takes months, and low bandwidth communication takes hours. The Solar System is big.

That said, kickass setting in a lot of ways, great presentation, and the book is free. What do you have to lose?

Shared Fantasy is an ethnographic description of the fantasy role-playing games community circa the early 1980s, linked to a functional, if not exactly scintillating, theory of fun and games. Fine is a sociologist, and he's interesting in the workings of status in the young, male, gaming group that he studied, and also the creation of a shared culture around an imaginary world of magic, heroics, violence, and ever fickle dice. He treats RPGs as entertainment, with all the care that the subject deserves--games won't save the world, they won't turn kids into satanic monsters, but they're a great way to spend and evening with your friends.

This book is most valuable from a historical perspective, in that a lot of modern 'serious gaming' culture was formed in these D&D clubs, and the conflicts that Fine studies are the same as the ones argued at length on RPG.net today. Rules vs rulings; problematic players and arbitrary GMs; the troubles of moving beyond adolescent male power fantasy. There are some choice quotes from Gary Gygax when he truly was the high priest of a rapidly expanding hobby, and a lengthy section on the world of Tekumel developed by the incomparable Dr. M.A.R Baker.