Hackworth's story is one of leadership, about how to take a losing unit and turn them into winners through energy, training, and discipline. Inheriting a broken and despirited battalion, Hackworth went from a CO with a bounty on his head to commander of a crack team of killers. The lessons in this book are about esprit de corp, warfare, and how an organization rots from the top are universal.

Unlike most of these war memoirs, Steel My Soldiers' Hearts has an antagonist, the careerist and incompetent Colonel (later Major General) Ira Hunt, who interfered constantly in Hackworth's plans to the detriment of the ordinary soldiers in the battalion. The VC are a respected and crafty foe, but Hackworth has no time for the slow work of counter-insurgency. He's a master of light infantry tactics, and stealthy and brutal ambushes and patrols. For a layperson, this is a good intro to the chaos of airmobile operations.

As a writer, Hackworthy is a pulpy as a freshly squeezed glass of politically incorrect orange juice. The book is far from a neutral account, but it's his story and he tells it with verve and gusto.

New crazy Vietnam War moment: A helicopter taking out an AA gun in hand-to-hand combat. Just lean out and karate chop it down.

Spam is an example of the best of scholarly writing-taking a single under-examined subject and using it to illuminate an entire field of history. In this case, Brunton elegantly theorizes spam, the omnipresent unwanted messages that clog computer networks and consume scarce attention, and its role in the development of various forms of digital governance over 40 years and three major periods. Both brilliant and readable, Spam is a must-read for the 21st century.

This is it. The only Bruce Sterling novel I haven't read. So how does my guru's second novel hold up?

Well, it's original, aggressively stylized, and full of provocative ideas. In the distant future people are effectively immortal, with ennui a leading cause of death. The titular Artificial Kid inhabits the body of of a deceased politician, making his living as a combat artist, beating up other artists with his nunchuks and selling the tapes. He stumbles into a massive historical/scientific conspiracy, and a whole bunch of crazy stuff happens.

This isn't a perfect book. If the characters are a little flat, or the writing drags a little, then that's the price of journeyman work. But Sterling's obvious talent and energy is on display, and its definitely a fun read.

I'm torn on this one, since Colin Ong-Dean is a colleague and its bad form to rip into someone's dissertation. That said, while this book ticks off all the boxes of a good scholarly work (surveys, data, theories, results), it doesn't really say anything surprising or novel. Ong-Dean proposes that parents with a high degree of 'cultural capital'
(wealthy, educated, white) are better able to navigate the special education system. Unsurprisingly, that turns out to be correct.

Unfortunately, the work doesn't go much beyond that. I only have the slightest idea of what an Individualized Educational Program entails. The most interesting part is in Chapter 3, when Ong-Dean sketches out a "high road to disability" that elites can use to aid their children, and a "low road to disability" used by institutions to control and discipline problem children. Unfortunately, he doesn't go much beyond that.

I see scholarship as a work of excavation and translation. This isn't a bad book, per se, but it's very fragmentary. The other side of the story, the creation and maintenance of disabilities by an expert bureaucracy, is treated as a blank canvas against which the drama of parents happens. This is a major flaw in the work.

What's there to say about The Kingkiller Chronicle the hasn't been said? It's awesome fantasy, very traditional in some ways but also quite creative in its world-building and characterization. Sure, Kvothe isa bit of a Mary Sue, and sure it's been something like 1500 pages and I'm not even sure when the adventure properly starts, but as a picaresque fantasy journey of spells, swords, and songs, its unmatched. A great book for any fan of the genre.

Confession time: I only read this book because it was ~80 pages and counted for bookrace 2013. All I can say is that I'm very glad that semiotics exist, because like Baudrillard's Disneyland, it is the nonsense that makes my discipline real.

Vonnegut meditates on the theme of the "banality of evil."

I can't even...

In the form of a mystery, this is a book about authorship and the possibility of a true language. I can't tell if it's actually great or merely aping greatness, but its definitely a bizarre and entertaining read.

It's only appropriate that the next book after Guerrilla would be a biography of famous guerrilla warrior Che Guevara. But because I'm slacking this summer, it's a comic book.

So what's to say? Obviously, this book is just the highlights; a series of semi-connected interludes that cast Che in the best possible light. But it also acknowledges his brutal work as a revolutionary executioner, and the failure of his battles after Cuba. The book ends with a brief essay on the meaning of Che's image in an age of commercial reproduction. The end result is a story of a man who wanted to end injustice in the world, and who used violence to achieve this noble goal with decidedly mixed results. It's like Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe with Socialist Realist art.

This is Stross's Strossiest book since Accelerando. The Big Ideas are still there, but this time instead of Singularitarian enthusiasm and terror, Stross has woven a thriller about the intricacies of interstellar finance. Nominally a sequel to Saturn's Children, it is both much better and stands entirely on its own.

It's the deep future, and humanity is long-dead, replaced by robot with nanotech bodies and very human minds (messing with autonomic nervous systems tends to wind up in bad ways). Krina, our heroine, is an expert in the historiography of accountancy with a sideline in confidence schemes. Chased by a zombie-assassin with her own face, she falls in with morbid human-obsessed cultists, batwinged space pirates, and even stranger situations as she unwinds the greatest financial crime ever committed.

As with a lot of Stross, the world-building starts from a single flash of insight (What if computer science was the same as Cthulhu Mythos sorcery? How would a family that could walk between parallel worlds actually work?), and in this case it's the image of the space pirate as pinstriped merchant-banker. The core of the story builds out from there with relentless logic, along with plenty of those little touches that make the setting feel real. This is a place that works; that people live in.

As a protagonist, Krina is wonkish and competent, and her voice just flows naturally. This book feels comfortable and well crafted in a way that Stross doesn't always achieve. (You can trust Charlie on ideas, but well, his writing schedule doesn't leave a lot of time for sanding rough edges). The only reason I've dinged Neptune's Brood a star is that doesn't end so much as stop in classic Snowcrash fashion. But if you've liked anything else Stross has written, check this one out.

***UPDATE FOR 2024***

Yeah, I agree entirely with my prior review. I like Krina, and the weird scoundrels she falls in with are even better (❤️ U, Count Rudi), but even after working in banking and at least three explanations of the Atlantis Carnet scam and how slow money banking works... I'm not sure I get it. Watts are valuable, atoms are valuable, properly arranged atoms are extremely valuable, and intellectual property is useful, and therefore profitable to the extent you can extract rents from it. But the ideas sparkle, even if they're zirconium rather than diamond, and whenever the plot is in danger of slackening, Stross tosses a couple of goons with smartknives through the door.