Rollicking high-action space opera meets gritty noir detective story, as an unlikely crew of ragtag misfits has to prevent a disastrous interplanetary war and investigate secretive corporate malfeasance and a possible outside context problem. If you like fast-paced action, and realistic scifi, this is a must-read.

What does it take to make great software? A focus on quality boarding on obsession, brilliance, long hours, personal sacrifice, and a leaving of that intangible called leadership. Showstopper stands besides The Mythical Man Month and The Soul of a New Machine in it's depiction of programming and technology around the creation of The Last Great OS.

Lead Engineer David Cutler and his team had a ambitious job, to make the first 'platform-independent operating system', a piece of software which would revolutionize personal computing by adding reliability and backwards compatibility, and make Microsoft very very wealthy. Over 4 years, they transformed a vague idea into working software, at the cost of $150 million, many broken marriages, and constant abuse and bullying. The sense I got from this book is that Cutler was a maniac, but perhaps the only type of person who could make something like NT work. I can only hope that the massive stock options the team got compensated for the emotional trauma. The human side is paramount in this story, but able analogies explain the inner workings of the PC.

These days, post-Zune, Windows phone, and the resurgence of Apple it's easy to mock Microsoft as a has been-a dinosaur limping along on monopoly market power and tech lock-in. But it serves us to remember that they were agile and innovative once. Cutler's messianic vision may have been justified, because 20 years later his code is still at the heart of the versions of Windows that we use.

*Disclosure: Gregg Zachary is a friend and colleague.

This might be one of the strangest surveys ever: a review of about 200 American general who served in Vietnam, conducted by one of their own, about their opinions of a war that had not yet finally been lost.

The picture that emerges is one of a dissatisfaction with the war in general, with specific management tools (body counts, ticket punching), and especially the South Vietnamese military and American media. Despite this, the generals thought they lead well, did the best they could, and that failure for the war rests elsewhere. Kinnard tries to make the case that these generals were in fact introspective, but for all the strengths of the survey, the war managers come off looking more for scapegoats than lessons learned. The anonymous commentary from the respondents is the most interesting part of the book, but the survey methodology is perhaps not the best approach to get at the mindset of American generalship in 1974.

The basic formula for the Expanse series doesn't change: the Solar System is on the brink of a Cold War going hot; warmongering fools are working on illegal bioweapons; an alien intelligence is busy transforming Venus; and once again the crew of the Rocinante is right in the middle trying to find a lost little girl who might be the key to the whole interplanetary mystery. But while the formula is the same, the writing and the pacing haven't slipped a bit, and are if anything even tighter. If you liked Leviathan Wakes, you'll like this book.

In particular, the new supporting characters make the book. While Detective Miller in Leviathan Wakes was a drag-well written-but a drag nonetheless, these new characters are pure fun. Chrisjen Avasarala is a Indian grandmother and UN éminence grise who curses her way through scrotum-tightening diplomatic fixes, giving us a much needed look at the seat of power in the Expanse series. Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper deserves a seat among the Space Marine greats (Johnny Rico, the Master Chief, Cpl. Hicks, Doomguy, Felix, William Mandella... I know a lot of space marines), for her unique background as a Samoan-Texan-Martian, dead accurate characterization as the professional, and for the fist punching satisfaction when she finally gets to put her power armor back on and right wrongs a 5000 rounds-per-minute.

It must be that time of year where I read a ton of formulaic fiction to clear my mind. Bernie Rhodenbarr is back, with another disastrous love affair, another lost piece of pop-culture ephemera (A first edition Raymond Chandler autographed to Dashiell Hammett), and a corpse. The setting is a snowbound B&B masquerading as an English country estate, and with the bodies piling up, Bernie needs to find out the real killer and abscond with his priceless first edition. There's some cleverness as Block contrast the tropes of the 'English drawing room murder mystery' with the 'American hard-boiled noir' story, which a mystery fan will obvious enjoy, but this book might be a little bit too twee and hit a little too close to the obvious plot points to be a proper deconstruction. Not bad, per se, and if you're on a beach and this book is nearby why not, but nothing you need to seek out either.

Ian Hacking is a subtle, thoughtful, and often frustrating writer. In Rewriting the Soul, he takes a genealogical approach to Multiple Personality Disorder, epidemic at the time of writing in the early 1990s, and links it to political movements, 19th century French psychiatry, and the philosophy of self and memory. All science, particularly the human sciences like psychiatry, are informed by politics, but Multiple Personality Disorder is is more informed than most. The appearance of alters, personality fragments, is linked to recovered memories of abuse, either mundane child abuse at the hands of close relatives or esoteric (and entirely fictional) ritualized satanic abuse.

Hacking is n expert both in 19th century psychiatry and the intricacies of the modern multiple personality disorder movement, and ably shreds any commonplace notion of a singular self based on factual memory by showing all the ways in which this commonplace self breaks down at the fringes of medicine. To the question, "Is MPD real?" Hacking replies 'Yes. But it is a grave moral wound inflicted upon people by psychological entrepreneurs.' For a philosopher, a seeker after truth, the scanty evidentiary basis of MPD must be infuriating, especially given the way that it afflicts the lives and communities of people diagnosed with it. But I'm not sure that Hacking earns his normative critique, or an alternative formulation of the self not reliant on a fallible and fluid memory.

The Battle of Fallujah was the most intense fighting American forces have faced in the 21st century, a Marine battle to stand with Okinawa and Hue for a tenacious enemy and destruction unleashed. Bing West has admirably recorded the heroism of the Marines who went into Fallujah, and the context of the battle in Iraq in 2004. The book's image of a Marine Division astride a shattered city, ruefully shaking its head and saying "Look at what you made me do", is not the most objective take. That image, like so much else about the Iraq War, left a sour taste in my mouth. But the story of Fallujah is one that must be told.

Make no mistake, West is biased. He's Marine to the bone, and the world is divided into Marines and those who stand in their way. Marines are always righteous: heroes who brave insurmountable odds to cover their brothers; precise killers who use sniper rifles against enemy fighters and guided bombs only on identified strong points; extraordinary men who keep on going no matter how hard it gets.

Others do not come off as well. The Bush White House and CPA are gently rebuked (by comparison with other histories) for mismanaging the big picture and holding the Marines back. Bing has some sympathy for Iraqi soldiers and policemen intimidated into uselessness by threats against their families, but none at all for Iraqi 'leaders' who promise to keep the peace but fail to deliver repeatedly. The news network Al Jazeera is portrayed as an Al Qaeda propaganda wing; pouring gasoline on the embers of Iraq for ratings, in the same way that local clerics preached jihad for political and criminal power. West disgust at how those he deems responsible for sending thousands of Iraqis in front of American guns while avoiding real danger themselves is a blow to his objectivity.

This book succeeds in it's goal of commemorating the Battle of Fallujah and the men who fought it. West understands the nature of combat like few other writers--100 patrols as a Marine Vietnam will do that for you. This isn't as good as the The Village, but few books are. If there's a lesson to be learned, it's that you should *not* fuck with the United States Marines Corps. Hopefully, that will be obvious to others without having to blow up their cities first.

The conventional wisdom among historians is that America lost the Vietnam War in the villages and hamlets. Large American units didn't understand the locals, used air power and artillery as a blunt instrument, and drove the villagers into the hands of the Viet Cong. The Village presents an alternative to that narrative, about an operation where a Marine rifle squad lived and worked alongside the government's Popular Forces, and over the course of a two years, managed to regain control of the village of Binh Nghia.

The book presents a vivid and unvarnished account of the paradoxes and contradictions of counter-insurgency warfare. The Marines had to learn the rhythms of the village, the odd quiet on a night patrol that hinted at VC infiltrators. Psychology and presence were worth more than firepower, and both sides were hostages in the great game. The VC could kill police and soldiers, but families were off limits because their own families lived in the same village. The Marines could use fire support, but only at the price of walking past the burnt ruins every day for the rest of their tour. And so the war went on in skirmish and night ambush, making the villagers erect defenses and tear them down, and head games against the other sides leaders. And in the course of their time there, the Marines came to love and respect the village, and the village came to respect and love them. In many ways, the men of the CAP were exceptional, and its unclear if a thousand more like them could have been found, but they managed to save the village without destroying it. By the time they left, the VC in Binh Nghia were crippled, unable to tax, recruit, or move supplies along the river.

The Marines of The Village paid a heavy toll for their victory, but unlike so many other Americans in Vietnam, they knew what they were fighting and dying for. The lesson is the COIN cannot be successful without endurance, and that you cannot endure without loving. From the short-timer looking to survive his last patrol, to Presidents looking for 'peace with honor', almost every person involved in the War appeared to hate Vietnam. Perhaps that was why we lost.

Midway: The Battle the Doomed Japan and Miracle at Midway. The story they tell is one of friction, in Clausewitzian terms, of a Japanese operation without objectives, and many moments of incredibly bravery against terrible forces of fire by the men who fought the battle.

Going into the last of the Expanse trilogy, the question on my mind was "Will they change up the formula?" And they did, but at the expense of the tight plotting that made the first two books a joy.

This time, after an attempted assassination/smear job, Holden and co are floating beyond the Gate, surrounded by billion year old alien artifacts that can change the laws of physics. And of course, when faced with the inexplicable, humans beings do what they do best: get scared and try to murder each other.

I can't exactly say what's wrong with this book, but despite strong bones, it didn't quite gel. Holden and his allies are too saintly, their opponents too obviously foolish. Serious themes of sacrifice and redemption are gestured at, but not fully fleshed out. I mean, read it if you've gone this far, but Abaddon's Gate is a step down from the rest of the series.