There are a lot of books about what Millennials are like or should be doing. It's a crap genre, and I prefer to listen to our elders, like Tim Krieder. Here, Kreider meditates on friendship, family, politics, stories, lies, good people and bad people. There's a kind of wisdom to it. Nothing grand, nothing sublime; just the boozy experience of an aimless gen-Xer who managed to turn obscene doodles into if not a career, than not destitution. The essay are finely crafted, poignant pictures of friends we've all loved and lost, and just when you're about to start sobbing, there's a cartoon.

I have to give Mr. Gladwell this, he is a damn fine writer. Everything he touch becomes interesting and obsessively readable. You come away feeling smarter, let in on a bit of secret knowledge. That said, I'm not so sure Malcolm Gladwell is actually a good thinker. His style is a collage of anecdotes and surprise to conceal the obvious. In this case, those obvious stories are that large and ponderous entities can be beaten by nimble and aggressive ones who break implicit rules, at some point more of the same produces negative results (inverted U-shaped curves), and that childhood adversity produces 'great' people.

I admire Gladwell's obvious skill as a writer, and his jackdaw collections of facts and stories, but I worry that his psuedo-profundity is replacing actual insight.

Six Days of War is a comprehensive, deeply researched, if not exactly unbiased account of the Six Day War. An Israeli academic (and subsequently Ambassador to America), Oren mostly reiterates the consensus Jewish position that the Six Day War was a righteous triumph for the Jewish state; one which secured its place on the global stage while failing to resolve basic issues such as Arab acceptance of Israel, or the future of the Palestinian people.

This book is a day by day, sometimes hour by hour account of the war and its lead-up. The basic story is one we know well: With tensions rising along the Sinai border and at the vital Straits of Tiran, and diplomatic efforts failing at the UN, the Israeli government launched a preemptive strike against the Egyptian air force, annihilating it on the ground, followed by bold attacks that in sequence captured the Sinai, Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.

It's impossible to have much sympathy for the Arab states. Though Israel fired first, it was only after years of escalations and provocations. From public radio propaganda and private diplomatic cables, Arab leaders, especially Nasser, wanted a war but were unable to cope with the maelstrom of violence that they unleashed. Egyptian and Syrian commanders are both incompetent and brutal; daring war but breaking at the first reversal. Only Jordan's King Hussein comes off as halfway sympathetic. By contrast, the Israelis are decisive, diplomatic, and while flawed still heroic. Certainly, when faced with the ultimate test of statecraft they succeeded beyond all measure.

I'm not sure that I fully buy Oren's argument about contingency and chance. Sure, the fact that the war played out precisely when it did and how it did could not have been foreseen, but war would still have happened no matter what. Israel and Egypt had fundamentally different visions of the Middle East, and both believed that they would lose at any 'even' negotiating table. The quality of the armies was not a matter of luck, but of decades of building a military, and the fragility of authoritarian states compared to the resilience of pluralistic ones.

The Name of the Rose is a perfectly comprehensible book: a little semiotic murder mystery set in a 14th century monastery at the center of the most pressing issues of the time: the poverty of Jesus Christ.

What, you don't have that section on your bookshelf?

More seriously, Eco does an incredibly job getting inside the very alien minds of his monks, and the kinds of passions and secrets that would lead these sworn men of God to murder. The tensions and conflicts of the 14th century, on the edge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are on full display. I can't say this is a perfect book (unevenly paced, a little too in love with its own erudition), but it is an undeniably impressive one.

This is a theoretically ambitious, yet pragmatically grounded approach to conducting focus groups, gathering perspectives from marketing research and psychology to describe how best to manage focus groups. This book is focused more towards marketing and mediating, rather than the social sciences and putting groups together, but it's well-written and very useful.

John Ringo is definitely a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you have a rather thrilling action scifi writer, on the other hand "Oh John Ringo No!"

Never let it be said that John Ringo ain't a nerd. This book is basically a love letter to Schlock Mercenary, where right after a bad first contact puts Earth under the heal of not very bright imperialist aliens, an out of work scifi web comic author lucks his way into finding the single Earth product that actually sells off-world, and parlays that into bootstrapping an orbital military industrial complex.

The characterization is a lot of fun, if you can look past the frequent pointless jabs at liberals (really John Ringo, what did we ever do to you?), and I actually like the logistics of bootstrapping up past Kardashev Type I civilizations, but I'm not sure about Ringo's space mirror array fetishism. Here, space mirrors are basically industrial and military magic that only humans have discovered in millennial of interstellar civilization. And there's a battle, which we win due to petawatts of archimedian solar death rays, but the solar mirror fetishism is even less fun than David Weber's missile salvo fetishism. Well, we'll see where this goes.

Apparently WW2 + magic is a genre, of sorts. Bitter Seeds features a team of British warlocks going up against a squad of Nazi super-soldiers. The alt-history is pretty good, as the Nazis use their powers, especially precognition, to decisively win the Battle of Britain. British warlocks counter with a fimbulwinter, paid in a heavy blood price, and the battle escalates on both sides, with ever greater sacrifices.

Tregillis does a decent enough job with the alt-history, the points of departure, the horror and inefficiency of the Nazi war machine, and the lengths to which the Brits would be willing to go when pressed (See Operation Vegetarian). On the other hand, the mad science isn't as cool as the Cthulhu mathematics of Charles's Stross work, and the characters and writing are solid, but nothing to write home about.

Good if you're a fan of this kind of stuff and want something fun, but not really groundbreaking.

Cowboy Angels is a grim and paranoid book about world-hopping CIA operatives involved in a conspiracy to unite every America in the multiverse under the banner of Freedom and Empire. There's no glory here, and little redemption. Just lies, murder, and obligations from the grave. The language is hard and spare as befits the subject, and I think McAuley backed away from the Big Implications of his multiverse, but he kept me hooked all the way through.

It's hard to review a Culture novel, because there are few words capable of encompassing Iain Bank's vision. Needless to say, in a galactic utopia there are still crimes and ancient sins, and it is these that Bank's protagonists are concerned with; reparations for a civil war, the light of dying stars, and what remains when even memories are gone. Great aliens minds (and Minds), vistas to boggle the mind, and a characteristic Banksian cosmological bleakness that yet manages to carry a little hope for intelligence in a uncaring universe.

The great fantasists are more than storytellers, they're mythmakers, and in Hogfather Sir Terry tackles the subject of myth head on. This is Pratchett at his best: the best jokes, biting commentary without being bluntly allegorical, and an ending that uplifts and reaffirms the human spirit. If you like Susan, the wizards, and DEATH, you'll love this book. And the ending conversation, about how stories make us human, and about how the small lies (the Hogfather, Soul Cake Duck) prepare us for the big ones (Justice, Purpose, Mercy) is one of the most inspiring and humane things I've read in a long while.

As a certain red-suited skeleton would say, HO HO HO.