Kirk and Kutchins chronicle the scientific rhetoric used to justify the replacement of the DSM-II with the DSM-III, the process of convincing the mental health community to use the new DSM, and the failure of the newfound manual to live up to its own standards of reliability and validity. This is a comprehensive and sophisticated history, drawing mostly from the public statements of the American Psychiatric Association and the driving force behind the new manual, Dr. Robert Spitzer. This book traces the development of kappa, a statistical measure of reliability, and how colored descriptive terms were used to make the same numerical values denigrated as 'no better than fair' transform into 'good' via slight of rhetoric. Having created a a problem of reliability, the low chance of two psychiatrists arriving at the same diagnosis for the same patient, and proposed the solution of significantly altering the whole system of diagnosis according to a minority view, the APA created a weighty tome backed up more by politics than science, one that enshrines the dominant view of psychiatrists in mental health.

Losers don't usually get to write history, and as social work professors, Kirk and Kutchins were definitely losers here. The story of the DSM is written here as a fall rather than a triumph. But while Kirk and Kutchins draw links to some big names in STS (Kuhn, Merton, Latour, etc), they don't quite have the answer to why the DSM-III became the standard. Why, in the tide of anti-psychiatry scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, was it a medicalized, neo-Kraepelian who rewrote the book on mental illness and closed down dissent with a much more nominative and non-causative style of diagnosis?

There are perhaps no answers for that questions, but The Selling of the DSM succeeds in other areas, exploring the creation of a new scientific instrument, the micro-decisions and discretions characteristic of using the DSM, and the ways in which the many users of the DSM have learned to manipulate it to their own ends, making a mockery of its supposed 'objectivity'. The legitimacy of psychiatry, more than most other sciences, rests on political processes. This book brings those processes to light

Perhaps the best adjective for this book is 'twee'. James Bond is inherently absurd, and this is a slantwise parody of the gin-soaked, misogynistic, psychopathic genre. Bob Howard has been dispatched to the Caribbean to take down a mad arms dealer auctioning off a DEEP SEVEN weapon (what is dead may never die...) that might destabilize relationships with the Deep Ones, who could wipe up humanity without even noticing. Making matters worse is that the mad CEO has set up a geas such that only one man can foil his plans-one man who doesn't exist, and Bob barely fills his tuxedo and shoulder holster. Not to mention the soul-eating monster he's been partnered with.

But as I mentioned, twee, because despite the whole cosmic horror thing, the best part of this book is the Bondified Smart Car, a tiny two-seater runabout packed full of gadgets, gizmos, and an ejection system. Pretty good as a novel, great as a take-down of the espionage genre, this book is a love letter to a certain kind of silly Britishness.

Intense, hallucinogenic, truer than true, this is the story of a hard year in Vietnam by a very talented writer. Michael Herr spent 1968 with the grunts, in Tet, at Khe Sanh, on China Beach. He spent it drinking in the bar of the the Continental Hotel, smoking dope in Saigon slums, sipping whiskey in bunkers by the light of parachute flares. You can't read this book and not feel the madness, the glamour, the transfixing power of War, and the way it touched and and transformed the men who fought it.

I'm most familiar with Reynolds 'Revelation Space' series, so I was afraid that I'd be in for more war-criminals war-criming against a cosmos so dark that black holes could be used as light sources. I was pleasantly surprised when Pushing Ice magnified Reynolds' better qualities.

The comet miner Rockhopper is the only ship in position to intercept Janus, a moon of Saturn, when it begins to accelerate out of the solar system. A mission that is at first a simple scientific flyby turns into the adventure of a lifetime. This is still Reynolds, and it isn't cheerful, but the agressively competent crew of the Rockhopper having to make difficult decisions to survive, and living with the consequences of command against a very strange universe.

This is the kind of book that restores my faith in academic theory. It should be required reading for anybody interested in the exercise of power, economic development, or large scale systems.

In Seeing Like a State, Scott explores how attempts to radically transform and improve the human condition have failed. He identifies the central problem of statecraft and of government as one of legibility; the state must make its citizens and their activities visible before it can appropriate revenue and orchestrate any plan for the general welfare. The problem comes when this necessary evil is tied to an ideology of High Modernism, an authoritarian central government, and a prostrate civil society.

High Modernism is a belief in a technocratic and scientific rationality; that there is one correct answer for every situation. But there is no such thing as a universal generalization, every village, field, and person is a unique individual. The state's attempts at improvement rapidly become an effort to standardize society, and make every unit of interest behave identically. This process of reducing reality to schematic agents and cadastral maps is inherently one of violence, discarding generations of carefully accumulated local metis (craft) in favor of the interests of the center. Local people are inevitably coerced into conforming with the modern grid, since it is easier to make people fit the categories than categories fit the situation.

This is not a hopeful book, but it does provide a valuable glimpse at the functioning of the most dangerous ideology of the 20th century--that of the centrally directed transformation.

This book is a decent summary of the state of erotic robotics circa 2007, but otherwise rather slapdash and under theorized. Levy's premise is that real soon now, we'll have robots, and once we have robots we'll have sex with them. It's difficult to oppose this statement because people are pervs who'll try fucking anything, but that doesn't necessarily mean that sex with robots will ever become mainstream. Levy draws on a wide array of scholarship, from the psychology of attachment, to the sociology of prostitution, to the history of vibrators, but each of these subjects is treated rather shallowly.

The interesting question and challenges about intimicay with AI are totally dropped. What about the Uncanny Valley effect and almost likelife robots? Why should we accept the validity of the Turing Test over Searle's Chinese Room argument? Is it moral to create beings to have sex with them?

At the end of the day, my biggest problem is with the narrowness of Levy's conception of both sex and robotics. For him, the robot is the android-full stop, and sex with them is a supplement to an ordinary relationship, or a crutch for those too socially awkward to keep a human mate. It's a very shallow, very Western, very boyish idea of what sex is all about, and does little to sell that idea that healthy adults will have sex with their lovely robots.

I hate to say it, but We is important more for it's context than its content. Written by a disappointed revolutionary in the early days of the Soviet state, suppressed in Russia yet influential on 1984 and Brave New World, We is a prototypical anti-utopian and anti-totalitarian novel, but not a very enjoyable one.

In the deep future, the One State has conquered the world, and is on th doorstep of conquering the planets and the inner space of the soul. Yet, this triumph of the many over the individual is threatened by the First Designer of the pioneering rocketship Integral, and his encounter with the seductress and emotional revolutionary I-330. Our narrator journals his descent into the disease of having a soul, the revolutionary underground, and the battle with the Guardians of the One State.

The problems with this novel are twofold. The first is a very Dostoevskian orientation towards individuals, emotions, turmoil, and general psychology, which works at cross purposes of the critique of utilitarian/rational leadership. The second problem is a lack of schematic coherence. By that, compare 1984, which was about Terror and History, or Brave New World, which makes eloquent statements about the antithesis of Pleasure and Freedom. In We, there is the stultifying Order of the One State contrasted against a human desire for authenticity and imagination. It's decent, but it lacks the penetrating insight of the other classic anti-utopian novels. Perhaps I do not have enough of a background in Soviet history, but I think that there is something more than can be said about the New Soviet Man, or the betrayal of ideals in the aftermath of the Revolution.

Haidt is much better psychologist than political philosopher, and this book is both monumental and dangerously flawed.

On the good side: Haidt draws broadly from research in psychology, anthropology, and biology to develop a six-factor basis for morality (Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation), and show that moral judgement is an innate intuitive ability accompanied by post-hoc justifications. Morality serves to bind non-related groups, i.e. society, together, and moral skills have been favored by various evolutionary mechanisms over human history. This theory is, frankly, really good and really well developed.

Haidt then goes on to show that Liberalism draws from only the first three moral factors while Conservatism draws from all six. This explains both the differences between liberals and conservatives, and why conservatives beat the stuffing out of liberals at the polls. This is also incontrovertible.

But Haidt is unwilling to follow his theory to its ultimate question: Can a democratic political system that privileged the rights of the minority procedurally sustain decision-making based on all six moral factors? Care/Harm, Liberty/Oppression, and Fairness/Cheating are universal factors; everybody uses them, and we mostly agree on when they are upheld or violated. Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation are intrinsically provincial factors; they're different for every culture, and every individual.

A moral order for a pluralistic society which takes the latter three factors seriously must either force people to uphold a morality they do not believe in, or segregate people based on their different interpretations of morality. Perhaps I'm particularly sensitive to such concerns because I'm a liberal Jew, but forcing false beliefs on and/or ghettoizing people seems profoundly wrong. Conversely, giving a Moral Minority the ability to gum up the works whenever they feel their rights are under attack is killing good governance.

Where conservatism fails is that we are no longer living in separate communities. It's one global economy, one atmosphere, one water cycle, one oil supply, etc. Haidt faults liberalism for damaging American moral capital in the 60s and 70s, but he doesn't explain how conservatism can become big enough rule the globe.

Reagan's legacy is a complex topic, and unfortunately I felt that Way Out There in the Blue didn't do it justice. FitzGerald used Strategic Missile Defense to approach Reagan's time in office, but SDI never amounted to much. At best, it was just a poker chip bounced around between the Department of Defense, State, the National Security Council, and arms treaty negotiators, as various factions within the American government tried to advance any kind of coherent Soviet policy. Reagan and his administration do not come off looking well in this account. The man himself is profoundly disinterested in both policy and personnel, the movie star who sees his job as selling the American public on whatever his advisers have decided. Reagan was an idealist in the worst sense of the word, someone who dreamed of a world without nuclear weapons and of an American triumph, but without the fortitude to work out the messy details of his technologically impossible visions. Perhaps the most damning flaw is that despite the billions of dollars poured into SDI and new strategic weapons during the 80s, the Soviets never bit at the arms race, keeping their expenditures essentially flat without changing the classic Mutually Assured Destruction balance. According to FitzGerald, the USSR fell because of internal flaws and Gorbachev's overly ambitious reforms, not anything Reagan did. If that's the case, why should we even care about Reagan's foreign policy? And finally, despite the billions of dollars invested in basic research, science and scientists barely appear in this work, aside from a few pages with Edward Teller. How can you write the history of a scientifically dependent weapons system without the science?

There's probably an interesting (and much more theoretically ambitious) book about the imaginaries of strategic missile defense out there, but it isn't this book.

One of the great American novels, Huck Finn is a loving, sardonic, and penetrating look at a vanished place (the American South along the Mississippi) and a vanished time (carefree boyhood). You've probably read this book, and you should probably reread it.