A Violent Masterpiece is James Ellroy by way of Tiktok and ketamine, a ripped from the headlines thriller about the dark underbelly of Los Angeles and the fatal mix of power and desire that propels all great noir. Three protagonists find that their lives intersect over the arrest and untimely death of a former child actor turned Hollywood producer, and a string of brutal murders by killer called the LA Ripper.

Eric Alger, the inciting victim, had a reputation for liking very young women, and was busted with hard drives full of child pornography. He fires his usual lawyer and hires Doug Gibson, a street fighting defense attorney who throws what grit he can in the wheels of a racist and corrupt justice system. Alger claims that he was set up, and moreover, he’s got reams of blackmail material on the most powerful people in LA. When he dies in his cell, only the most credulous person would think it’s an actual suicide.

Alger’s life was made possible by Kara Delgado, a concierge for Sub Rosa, an agency that can get you anything. Kara is very good at catering to the most debased desires of the rich and powerful. Her secret is a missing friend and colleague, Phoebe, and a growing disgust at her line of work.

Jake Deal is a parasite on the city, a livestreamer focusing on the most sordid aspects of LA’s streets. When he’s hired by persons unknown to do some blackmail investigations, he gets tossed into the maelstrom. Jake loves to drive, to misquote various people, “as the man said”, and live by his own code.

The writing is lurid and neon-drenched, perfectly apt for this modern noir. Harper rips his plot points from actual headlines: Epstein, homeless encampment clearings, LA Sheriff Department gangs, David Grossman, private security contractors and black-bag crisis PR teams. He paints a picture of deranged sex and violence at the apex of wealth and power. After all, when you can have anything, why not have anything?

I docked the half star because Harper doesn’t quite know when to stop. His style is full sensory overload, maximal speed and violence, and a true master would know that tension needs a moment of silence. But everything else is so good this is quibbling. A Violent Masterpiece is one hell of a ride.

Blight and Lang were two of Robert McNamara’s closest collaborators in the great project of his twilight years: using the lessons of the Cuban Missile crisis to push for nuclear disarmament. They organized McNamara’s last significant public appearance, and this book is their attempt to “carry the fire” of his mission. It’s an unconventional history, structured around about 40 letters between Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro, amplified by contextual information, mostly in the form of dialogues between these leaders and their advisors, and given some dazzle by short dramas and comic books introducing each section. And sadly, it is a miss.

McNamara’s conviction was that the world came within a hair’s breadth of Armageddon in 1962, that we avoided catastrophe mostly by luck, and given that humans are fallible, every day that nuclear weapons exist is a chance for some error or miscalculation to trigger general thermonuclear war. And looking at the leadership of America, Russia, and Israel in 2026, we need a lot of luck. On a long enough timescale, catastrophe is unavoidable. The bombs must be dismantled.

To the history itself. Blight and Lang put the immediate origins of the crisis in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, where a CIA backed army of Cuban exiles utterly failed to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. Khrushchev had a clever idea to bolster this outpost of socialism in the Western hemisphere by giving them nuclear weapons, a balance to the American intermediate range missiles in Turkey. U-2 reconnaissance discovered the missiles before they became active, and Kennedy announced a “quarantine” of Cuba, since a blockade is an act of war, and set US forces to DEFCON 2, one step short of actual war.

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev immediately recognized that nothing around Cuba was worth risking global annihilation. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that these two ardent Cold Warriors recognized that they had a unique partnership in not blowing up the world. The trick was to get the missiles out of Cuba in a way that preserved face for everyone concerned, and in this, Castro was the wildcard. In the grip of revolutionary fervor, Castro was absolutely willing to sacrifice himself and his country. The basic misapprehension was that Castro saw himself as under massive American threat, and after Bay of Pigs, Kennedy wanted Cuba off his agenda. The minimal covert action was primarily for domestic politics.

There’s something powerful about the actual words these historical figures used, but this book attempts and doesn’t grasp the psychological weight of the moment. Sure, the world could be destroyed. What’s for dinner? As an amateur strategist, I fully believe that a “winnable” nuclear war is a dangerous myth. Yet, even with all its conventional arsenal, Russia still hasn’t destroyed Kyiv over 4 years into its Three Day Special Military Operation, and a single nuclear missile, if they chose to escalate, could do so. But if there were only one nuclear power, the ability to wipe out the cities of its adversaries without significant retribution would be very tempting to would-be conquerors. Mutually Assured Destruction has worked, so far, and even North Korea can make a nuclear bomb these days. Putting the genie back in the bottle is very very hard.

Weightless is a breezy guide to GLP-1 drugs by a New York City based endocrinologist and obesity specialist. Dr. Salas-Whalen has been working in this field for decades, and she firmly believes that obesity is primarily a hormonal problem and GLP-1 drugs are the solution. As such, she has her interests, but they’re clearly laid out: use these drugs under the supervision of a physician, preferably an obesity specialist like her, use only FDA approved formulations. And most importantly, GLP-1 are only one part of weightloss; a high protein diet and strength training are the other two parts.

I was most interested in the science. GLP-1 is literally Glucagon-like peptide-1, a hormone identified in the early 1980s which plays a key role in modulating digestion, blood sugar, and feeling full after meals. Natural GLP-1 breaks down in minutes, and it took decades to develop the first workable drugs, which were for treatment of diabetes. The first generation required injections 30 minutes before breakfast and dinner, so compliance was basically nil. Around 2020, Ozempic and Wegovy broke into mainstream awareness, which had the potential of once a week injections or daily pills.

Dr. Salas-Whalen discusses the differences between semaglutide and tirzepatide, which is newer and works on two hormone pathways. These drugs are best titrated up to a therapeutic dose, both to limit side effects and get more out of the weightloss plateau before the patient adjusts to the drug. Some digestive problems, especially diarrhea and heart-burn are very common, and other side effects are genuinely a reason for medical concern.

While GLP-1 make it possible to lose weight by reducing “food noise” and emotional eating, getting the most out of the drugs requires eating 100 grams of protein per day, ideally in 4x meals of 30 grams each, which is a lot of protein. And strength training is still strength training.

Dr. Salas-Whalen is relentlessly pro-GLP-1, to the point where I’m concerned she’s actively ignoring any contrary evidence. And I think everything useful in this book could be said in 50 pages. As with anything novel and popular, there’s more smoke than light.

A Brightness Long Ago is a lush meditation on fate, character, and fortune, structured around the reminiscences of Guidanio Cerra, an aging councillor, on his youth and rise to high station on the contingency of being present for truly great events.

The young Danio is working at the court of the Count Uberto, whose moniker The Beast is well deserved. One of Danio’s less pleasant duties is accompanying the palace’s steward when young girls or boys are brought to sate The Beast’s appetites. He recognizes the woman being brought up as Adria Ripoli, not an ordinary peasant girl. Adria is the daughter of a powerful nobleman and associate of the renowned mercenary commander Folco d’Acorsi, who came to Danio’s school. Adria kills The Beast with poison, but is wounded in the process. Danio helps her escape, an impulse to reward courage rather than his unworthy nominal overlord.

The story loops through the intertwined lives of Danio, Adria, Folco, the healer Jelena who nurses Adria back to health, and Folco’s great nemesis Teobaldo Monticola di Remigio. The assassination is one move in the great game between Folco and Teobaldo, but one played to little advantage as both principals are stalemated.

The second act finds Danio falling in with Teobaldo on the road to another city for the annual great horse race, which is a spectacle of gambling and excitement. Adria has entered as a rider, primarily to prove her worth as more than a potential bride, partially because Folco sees an opportunity. Danio tells Teobaldo, who embarks on his own scheme to steal Folco’s thunder. Danio and Adria meet for a second time, and a once-in-a-lifetime romantic encounter, and then her jealous father does something truly stupid and everyone has to desperately improvise a way to avoid a general war.

The third act could be considered consequences, as everyone heads home and onwards with their lives. Danio becomes a diplomat for his city of Seressa, Folco and Teobaldo face off on opposite sides of one of the great power struggles, and Sarantium finally falls.

Kay is a gorgeous writer, with a gift for sensuality and sentiment and psychology. There isn’t so much of a plot as a continual mood, which is fine, since events move at a good pace. Yet I can only mark off a point because the setting is literally Renaissance Italy. Not inspired by, not based on, literally. The characters have some more modern opinions towards feminism and homosexuality, though the majority of people are plenty conservative, and there’s no mention of a New World, but everything else just has the names changed. I can get the urge to write historical fiction without having to deal with inconvenient “well actually”s about historical events, but by Jad does it feel lazy.

Become What You Are is a collection of Watts’ essays on Eastern Religion. As much as something like Taoism or Buddhism can be explained in words, Watts does it. But words are entirely inadequate to grasp a non-dual reality, to undue a lifetime of Western scientific thought. Logic is a tooth which can bite everything except itself. Doctrine is pointing at the moon and mistaking the finger for the cosmos.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but I couldn’t help but hear a nagging voice saying “Aren’t all these traditions different?” Maybe to an American, the Tao and Karma and Dharma can be talked about as one school of philosophy, borrowing ideas freely, but internally, to the people who historically lived with them, weren’t they very much distinct religions?

Civilizations is an ironic alternative history. Starting with the divergence of a more successful viking Vinland expedition, the peoples of the New World have iron working, horses, and some immunity to smallpox and similar diseases. When Columbus shows up, his little adventure is overwhelmed and he dies a lonely failure in Cuba. No other Europeans cross the Ocean Sea.

40 years later, the historical Inca civil war between Atahualpa and Huascar ends very differently. In our timeline, Atahualpa won a bloody victory and then was ambushed, captured, and killed by Pizarro. In this timeline, he flees to Cuba where he discovers the wrecks of Columbus’ ships. He constructs new caravels and heads into the rising sun.

Weeks later, fewer than 200 Incas sail into Lisbon, recently devastated by an earthquake. Europe doesn’t know what to make of these strange visitors, and with no way back, Atahualpa takes the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V prisoner and holds Europe in the balance.

The Inca successfully navigates the viper pit of European politics, outmaneuvering nobles, mollifying the peasantry with a replacement of taxes with the Incan corvee labor system, and cutting the Gordian knot of the Protestant Reformation with the obvious clarity of Sun worship and religious freedom. My favorite part of the book was a gloss on Luther’s 95 Theses, where a second set of theses noting that Sun worship is obvious and simple and Christianity is just a confused and debased version is nailed to a church’s door.

A second threat is the arrival of the Mexicans, who have almost defeated the Incan empire in the Americas and arrive to take over France and form a counter-weight to the Incan polity with their fearsome jaguar warriors and grim human sacrifices, but the whole Mexican invasion seems half-baked.

A lot of this book is a simple inversion of the Spanish conquest of the New World. Much of the fun comes from trying to puzzle out the hagiographic perspective of the internal author, and imagining an alternative world built on Incan foundations.

I was familiar with the existence of Pappy Boyington from the 1976 NBC show, which is loosely based on his WW2 experience. The book is quite surprising, a punchy and personal take on a very up and down career.

Boyington had been a Marine aviator for years when he violated the cardinal rule of the Corps (“Never volunteer for anything”) by signing up with the American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers. Going to China seemed like a good way to get away from trouble at home, which included hefty debts, an ex-wife and three kids, and an incipient court martial for punching another officer.

China was chaotic, a shoestring operation at the far end of the Allied effort in the days before formal American involvement. The 3 squadrons of Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers flew P-40 Warhawks, famously painted with the shark’s mouth.

Though substantially outnumbered and chronically short of supplies, the Flying Tigers inflicted outsized casualties on the Japanese, and offered some protection to Chinese cities which were otherwise entirely vulnerable from the air.

As the war became more official, Chennault began making bureaucratic moves to fold the Flying Tigers into the US Army Air Forces. Boyington’s response was “Hey, I’m a Marine” and when told he’d be reduced in rank from Major to 2nd Lieutenant, he resigned his contract and made his way across India, Africa, and the Atlantic back to Washington DC. In one of those real-life SNAFU moments that characterize actual war, a personnel officer refused to reinstate him, and this veteran fighter pilot wound up parking cars in LA while battles raged across the Pacific.

By the time Boyington got back to the war, it was 1943, and the Marines were operating F4U Corsairs out of Vella Lavella. At first a major without an assignment, Boyington organized various misfits and replacement pilots into the provisional squadron, VMF-214, which became known as the infamous Black Sheep.

Boyington was an aggressive commander who led from the front. He admits he has no talent for remembering or describing air-to-air combat, but he found more than his share of the enemy and became a leading ace. He also drank like a fish, chased women in Australia, and generally made a nuisance of himself.

On one last mission to try and exceed WW1 ace Eddie Rickenbacker’s score, Boyington bit off more than he could chew, and outnumbered 10 to 2, was shot down. He was picked up by a Japanese submarine and became a prisoner of war for a long 20 months.

In what’s perhaps the most surprising part of the book, Boyington bears the Japanese no particular ill-will. While routinely brutalized by some guards and placed on starvation rations, he was talented at finding human sympathy with ordinary civilian workers and the educated Japanese drafted as translators. Through grit and optimism and stealing food, he survived the war and came home a hero with a total of 28 kills, a Navy Cross, and a Medal of Honor.

Postwar life did not prove kind to Boyington. Booze was a constant problem, and he was fired from multiple sales jobs. Prior to getting sober and writing this book, the best thing he had going was refereeing professional wrestling matches, which was somehow even more of a farce in the 1950s than it is today. Fortunately for Boyington, a handful of good friends walked him through the 12 AA steps, he managed to dry out, and hold down a flying career.

I’ll admit that WW2 memoirs are a little outside my usual range. Boyington has a distinctive voice, which is a pro and con. The stories are a little repetitive, but a lot of fun.

Notes from Underground is a strange little novella, half literary critique and half misadventure. Pevear and Volokhonsky do a heroic job putting this book into its context, and it still struggles under its contradictions.

Apparently Dostoevsky wanted to write a review of a utopian socialist Russian novel called What is to be Done, which later inspired Lenin. His critique was an attack against the entire system of rational progressive idealism, the idea that man, both singular and collective, knowing his interests and endeavoring to advance them, could get anywhere.

The Underground Man is a Russian bureaucrat, retired after coming into an inheritance and now profoundly unhappy outside St. Petersburg. He recounts his philosophy, and then several incidents from when he was younger. The central arc of part 2 concerns his wounded pride, facing down an officer who simply moves him aside in a tavern by bravely bumping him in a crowd, trying to celebrate with former schoolmates, and then in the climax, getting drunk and going to a whorehouse, and trying to connect with a young prostitute named Liza, and then deciding to humiliate and demean her.

There’s something hilarious in the narrator giving a five page monologue about the hazards of an immoral life to this poor woman he’s lying next to, but if the farce is meant to be a satire of rationalism, I feel like it misses entirely. The Underground Man is so profoundly unhappy because he can’t fit into the profoundly honor-driven and irrational world of 19th century Tsarist Russia. Somehow this book prefigures the mindset of the Twitter poster perfectly.

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning is not an easy book, but it is an important one. The existence of Israel as a Jewish state is inextricably linked to the shadow of a Palestinian people without those rights. At first, this contradiction was smoothed over by the precarious existence of Israel itself, the halting negotiations of the peace process, and the abominable behavior of Palestinian terrorists.

The October 7 attacks, and subsequent escalation of Israeli reaction from ‘mowing the grass’ to ‘scorched earth’ cracked whatever balance remained. Beinart is an editor with Jewish Currents (I’m a subscriber) and tries to unpack where Progressive Judaism is going.

Beinart’s approach examines the mythos of Israel and its consequences; mythos in the sense of the psychology and beliefs, rather than literal untruths. The basic element of this mythos is that Jews are the perennial victims of history. And yeah, Jews have been kicked around a lot, from the destruction of the Temples to the Holocaust. But the story of Purim finishes with Mordecai and his bros murdering Haman and his sons in their sleep. And the whole point of Israel is not to be victims any more.

A second line of mythos is that criticism of Israel is criticism of Jews, or in other words that anti-Zionism is also antisemitism. The “New antisemitism” is not so new; it’s traceable to at least the 1960s, when the Black-Jewish alliance of the civil rights movement broke apart on the pretty successful assimilation of American Jews, and the identification of radical factions like the Black Panthers with international anti-colonial struggles, including the Palestinian struggle. This is one area where the Left has admittedly made mistakes. Pro-Palestinian rallies flying Hamas flags are no bueno. Occupy Wall Street era skepticism about finance and capitalism can easily shade into paranoia about (((Globalist Bankers))). But surveys show left liberals are less antisemitic than those on the right and much better at distinguishing opposition to specific Israeli policies from Jewishness as a whole.

The essential facts are that Palestinian academics and voices in America have experienced far more discrimination than Jews in recent decades. And hysterical accusations that saying that the Israeli war in Gaza is killing children is a “blood libel” undercut the credibility of groups like the Anti-Defamation League. There’s no mystical aspect; the IDF is just incredibly cavalier about the use of heavy ordnance in populated areas.

The final myth is that Jewish security demands Jewish supremacy. Evidence from history and the social sciences suggests that people turn to violence as a last resort, and that the ballot staves off the bullet. The American South, South Africa, and Northern Ireland offer (flawed) examples of what happens when hierarchies are dismantled. Two major philosophical/theological points, which land most successfully of anything in the book, are that Jewish law is very clear that being a master is as degrading as being a slave, and we should be neither. Second, idolatry is literally commandment number one, and a very specific version of Israel has become an idolatrous object. Hillel allows versions of Jewish belief from atheism to Hasidic observance, but will not allow any questioning of Israel. Similarly, only one of Israel’s 14 Prime Ministers has followed kashrut, but the Israeli Constitution demands allegiance to the idea of Israel as a specifically Jewish state.

The final point is that there must be basic symmetry. If we allow for a Jewish right to self defense, then there is a Palestinian right to the same. If human rights are universal, than then international law applies to Israeli politicians and soldiers as well. Beinart’s conversation with more Zionist friends, along the lines of “Is there anything that Israel could do which would make you reconsider your support?” (use of nuclear weapons, Auschwitz-style extermination camps…) answered in the negative is an example of infinite idolatry.

These are weighty questions, and unfortunately Beinart does not have a great answer about what it means to be Jewish. In a pragmatic sense, as both Tablets Shattered and We Are Not One discuss in depth, the center of gravity of Jewish life has shifted to Israel. Israelis are right to feel more defensive about their security than American Jews, and American Jewish institutions which send their leaders to Israel for training, or are staffed by binational people, will have trouble finding their own identity.

Since this book was published in 2025, the situation has only gotten bleaker. Israel has invaded Lebanon and joined America in a disastrous war with Iran (well, disastrous for American power and anyone who ships oil through the Straits of Hormuz, Israel proper seems to be doing okay). Israel is on a dark road, but hopefully there is still time for an off-ramp, to point to Gaza as a turning point rather than a cliff.

Children of Strife continues and expands on everything that’s great about this series: new modes of cognition from non-vertebrates, the arrogance of terraformers, desperate survival against the harsh environments of space, and the meeting of minds.

The first major threads follow a group of five self-exiled industrial tycoons, “geniuses” whose criminal activities had them flee Earth under the dubious leadership of Gerey Hartmann, a self-important aspiring god (any resemblance to a living titan of industry is entirely coincidental). An implacable enemy of Arvrana Kern, Hartmann and his colleagues are seen through the eyes of Redina Kott, who at least has a sense of humor to liven up her corporate sociopathy. Their renegade terraforming operation is proceeding abysmally, constantly overwhelmed by literal bugs, when the great silence virus knocks out their station. Guided by Ken Pil, an acid-burnt longevity scientist, the five manage to figure out how to upload themselves into the ecosystem as distributed minds, entering a constant hell of war.

Meanwhile, thousands of years later, a group of dissenters from the panspecific coalition stumble upon Hartmann’s world, which has become a verdant planet complete with biological space elevator. The mission is led by Cato, an uplifted mantis shrimp, and includes Alis, a mentally damaged member of the Ymir expedition, a branch of the Nod organism, two portiids who are conducting taboo research into the nature of mind-uploading that created Avrana Kern, and a Kern fragment that has diverged from the main branch. When half the expedition goes offline, Cato, Alis, and Kern have to resolve the mystery of the implacably hostile Life on the planet below, and find a balance between the arkship survivors, the aggressively assimilative swarm that the Nod organism can be, and the half-insane minds of Gerey and his colleagues.

The five tech titans in the first thread slightly overstay their welcome; I spend enough time dealing with this particular flavor of asshole in real life to not enjoy it in speculative fiction. Cato, the uplifted mantis shrimp, is perhaps the best example of the honor warrior alien in science fiction. There are very clear reasons why a species that can punch hard enough to create sonic booms would default to ‘might makes right’, and a complex hierarchy of dominance that defines who gets punched. But more than that, Cato is a warrior poet, declaiming his opinions in short stanzas that contain just a bit of the subtle meaning that a sign language designed for dozens of rainbow-shimmering limbs can express.

Children of Memory was a dip, as simulated worlds are not very satisfying, but Strife is right back to form.

What with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I figured it was time to broaden my horizons to the American Revolution. I’m not familiar with Atkinson, but he’s a highly regarded journalist turned military historian who’s won a boatload of prizes.

This approaches the war on an individual, humanistic level. Unusually, the first individual is King George III, at the height of his power, with his 1773 birthday review of the fleet. Usually cast as a brutal tyrant and madman, the King George of the revolution was detail oriented and involved. Unlike his German forebears, he was born in England, had English as his first language, and in fact had a thoroughly British provincial conservatism, which exacerbated the political differences between Britain and the colonies.

From 1773, Atkinson skips through the political issues and begins with the British occupation of Boston, and the subsequent battles of Lexington and Concord. The British plan was simple: flatten the enemy center of gravity, gain support from loyal locals, teach the rebels some manners. And it was as poorly executed as could be.

The British found little local support, and the excursion to Lexington and Concord to seize military stores played into the best strengths of the minutemen militias. Thousands of locals swarmed the British column, sniping from behind trees and stone walls, targeting officers and dealing hundreds of casualties. At the Battle of Bunker Hill, the same militias stood up to regulars, ceding the ground at a high cost.

I won’t go into a full blow by blow, but both sides suffered major reverses to their objectives. The British were constrained by the difficulties of expeditionary warfare across the Atlantic in the age of sail. Orders arrived weeks out of date, provisions arrived rotten or not at all. The British command was often divided and ineffective, failing to close and destroy the enemy.

The American side was short of every military store, especially gunpowder and heavy cannons. At this point, most troops were militia on short term enlistments and the army was perennially rotating away. There were almost no military professionals, everyone including Washington was still very much learning as they went. The Colonial congress was disorganized and broke, which created comparable logistical difficulties.

Both sides experienced failures in strategic sideshows. The American invasion of Canada was an utter fiasco that saw an army destroyed by disease and the embitterment of Benedict Arnold. British attempts to shore up loyalists in the southern colonies only succeeded in widening the war to areas less politically motivated; freeing and arming Black slaves was a red line for the southern planter class.

For the main campaign, the Americans won at the Siege of Boston by emplacing heavy guns on Dorchester Heights. Washington then moved his army to New York, where he failed to defend the region and was pushed into New Jersey, keeping the Army intact by the skin of his teeth. What saved the Revolution was a series of audacious actions in the winter of 1776/1777, when Washington led troops across the frozen Delaware to win sharp blows at Trenton and Princeton. These dramatic victories bolstered American support at home and abroad, and forced the British back to a tiny strip of New Jersey for winter quarters.

Each side had learned sharp lessons, but the Americans had learned a little faster. As I mentioned, this is a personal account of the Revolution. Atkinson of course focuses on major figures like Washington and Franklin and Howe, as well as junior officers who would rise to greatness like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, but he takes plenty of room to describe ordinary men and women suffering, with excerpts from letters home, diaries, and descriptions of death in battle.

Atkinson doesn’t quite rise to the highest tier of grand history, like Ian Toll’s Pacific War trilogy or McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, mostly due to a relative disinterest in the intellectual and political aspects of the Revolution. However he avoids a much more common hagiographic trap, and these are engaging and detail filled stories.

Radiant Star is a sideshow in the Imperial Radch series. The city Ooioiaa is buried under the ice of a rogue planet wandering through interstellar space. Ooioiaa’s main export is religious experiences. The city is the home of the Temporal Location of the many sects of the Radiant Star, who welcome pilgrims and bestow oracular visions. It was occupied by the Radch thirty years ago, and the colonial administration is slowly absorbing the local power structure and beliefs when everything is interrupted by the immense polycrisis of the Radch Civil War documented in the main series.

Shipping stops, orders from above stop coming through, and Ooioiaa is very much on its own. Meanwhile, the head of the powerful and wealthy Serque Removal corporation, which holds a monopoly on carving out new subterranean spaces and dumping the waste rock on the icy surface, decides that he’d like to crown his life by becoming one of the saints of the Radiant Star, a process which involves fasting, drugs, and finally dying and preserving his body within the Temporal Location.

A bunch of overlapping schemes come through. Various sects and Radch authorities see this last saint as a way to secure their political interests. The two Serque heirs, a favored grandchild and disfavored child, duel over control of the company. And the city is on the brink of starvation, as an alien parasite wipes out the meager food supply.

The POV skips around, from various powerful leaders to servants and scholars and middle-class consorts jumped above their station, occasionally directly addressing the reader. Leckie keeps her impeccable sense of names (if only I could remember them) and pronouns. But the plot sort of lurches from scene to scene, without any central narrative or theme, and everything is resolved by events in the main series without these characters doing much.

The best part was when the narrator directly addressed the reader along the lines of “I know water purification systems are boring, but this matters.” like Les Miserables delving into the Paris sewers.

The Middle Passage is a Jungian analysis of midlife angst. Hollis frames the initial part of adulthood as in fact an extended childhood, a heroic journey into careers, marriage, family, and other achievements. This path is based on fundamentally illusory premises, and it’s no wonder that there is nothing at the end. People who’ve reached its limits find an interior depression and exterior chaos: quitting stable jobs, starting affairs, and other ill-conceived life choices. This pain is the sign that real adulthood approaches.

Hollis admonishes again and again to sit with solitude and the question “What do I really want?” Not what our parents and society expect us to desire, not the diversions and escapes and balms from pain, but actual soul deep authentic desire, what Jung called the Shadow.

The Shadow is not evil, but is fundamentally what we fear and repress, and also where the wellspring of creativity of power lies. The middle passage is about connecting with the Shadow, and finding true meaning on the other side.

Hollis writes beautifully. I underlined a sentence on nearly every page of this book. As for actually implementing it? We’ll see.

Superfortress is a paean to strategic airpower written by one of its foremost practitioners. General LeMay and his coauthor Bill Yenne describe the development of American bombing strategy, starting with Billy Mitchell and continuing through the development of the B-29 in the early 1940s. One thing that is clear is that while Japan was LeMay's opponent, LeMay's enemies were the US Army and the Navy.

The story then takes an abrupt turn to the practical as LeMay describes his own command of the XX Bombing Group, first staged out of India and China, and then Guam. LeMay was relentless focused on delivering maximum destruction and made several innovations. The first was a centralized maintenance system that say his command flying 120 operational hours a month, compared to 30 hours per month for the 8th Air Force based in Europe.

The second was the use of low level incendiary bombing to demolish entire Japanese cities, with tens to hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties per raid as well as mass homelessness and starvation. LeMay has no second thoughts about his actions. The goal was to win the war as fast and efficiently as possible. The Japanese government should have protected their people, if they were able.

LeMay's real ire is directed towards skeptics of strategic airpower in the Army and Navy who diverted development resources away heavy bombers, and who then diverted bombing missions away from maximum damage to merely tactical ends. LeMay is absolutely unshaken in the decisive potential of airpower, Korea and Vietnam aside.

Where the Axe is Buried is a spy thriller aping big idea fiction, linking thoughts about liberty to examples in nature. In the near future, much of the world has fallen into tyranny. The European Union has turned the details of its governance over to the PMs, carefully sandboxed artificial intelligences that manage the economy for the common good in a time of climate pressure.

The EU version is the soft tyranny of modernity extended. You can make any choice you want, as long as it's about what brand of soft drink to buy. The Russian Federation is the iron hand version, a classic Stalinist dictatorship with social credit scores, secret police, a gulag archipelago, and an immortal President, who uploads his mind between bodies to rule forever while fencing the Federation off from the decadent west.

The story follows three main characters, and a few secondary ones. Lilia is a brilliant computer scientist who returned to the Federation from Britain to see her dying father one last time, and has become trapped. She invented a breakthrough in neural networks that might offer an escape for the Federation.

Nurlan is a parliamentary staffer in an unnamed Republic on the fringes of both Europe and Russia (Georgia, perhaps?) His parliament is under siege from protestors outraged at the PM's rapid increases in energy prices.

Nikolai is the President's personal doctor, maintaining the immortal ruler's continuity as he goes another death and rebirth, and trying to deal his moral compromises at the center of the security state.

Zoya and Palmer are secondary characters. Zoya is the last dissident, exiled to the Siberian taiga. Her book The Endless Argument frames the politics of this novel. Palmer is Lilia's British boyfriend, an ordinary bloke trying to figure out what happened to his girlfriend, starting with if Lilia is even alive behind the Iron Firewall.

Nayler spent a lot of time in the former Soviet Union, and there's a great deal of authenticity in the characters and the setting. But the plot is one of mysterious propulsion from place to place, as the characters are wrapped up in a networked conspiracy that squeezes through the interstices of the omnipresent surveillance network with magical data obscuration devices. This organization goes beyond cellular to totally cryptic, delivering messages via bug drones that spell out messages and vanish down the drain, or setting up 3D printed safe houses in the middle of nowhere.

Nayler envisions a collapse of tyranny and a return to authentic human freedom, but his ambition outstrips his abilities. I still enjoyed this book, but like late-career William Gibson it's style over substance.

Absence combines near future cosmological mysteries with the psychology of living under the apocalypse. The problem people suddenly vanishing to parts unknown with no warning and no more sign than the gentle "pop" of air closing the void where they once world. Billions have vanished, and the threat of going at any moment has reshaped modern life.

Our protagonist, Harvey Ellis, is an agent with the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, a new government agency charged with managing the collapse. His mundane job is certifying that people are really gone so the survivors can collect the benefits, and sorting out proper pops from mundane murders and runaways. It's not an easy job, holding the state together against conspiracy theorists, cultists, and good old fashioned denial, but someone has to do.

Harvey's routine is interrupted when a small town in Kansas reports a Return. No one has ever come back from popping, and more than a decade after vanishing from a high school bathroom, Gabriella Reyes could save the world, or finally destroying, depending on if she's telling the truth or what brand of lie she's telling.

Harvey and partner Shonda (another BPA agent who he's having an affair with. What are rules when the world is ending?) venture into the pressure cooker of a small town with a traumatic history to divine the truth. The mystery is X-Files flavored, but where Hudson excels is drawing out the little details of the world, like the apps people use to track that they're still present, or the return of Amtrak since suddenly driverless cars and pilotless planes are too dangerous for mundane travel.

The mood is perfect. Hudson is one of the leading figures in the genre of climate fiction, and in Absence the metaphor isn't particularly subtle, but he has enough respect for the reader not to make it didactic. There's nothing that the people of this world can do about depop except manage the consequences. The uncertainties are truly cosmological. Climate is a lot more mundane, even if coming to emotional grips with climate rather than mere weather is out there. But the worst part of my life, at least, is having to get up and go and grapple with spreadsheets rather than the next few decades, because the psychological weight is too high. Absence slides in under that door.

And it's a damn fine novel, one that I finished over a pleasant Saturday, which is something I haven't done in a while.

Blue Power is a serious academic study of police labor relations, and how the police became an unassailable local power in the years since World War 2. This is a study of political entrepreneurship on the part of officers and cowardice and incompetence on the part of political leadership, including police chiefs and elected officials from mayors up to Federal offices. Schrader structures his books around the tactics and rhetoric the rank and file used to seize power from their bosses.

In the early1960s, the basic issue was one of pay. Police salaries lagged behind other public sector employees and far behind the hot private sector. Rank and file cops sought higher wages, but police had a tense relationship with the mainstream labor movement. Police political organization, such as it existed, was focused on chiefs and locally disorganized brotherhoods and federations, who were more social club than activist group.

The first major tests came as the Civil Rights Movement, Johnson's Great Society, and Black Radicalism combined to light American cities on fire in a series of riots around 1968. These urban uprisings galvanized police as the barrier between society and chaos. Pressures around racism (police were deeply segregated and agents of enforcing segregation) and integration, and newly available federal grants, as well as an ideology of technocratic liberalism, encouraged reform, education, and the beginnings of police power.

As the American economy slowed in the 1970s, police pay and especially pensions became an anchor around many municipal budgets. While police were formally prohibited from strike, wildcat actions like sickouts and work-to-rule enforcement slowdowns demonstrated the power ordinary officers had over their nominal superiors.

Aside from salary, the main focus of the issue was police discretion. Officers are hardly robots, and have constant options about who to stop and investigate, when and how to escalate a situation, and how to frame official events. The basic principle was one of solidarity: officers were always right in the moment, and could not be held accountable afterwards. Civilian review boards were anathema. Disciplinary procedures were slowed down and made biased to cops. In one notable case, the Detroit Federal of Police (I might have the city and organization wrong, but the details are correct) intervened to pay $5000 dollars to a Black prostitute who'd been raped by two Black officers for her to drop the charges. Solidarity crossed racial lines, even over obvious criminal malfeasance.

In the 1980s, with these gain secures, police turned to matters of culture. "Support the police" was a bipartisan issue, with police able to garner support from then-Senator Biden on public safety and budget issues, and then cross the aisle to stand with Republicans on cultural issues against further civil rights advances. In the 1980s, Rep. Mario Biaggi lead a crusade against "cop-killer bullets", a basically nonexistent threat of Teflon coated ammunition that had slightly enhanced performance against armored vests. Criminals didn't use specialized ammunition, many officers refused to wear vests, ordinary pistol shots that hit limbs and heads were plenty deadly, and rifles punched trivially through vests anyway. A campaign against a basically non-existent problem would characterize future police activity.

The 1980s also saw the rise of the War on Drugs, and the use of asset forfeiture as a major source of revenue. Cops had an incentive to shake people down for cash and valuables suspected to be linked to drug trafficking. The rewards were split between departments and local governments, while questions about how much of this was genuinely connected to drugs were left unasked.

If the bipartisan consensus around more cops lasted through the 1990s and 2000s, it shattered in the 2010s. Black Lives Matter drew attention to the disproportionate violence of police against Black people. The slightest political nod towards the idea that maybe officers shouldn't just open fire on Black kids from figures like Barack Obama and Bill de Blasio prompted symbolic police revolt, exemplified by officers turning their back to Mayor de Blasio en mass at funerals.

With Trump's presidency, the police picked their side. Trump's encouragement of racist violence gave police exactly what they wanted. Police organizations are now steeped in MAGA propaganda. As ICE enforcement operations demonstrate, the violence is the point. If the police had once been "professional", they're now a self-reinforcing cauldron of hate, with the main expertise being structuring overtime to maximize pension payouts.

This is a social and labor history, and I wish Schrader had focused more on the economic and effectiveness issues of policing. The tragic fact is that police are incredibly bad at solving any crime more complex than "We searched a guy and he had a baggie of drugs on him." Clearance rates for murders, rapes, and major thefts are in the single digit and often sub-1%. 9 out of 10 charges are plead-bargained away, frequently on the basis that pre-trial imprisonment is more disruptive to the suspect's life than a guilty plead. "Defund the Police" should have been taken more seriously as a policy, a call to redirect budgets to things that actually improve the lives of citizens, rather than a praetorian goon-squad.

This is a serious and sober book about how Blue Power happened. While cops have the raw ability to direct violence, their legitimacy is matter of construction. It's time we begin dismantling that wall.

Scott Payne is a good ole boy from South Carolina and retired FBI undercover agent, who recounts his career with the agency. For all his corn-pone accent and style (including pretty devout Christianity), Payne's a pretty clever guy and sincere anti-racist, starting with how his White community and some rural cops treated Black teammates on his high school football team, and ending with a belief that "accelerationist" White Supremacist domestic terrorists are the greatest danger America faces today.

Undercover work is a high stakes delicate game. Payne started with local cops, doing simple "buy and bust" operations on street level dealers. But kingpins and real organizations aren't noticably harmed by low-level enforcement, and Payne moved onwards to the FBI.

His first major case was infiltrating the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, a classic gang focused around whatever crimes make money, mostly smuggling and moving odd product. Payne is pretty sympathetic to the Outlaws and some Tennessee opioid dealers, even as he works to put them behind bars.

He has a lot less sympathy for members of The Base, the White Supremacist network he played a key role in taking down. These guys are online losers, radicalized by group chats and social media, treating spree killers as inspirations and just looking for a chance to take out as many people with them as they can.

I've got mixed feelings about undercover work. It's definitely scary stuff. Payne came close to death at least once when the Outlaws searched him while wearing a wire, and when The Base used debugging tech on his truck which could have spotted his GPS tracker. Targeted undercover is definitely more efficient than randomly jacking up suspicious (read Black) people. But a lot of the FBI's undercover work is focused on Muslims and COINTELPRO political stuff. These investigations take years, and undercovers like Payne are the tip of large and expensive investigative teams.

Some interesting stuff. Even being an undercover agent isn't necessarily a full time job. Payne still had to do regular agent paperwork and served as a tactical firearms instructor. Also, if you're a criminal and a friendly stranger shows up willing to do illegal stuff you suggest, they're probably FBI. Especially if they're willing to kill people for money. Ostensible hitmen pretty much always FBI.