I've called myself a McNamara stan elsewhere so when a new biography arrived this year, I had to get it. I've read most of the major McNamara, with the exception of Shapley's The Promise and the Power (1993), and I can say that this is a fine history that does a great deal to put McNamara in perspective, showing his strengths, failures, and surprising passions in poetry and romance.

The book is divided into three parts: before the war, the Vietnam War, and after the war. The young McNamara is a fascinating figure. His father was a successful shoe salesman, yet distant from his family. His mother was emotional and over-involved to a fault. The middle-class McNamara family lived in Oakland near enough to Piedmont to send the kids to the truly excellent and elite high school there. McNamara was a straight arrow, a literal Eagle Scout, and yet a popular and charismatic young man destined for greatness.

His early was one triumph after another: college at Berkeley, becoming the youngest professor at the Harvard Business School, statistical service with the Air Forces in World War 2, where he conducted the analysis showing low-level firebombing would be the most destructive tactic against Japan, and finally the Ford motor company. Through this period he pioneered his mastery of control accounting and quantitive metrics, and also married and had three children.

In 1960, he was tapped by the incoming Kennedy administration as Secretary of Defense. He rapidly became a key member of the administration, finding a strong working relationship with JFK and RFK, and forging a deep relationship with Jackie Kennedy. Despite some initial missteps, including the Bay of Pigs fiasco and a major gaff on the missile gap (dramatically in favor to the US, contrary to the Kennedy campaign's rhetoric), he became a central player in the administration, helping to guide the world through the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This confidence would come back to haunt McNamara in Vietnam. The 60s saw a steady escalation of American involvement: More equipment, more advisors, a coup, air strikes against North Vietnam, troops to protect the airbases, and then a full-scale occupation of 500,000+ soldiers and Marines. McNamara assumed public responsibility for the war, confidently speaking on the progress being made to Congress and the public.

Yet privately, he had turned against the war sometime in 1965, shortly after the introduction of American ground troops. Even as protests raged across America, McNamara worked as Johnson's attack dog, crushing dissent over the course of the war with an avalanche of statistics. He finally left in 1968, becoming head of the World Bank.

At the World Bank, McNamara energized the sedate organization into a force for international development, embarking on whirlwind tours of the world. He left in 1981, shortly after his wife Marge died of stomach cancer, a disease which he believed the stress of the war had contributed to.

In his later life he hiked, skied, dated various glamorous socialites and married one. He also began to speak out against his own conduct as Secretary of Defense. In Retrospect and The Fog of War show a thoughtful man, one tormented by his role in history.

For those directly effected by the Vietnam War, no atonement will likely ever be enough. Henry Kissinger mocked McNamara's emotional outbursts in an interview later in life. This book presents a sincere attempt to reckon with McNamara's mistakes. In particular, he saw himself as a de-escalating force in the Pentagon, which he was compared to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Though based in ideas of loyalty and unity of command, he critically failed to apply his talents to the greatest test of his life. His silence after leaving the Johnson administration was an act of profound moral cowardice.

Perhaps the best line in the book comes towards the end, after a 2002 conference in Havana on the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Castro invited McNamara to return in ten years, to which McNamara replied "In 2012 I will not be in Havana. I will be in hell." and left the room.

I liked this more than but only at the fringes. Divided into 100 short sections organized into thematic components, 100 Key Points provides the basics of gestalt therapy, but is like a flashlight compared to the lightning of an actual gestalt session.

In When It All Burns, Thomas blends years of deep scholarship with his experience as a wildland firefighter with the Los Padres Hotshots to provide a comprehensive account of what it means to survive megafires today.

The best parts of this book are with the hotshots. This a small, macho, elite world. Simply moving through this kind of wilderness is exhausting work, lugging 50 pound packs up and down mountains and through dense thorn thickets. Fire on this scale is one of those awesome phenomenon, with stratospheric plumes of smoke that generate their own weather systems, a bone-shaking roar, and an apocalyptic glow that says "be anywhere else." I cannot comprehend the fortitude it takes to work under these conditions. The men of the hotshots shine: Aoki, Edgar, Drago, Marlon, and all the others.

The more scholarly part of the book takes a looping journey through the consequences of capitalism. Humans, fire, and burned ecosystems coevolved, and few places were more fire-reliant than pre-colonial California. Every Indian tribe skillfully used fire to clear and enrich the land.

This human fire chain was deliberately broken: first by Spanish missionaries who had to make traditional lifestyles untenable to keep Indians as slaves in the mission system, and then by American settlers who wanted everything for themselves. Over 90% of California's Indians were murdered by state and vigilante violence in a few decades in the mid-19th century. Chaparral and forest ecosystems ceased being productive in-and-of themselves, and became stores of lumber and agricultural value. For well over a century, every fire was rapidly suppressed.

A century of fire suppression, in combination with fossil-fuel driven climate change, has created the contemporary tinderbox of the American west. When fires start (and they always will), everything burns, even supremely adapted organisms like sequoias. Megafires ravage millions of acres, consuming everything in their paths. Past firefighting knowledge is useless.

Hotshots are the elite of the wildland firefighters, with a preternatural ability to read forest conditions and manage risk. But they earn subsistence wages, and as temps rather than full-time government employees, lack healthcare. Injuries and cancer are common, and the only safety net is GoFundMe. The two week on-three days off fire season schedule and psychological demands of the work are incompatible with stable relationships. It's a brutal life.

Thomas closes out by remarking that we can bring back indigenous fire practices, and that collaborative controlled burns and reasonable levels of logging are possible. The way forward is complex and challenging, requiring both more funding and a lot more care than fire currently gets, but the alternative is an inevitable megafire.

As a dedicate fire amateur (I've got some professionals in my life), this book systematically presents a lot of useful perspectives.

This is a Rimworld Let's Play.

I probably wouldn't have cottoned on immediately, except Wijeratne mentions his inspirations in the introduction, and while I haven't played Rimworld, I've picked out enough about it from ambient nerdery.

PCS Amber Rose is a the overseer of a salvage mission, an AI in charge of three fucked up humans. Simon spent his adolescence in a battle royale VR reality TV show. Anna's identity is entirely fraudulent, a former soldier pretending to be a dead woman. Milo is an alcoholic engineer in a world where the best human engineer is mediocre compared to the inventiveness of AIs. Their mission is to land on uncharted planet and secure whatever is valuable out of the wreck of the UN terraforming ship Damn Right I Ate the Apple (as an aside, for a staid bureaucracy, UN ship names in this setting are The Culture tier.)

Of course things go terribly wrong. They land in the wrong spot. The local fauna includes something like a paleolithic groundsloth that's several tons of muscle, claws, and matted fur. There's another group of humans on planet, and they're cybernetic mercenaries that substantially outgun and outnumber the team. Simon is getting sick, winter is coming on, tempers are fraying, everyone is tired, and no one trusts anybody else.

The first 80% of the book is Amber Rose ordering its humans around and trying to set us a secure base against weird threats. The last 20% jumps to an entirely new topic, as it's revealed that the planet conceals an immense ancient AI that's just looking for someone smart enough to be worth talking to, and humanity just barely meets the line.

This is a solidly okay space survival tale. The best thing I can say about it is that you definitely don't need to read this book to appreciate Pilgrim Machines, which is genuinely good.