Book Reviews

2nd Sino-American War The US Army has not accepted the simple fact that its performance in the Korean War was lousy. This year I’ve endeavored to understand America at war. After the World Wars, where America was Johnny-come-lately with industrial-might-makes-right, Korea represents the first modern war, where American goals are muddled, local allies are weak, but airpower is dominant. The war in Korea could be the first chapter in a textbook on American military foreign policy about how the combination of paranoia, ignorance, and intolerance of casualties leads to irrational action. ...

**Dystopian Scifi ** For those of us fortunate enough to live in the developed world, dystopia is contemplated more through fiction than reality. 1984 is required reading in schools, and the Hunger Games has the ability to dominate both book lists and the box office. Still, North Korea emerges from the Korean War detritus as a 21st century dystopia. Nothing to Envy tells this story. Like Behind the Beautiful Forevers or Young China, the author conveys a handful of life stories through thoughtful interviews. This is a portrait of stark totalitarianism in the face of economic collapse and famine. North Korea’s similarities to fiction are not lost upon those who make it out, one defector’s “favorite was a translation of 1984, he marveled how George Orwell could have understood so well the North Korean brand of totalitarianism.” ...

** Aliens should be weird. ** Interesting concepts of how a superior biotech race could manipulate and control humans, even while trying to maintain a respectful distance. With the right levers, a light touch can be powerfully convincing. More interesting is the way in which Butler focuses on human desires, as distinct from human emotion. The debilitating effects of social isolation, innate nausea, or deep desire to to believe in fictions all play important roles in the plot. ...

**Failed Gambits to Suicide ** Whatever the prowess of the Wermacht, the nation lacked the means to win. * This was the conclusion reached by German central staff in December 1941 almost 4 years before V-E day. * For the rest of the war, those responsible for knowledge and planning fulfilled their roles in the knowledge that strategic success was unattainable. * It’s easy to look at WW2 with hindsight bias and wonder at the rationality of the Japanese attacking America or the Germans attacking Russia. Why provoke a power with potentially superior force? But from the perspective of both Nazi and Imperial Japanese strategists, war was inevitable. They were caught in a Thucydides trap of facing rising powers with superior production capacity and a short window of time where their own militaries would be superior. In both cases, Axis intelligence underestimated Allied military capability. And in both cases this underestimation was apparent relatively early on in the war. ...

Would Bayes’ theorem, by other words, smell so sweet? Yes, yes it would.

Useful summary of modern logistics, interrupted by complaints about amazon.

**Un-Noteworthy ** Do you take notes? Do you reference those notes? If yes to both, don’t read this book. Go to Tiago’s website instead and see if you find anything interesting. Even the youtube channel has more actionable information. In the span of 272 pages, all I got was the PARA (Projects, Areas, Research, Archive) framework for top level organization of notes. Useful, but less actionable than I expected, considering I already organize files by area and have long since maintained an archive folder. The rest of the notes I took from this book were either comments on my own note-taking system, or mental eye-rolls at the poor quality writing. ...

Some good advice interspersed into the most mind-numbing mid 90s business prose possible.

**It works, more or less ** This morning while taking care of my youngest, my elder came up shouting ”拉了拉了拉了“ indicating his need to go to the potty. After helping him remove pants and leaving him alone, the result was some turds in the can and a kid washing his hands. With stickers and goldfish as motivation the 3 day program works. We haphazardly followed the program (really we did 2 days), there were a three accidents the first day, another few the first week, but overall there were fewer than expected. ...

A boundary test on reducing bureaucracy in a large organization with some interesting learnings.