Books I've Recently Read

I liked this book. Not because it had UFO aliens in it, but because it had a neat future history scenario where the Arabs are fighting the Europeans for food and territory. The aliens never seemed to get seriously involved in the action, and to me it seemed liked they were so much window dressing. But the war which was going on seemed very plausible, and very nasty at times - arial spraying of Sarin gas, for example. The book contained a couple of neat technological innovations, like a telepresence war robot, which the Americans threw in to help out the Europeans. It also had the Ukrainians getting beat up, without the Russians coming in to help.

Put out by the same publisher that did the collected short stories of Philip K. Dick, this is a good collection. 31 in number, each story relates a perverse sense of the ironic, often relating murder, perception, and emotion in a style appropriate to the author of "Psycho". Fun reading.

Lunatic fringe. Excited by the first third of the book, where the author logarithmically explores the history of the universe, I expected a little more. He starts with a sound basic philosophy of know where you are and where you've come from, as well as where you want to go, and you can probably get there. Unfortunately near the middle of the book he goes wild with concerns over corruption in the US Congress, and then wacks out with an overdose of oversimplification based on his philosophical principles. Quotes like "The new perspective from which we can view reality permits the reader to unlock truths that currently stump our experts" lead me to wonder about why I didn't bother to look at that section of the book before I paid my 25 bucks.

An interesting overview of select campaigns by several great military leaders. In particular the author does a good job with Scipio Africanus, the general who turned around Rome's fortunes after Hannibal's devasting military victories during the Second Punic War. Ghenghis Khan, Napoleon, Stonewall Jackson, Sherman, Mao, Lawrence of Arabia, and the German panzer generals are also covered. He mainly focuses our attention on the principles of least expectation/least resistance, maneuvering to the rear of the enemy, and branching maneuvers, which served these generals so well. Don't make frontal attacks against fortified positions!

Worthwhile reading, when the selection of creative science fiction runs so thin. This is cyberpunk, set far enough off in space and time. As a planet suffers the onset of a computer virus, a Protektor (ace computer hacker) is sent in to set things right. The story is generally a who-done-it, with a several innovations in perspective, as data from remote sensors and a populace "wired for sound" help the protagonist to solve the crime.

Hack space opera, with a human dominated federation being attacked by a bad-ass set of aliens, who, in the end, turn out to not be as bad-ass as we were led to believe. A small group of ace commandos go on a long-shot mission to save a captured officer. We always knew we could win in the end.

A brief overview of the life and career of one of the most important generals of the last few centuries. One of the few generals to survive Stalin's purges, it was Zhukov who organized much of the successful defense of the Soviet Union following Hitler's invasion of the summer of '41. After coming to Stalin's attention by his total victory over the Japanese at Halhin Gol in 1939, Zhukov was able to keep things from falling apart at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of '42. He was the first to propose the strategic plan for pinning the Germans at Stalingrad. He was also able to snooker the Germans at Kirsk, in the greatest tank battle of the war. Zhukov wasted many, many men in his final drive to Berlin in 1945, but the laurels should well go to him for much of the ultimate victory in WWII over the Nazis.

The book also looks at what happened to Zhukov after the war. Shortly after the end of the war, he is disgraced by Stalin and banished to a secondary posting. Upon Stalin's death, Khruschev asks for Zhukov's help and it is Zhukov who is one of the people holding a gun who arrests Beria in a meeting of the Politburo. He gains the post of Minister of Defense until 1957, when he once again falls out of favor. A loyal communist, Zhukov never turns on the system that screwed him and his people many times, and dies in 1974.