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Single and Single by John Le Carre [review short]

It's quite a distinct pleasure to read Le Carré, but it's certainly not fiction for the Adderall era. The pacing is far different from most modern fiction: there's no cliffhanger or plot twist every ten pages to hold the reader's attention. Instead, his stories take their time and gradually envelop the reader.

Single and Single has an intricate plot, with several characters and threads that the author gradually weaves together, and then, over a bare few pages at the end, accelerates into a rapid resolution. It's not his best novel, however, and if you're looking for peak Le Carré try his earlier novels Our Game and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, both excellent.

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Perpetuity by Kevin Joseph [new fiction release]

A fast-moving, speculative sci-fi thriller, and a fun read!  After helping a fellow runner who cut her foot on a nail, a young doctor inadvertently discovers a dangerous secret in her blood, a secret that puts them in direct conflict with shadowy forces in the biotech industry. Suddenly, they find themselves running for their lives, threatened by the US government... and even more powerful enemies. Perpetuity uses several character perspectives, and the reader gradually pieces together the book's reality through various characters' eyes. I appreciate any novel that is well-structured to the point that the reader doesn't actually "see" the structure, but can just enjoy the story as it unfolds. It's harder to do than it looks. The author has a tight, noirish writing style and a knack for capturing archetypal characters. Two examples: you'll meet a smarmy, arriviste tech CEO rendered perfectly, right down to the condescending internal monologue running in hi...
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The Wars of America (Vol 1) by Robert Leckie

This is a massive and capably-written history, the first of two volumes. It will fill in a lot of the cracks in any reader's historical knowledge of the USA--especially if you're like me, someone whose historical knowledge has more cracks than foundation. Recommended as either a starting point to learn about each conflict, or as a finishing point to groove and firm up what you already know. Before I get to the book itself, let me share a brief thought on the absolute necessity of reading history--but specifically, reading history from historians who lived outside your own time period.  Current history writing is subject to a variety of problems, starting with the historians themselves, who are necessarily products of the time in which they live. They hold their era's consensus narratives, and they'll have no choice but to filter their views through modernity. The modern publishing industry adds yet another layer of problems: it acts as a gatekeeping institution, both di...
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Flyboys by James Bradley

"Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture--and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants." After thoroughly enjoying James Bradley's book Flags of Our Fathers, a compelling history of the World War II battle for Iwo Jima, I was looking forward to reading his follow up book Flyboys, which tells the little-known story of Chichi Jima, a tiny island in the Pacific that literally--and figuratively--sits in Iwo Jima's shadow. Bradley's book tries to be quite a number of things, but at its core it's a history of a series of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers on American airmen captured during bombing runs over the island. The atrocities were astonishing in their depravity, involving summary executions, decapitations and cannibalism. I'll state one minor weakness of the book up front: About a hundred or so pages covers historical background of the Pacific War that reader...
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