Liz Williams’ BLOODMIND (TOR, 2007) continues the story set up in DARKLAND. Williams reminds me of a juggler as she launches three separate plots in motion. The main one involves the assassin, Vali, on the war-torn planet of Muspell. In the second plotline, Sedra, a dying woman on the planet of Mondhile holds the key to a super weapon. And the third plotline, on the misogynist planet Nhem, women flee the male dominated cities and join a secret camp. The ending is open-ended so expect additional books in this series in the years ahead.

DARKLAND (TOR, 2006) features Liz Williams’ one-eyed female assassin, Vali Hallsdottir, who works for the all-woman organization, the Skald. The book opens with Vali assassinating a brutal dictator and then being betrayed by her partner. The secret identity of the partner leads Vali on a mission to the super-secret nation of Darkland and later to the weird planet Liz Williams started her SF career with in GHOST SISTER, Mondhile. The novel gets bogged down from time to time as Williams alternates from Vali’s first-person narrative to a third-person narration by the characters on Mondhile. All in all, a satisfying SF adventure.

Liz Williams’ sophomore effort, EMPIRE OF BONES, has all the flaws of a second novel: too many characters, too many subplots, and a breakneck pace. Williams’ develops a future where a highly regimented social structure is maintained by vast intelligences in “The Core” of the galaxy. This social structure resembles the caste setup in India. This is where the novel starts to go wrong. One of the lead characters is Jaya who just happens to be the leader of the anti-caste faction in India. She is also a Receiver who has the power to communicate with the aliens’ depth ship. So part of the novel concerns the revolutionary struggle on Earth and the second part of the novel concerns the galactic conspiracy of the castes to destroy up-and-coming castes like humans. If you can put up with the flaws, there’s still enjoyment in this crammed novel.

Liz Williams says that one of the writers she admires is Jack Vance. There are plenty of Vancean touches in THE POISON MASTER. The planet of Latent Emanation is ruled by the mysterious Lords of Night. Humans live in feudal conditions while the servants of the Lords, the Unpriests, cruelly police the populous. Alivet Dee, an apothecary, flees when one of her clients dies. Alivet meets the Poison Master who takes her off-planet to help him develop a poison that will kill the alien Lords of Night. But there is a conspiracy Alivet needs to untangle before she can decide which side she’s on. At 370 pages, there’s a lot of padding here. A good editor could have shortened the book by a 100 pages or more and made it a better book. But Liz Williams delivers a compelling story with intriguing characters. I’ll be reading more of her work.

When, in August 1932, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post asked John Maynard Keynes if there had ever been anything like this before, he replied, “Yes. It was called the Dark Ages and it lasted four hundred years.” LORDS OF FINANCE tells the story of how incredibly stupid financial decisions caused the Great Depression and World War II. Liaquat Ahamed’s brilliant financial history of the economic catastrophes of the early 20th Century holds lessons for our present economic meltdown. This is not only a great piece of financial analysis, this book brings history to life.

I think Thomas E. Ricks is the only one who knows what’s really going on in Iraq. His brilliant analysis, THE GAMBLE, shows how the military finally abandoned their bankrupt “capture and kill” strategy and converted to a counterinsurgency approach with the Surge. Ricks believes we’re only halfway through our involvement in Iraq. We have at least six more years of counterinsurgency warfare ahead of us. Ricks shows us how the Army works and how a change in leadership to General David Petraeus avoided complete failure in Iraq. However, as a result of the Surge, we are now committed to fighting a “Long War” in Iraq that might last for decades. If you doubt that, just look at our military involvement in Korea: 50 years and counting. If you want to understand the Iraq War, Ricks will enlighten you.

I don’t know why Sudhir Venkatesh is still alive. After hanging out with some of Chicago’s most violent gangs as a sociology graduate student for over three years, Gang Leader for a Day tells how gangs work, why most public policy aimed at poverty is useless, and what we might do as a society to make things better for the poor. Venkatesh takes insane risks, but lives to tell the tale of the Dark Side of life in America.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein is a guide to policy makers, teachers, parents, and others who want to “shape” behavior. Thaler and Sunstein start with simple examples like placing healthy food a eye level in a food line and move on to complex 401K decisions. If you’re interested in “nudging” someone in your life to take a particular action, this is the place to start.

James Hawes’ breezy guide to Franz Kafka is filled with literary gossip and dishy speculation. Was Kafka pursuing a married woman at the same time he was engaged? And what was going on during all Kafka’s brothel visits? This book isn’t going to give you any deep insights into Kafka’s works, but if you’re interested in the man behind the myth, Hawes’ book will do nicely.

“I get a lot of hate mail.” That’s the way Paul Offit starts his story of bad science and risky medicine that exposes the opportunism of lawyers, and the manipulation by journalists, celebrities, and bent politicians. Offit is a specialist in vaccines. However, zealots and special interest groups work the system to push their flawed, tragic agenda. Advocates of junk science and litigation cruelly use autistic children to advance their private agendas. Offit rails against misguided and misinformed parents who are protesting childhood vaccination programs that been successful and saved millions of lives. Doctors and medical researchers who are attacked by greedy lawyers and desperate parents of autistic children deserve our support and admiration.

THE DEVIL’S EYE is a sequel to McDevitt’s popular “Alex Benedict” series. Benedict, and his sexy pilot Chase, sell high-end antiques throughout the galaxy. At the core of all the Benedict series, A TALENT FOR WAR, POLARIS, and SEEKER, there is a mystery. However, in THE DEVIL’S EYE, the mystery is fairly obvious. Even more disconcerting, the mystery is resolved about two-thirds through the book. The last third of the story concerns diplomacy. While THE DEVIL’S EYE is entertaining, it has nowhere near the suspense of POLARIS or SEEKER.

“The striking thing about the seemingly endless collapse of the subprime-mortgage market is how egalitarian it has been. It’s nearly impossible to draw a demographic line between the victims and the perps.” With these words, Michael Lewis introduces us to the world of financial panics. He starts in 1987 with the Wall Street crash, moves to the Asian crisis of the late 1990s, the Internet bubble, and finally, today’s subprime meltdown. In this anthology of articles about these panics, Lewis draws on many excellent writers. I prefer recent Nobel Prize winner, Paul Krugman’s lucid commentaries. There’s Dave Barry’s hilarious take on real estate. If you want to understand how these financial panics happen, and what to do to fix them, PANIC is the place to start.

It’s easy to write about success, but it’s much harder to write about how to return to being successful after a sickening failure. Rick Pitino was arguably the best college basketball coach in the country when he signed a $50 million contract to become Head Coach of the struggling Boston Celtics. Instead of turning the Celtics around, Pitino’s approach failed. Confronting his failure, Pitino returned to college basketball and built a woeful Louisville team into a contender. Pitino’s book is more than a sports book, it’s a book about how to deal with failure and personal tragedies. Pitino’s infant son dies, his best friend is killed on 9/11. Along with his failure in Boston, this could have crushed Pitino. Instead, Pitino overcomes his demons. This is an excellent book to learn how to deal with life’s travails and achieve success despite Hard Times.

THE NUMERATI are the people who data mine your every click on the Internet, analyze your every purchase at the checkout counter, and monitor your cell phone calls and texting. Stephen Baker describes how YAHOO and GOOGLE slice and dice your data in order to sell your information to advertisers. CMU seems to be heavily involved in this kind of research. There’s also a chapter on the activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) to fight terrorism with algorithms. Readers who believe in privacy rights should expect to be disturbed by this book.

If you don’t know a derivative from a sub-prime mortgage, Niall Ferguson’s book will enlighten you. Ferguson delivers a breezy history of money while going off on tangents like how the silver the Spanish took from the Incas actually caused financial problems for Spain and Europe. Money is a mixed blessing. However, Ferguson spends most of his time on explaining the financial intricacies of the past century which contributed to our current fiscal meltdown. Ferguson is a good storyteller which helps when trying to hold readers’ attention during a potential eye-glazing description of how the Federal Reserve system works.

Justin Peacock’s A CURE FOR NIGHT is one of the better first novels I’ve read lately. Joel Deveraux, Columbia Law School grad, is working for a prestigious New York law firm and making scads of money when he gets involved with Beth, a paralegal with a heroin habit. Joel gets hooked on heroin, too, and disaster follows. After his rehab, Joel finds a job as a Public Defender and assists on a murder trial. A good editor could have fixed some of Peacock’s rambling and tightened up the courtroom scenes. But this is just nitpicking. A CURE FOR NIGHT is an impressive debut novel. I’ll be watching for Peacock’s next work. You should too.

David M. Smick’s THE WORLD IS CURVED: HIDDEN DANGERS TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY predicts more troubled times ahead. Smick says China is being run by Tony Soprano and his thugs. It’s hard to look to gangsters for global leadership. And reading Smick on globalization and the world financial system is an eye-opener. Written as a reaction to Tom Friedman’s THE WORLD IS FLAT, THE WORLD IS CURVED is a more nuanced, detailed analysis written by a Wall Street insider. If you want to understand what’s happening (and what’s likely to happen) to the global economy THE WORLD IS CURVED provides a lot of answers.

Okay, I confess: I didn’t understand everything in Leonard Susskind’s THE BLACK HOLE WAR: MY BATTLE WITH STEPHEN HAWKING TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR QUANTUM MECHANICS (Little, Brown, 2008). But Susskind delivers a convincing description of quantum mechanics, better than anything I’ve read before. Susskind provides plenty of illustrations and examples to help explain these mind-boggling concepts. Where Susskind lost me was in the intricacies of String Theory. However, if you’re interested in where contemporary physics is headed, THE BLACK HOLE WAR is the place to start.

Be warned: if you read Nigel Hamilton’s HOW TO DO BIOGRAPHY, you’ll find Hamilton’s descriptions of dozens of biographies so compelling, you’ll want to read them all!!!

Hamilton shows how to write a biography, an autobiography, a memoir, and a blog by presenting wonderful examples from the classics.

This is a great book!!!

Mark Lilla’s study of how religion became separated from politics centers around Hobbs, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. I have never read a more insightful analysis of LEVIATHAN.

“A reorientation would have to take place, turning human attention away from the eternal and transcendent, toward the here and now. The old habit of looking to the divine nexus for political guidance would have to broken, and new habits developed. For Hobbs, the first step toward achieving that end was to get people thinking about-and suspicious about-the sources of faith. If they could start to see ignorance and fear behind most religious beliefs; if they became skeptical of claims of revelation; if they learned to distrust priests and ministers; if they questioned political interpretations of scripture; if they linked religious fervor with political violence-in short, if they began to think of religion as a human phenomenon rather than a divine one, the spell of political theology might be broken. Then, and only then, could sane thinking about political life begin.” (p. 218)

THE STILLBORN GOD is the perfect antidote to the poisons of the Religious Right.

If your summer reading tastes run to science fiction, you might consider Iain M. Banks’ space opera, MATTER. Much of the action takes place on Sursamen, a Shellworld which is an alien artifact as large as a planet. Level Eight is warring with Level Nine. The two groups have roughly 19th Century technology. Monitoring the action are a series of super alien races: the Oct, the Nariscene, and the Morthanveld who have been around for millions of years and have godlike powers.

Against this backdrop of Galactic power politics, Djan Seriy Anaplian, a secret agent for the human Culture’s Special Circumstances section, discovers her father, the King, has been murdered during the war on Sursamen. Djan decides she needs to go back to her home and investigate.

Banks takes about 200 pages to get all his plotlines up and running. But once they’re in place, the action is swift and deadly. Given that MATTER is 608 pages long, the pages turn with rapidity. The last 100 pages zoom by at warp speed. I hope there’s a sequel.

In 878 grim pages, Tony Judt’s POSTWAR tries to tell the story of Europe recovering from the ravages of World War II and confronting the threat of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It’s an impossible task, but Judt makes a good run at it. Music, art, movies, TV programs blend with the power politics of Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin. Any way you read it, this is a tragic story.

Michael Chabon writes about comic books, Philip Pullman, the ghost stories of M. E. James, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Along the way, Chabon talks about how he became a writer. In some of these essays, Chabon uses his magic to cause you to run to the computer and order the book he’s talking about. Here’s an example:

“Start anywhere; start with Odin. First he murders the gigantic, hideous monster who whelped his father, and slaughters him to make the universe. Then he plucks out his own right eyeball and trades it to an ice giant for a sip—a sip!—of water from the well of secret knowledge. Next he hangs himself, from a tree, for nine days and night nights, and in a trance of divine asphyxia devises the runes. Then he opens a vein in his arm and lets his blood commingle with that of Loki, the worst (and most appealing) creature who ever lived, thus setting in motion the chain of events that will lead to the extinction of himself, everyone he loves, and all nine worlds (beautifully mapped on the book’s endpapers), which he himself once shaped from the skull, lungs, heart, bones, teeth, and blood of his grandfather.” (p. 62)

The book under discussion is D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths. Don’t you want to read it now?

Everybody knows who Albert Einstein is, but how many people would recognize the name Ernest Rutherford? Rutherford was the improbable, unlikely genius from rural New Zealand who figured out the structure of the atom. Richard Reeves, in his fascinating A FORCE OF NATURE, makes the convincing claim that Rutherford’s experiments in physics make him the equal of Einstein. You won’t get any argument from me.

It’s hard to imagine who this book is written for. All three of these artists, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon, peaked in the early 1970s. They have continued to bring out albums, but nothing has had the impact of their early work. Their audiences dwindled over the decades.

Sheila Weller’s portraits of these three women are not happy ones. Their lives explode with unexpected pregnancies, wandering husbands, dreary affairs, divorces, drugs, suicide attempts, and a spiraling out of control.

Perhaps this book should be read as a cautionary tale.

“Power changes people, and it changes nations,” Robert Kagan says in his slim, insightful guide to contemporary politics. In a little more than a 100 pages, Kagan explores the upcoming competition of the U.S. and China (maybe a war), the frustration of radical Islamists to turn back the clock of modernity 1,400 years, and the surety that terrorists will acquire and use nuclear weapons. In a couple of hours, Kagan can reorient your geopolitical vision.

“To choose the best among the many good is one of the most hazardous attempts of criticism.” Samuel Johnson’s words apply to this fat collection of his work: poems, plays, essays, and of course, his DICTIONARY. Johnson’s life was a rocky one with heartbreak and poverty and illness dogging all his attempts to succeed as a writer. That Johnson became the legendary writer of his era and can be read with profit today is a testament to his grit and determination.

A Swedish journalist and an enigmatic computer hacker investigate the mysterious disappearance of the niece of powerful corporate mogul. The story starts slowly, but builds to a startling conclusion. This is the perfect thriller for the beach.

Before today’s teams of scientists and corporate R&D became Big Science, there was a tradition of individuals conducting science experiments in isolation: Galileo’s attempts to measure gravity, Newton sticking a needle behind his eye to figure out how light interacts with the retina, William Harvey using a tourniquet on his arm to study arteries and veins.

George Johnson returns us to the days when doing science was exciting and daring and fun (except for that needle in the eye). My favorite part of the book deals with Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with dogs. This is a story that has become distorted in psychology books. The true story is fascinating!

Yes, it weighs five pounds and has 3,440 pages. And, at almost $70, it’s pricey. But I consider this edition of Shakespeare the most definitive ever published. It’s based on the authoritative Oxford University Press volumes with additional essays to assist in understanding what Shakespeare was up to. This is a one-volume edition of the greatest works of the English Language. Every home should have one.

Leigh Brackett wrote science fiction and fantasy at a time when both fields were dominated by male writers. She developed her own, unique style influenced by the adventure stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard. Leigh Brackett didn’t stop there: she wrote a hard-boiled crime novel, NO GOOD FROM A CORPSE, that caught the eye of director Howard Hawks. Hawks hired Brackett to work with William Faulkner (yes, THAT William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize winner) on the screenplay of Raymond Chandler’s THE BIG SLEEP. Decades later, Brackett wrote the screenplay to another Chandler masterpiece, THE LONG GOODBYE. Oh, and weeks before her death, Brackett turned in the first draft of the screenplay for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. Clearly, Leigh Brackett was a major talent. But her early work has been too long inaccessible and forgotten.

Until now.

The Haffner Press is reprinting Leigh Brackett’s early stories. A couple years ago, they published the first volume of stories, MARTIAN QUEST. Now there’s LORELEI OF THE RED MIST. Hours of magic and thrills await you!

“Every great work of literature is either THE ILIAD or THE ODYSSEY,” wrote Raymond Queneau. Alberto Manguel starts there and spends the rest of his brilliant book exploring the two classics. Insights and startling musings lurk on every page. Alberto Manguel is the perfect guide to Homer’s intentions and genius. I cannot recommend this book more highly. After you’ve read this book, you’ll want to read (or reread) Homer’s classics.

Bernard Cornwell’s exciting story of the battle for London in 885 is actually the fourth book in his “Saxon Tales” series. Although you don’t need to read the first three books to understand the plot, you’ll want to read the first three books because they’re so good. This is historical fiction at its best.

The novel is narrated by Uhtred, a dispossessed son of a Northumbrian lord, who has sworn an oath to King Alfred who is trying to unite the Saxons against the marauding Vikings. Political wheeling and dealing, deceit, and violence abound. Meticulously researched, SWORD SONG delivers a thrilling reading experience and a painless history lesson.

Denis Donoghue has written a delightful book about eloquence and style. Unfortunately, a little over a decade ago, Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner wrote a better book: CLEAR AND SIMPLE AS THE TRUTH. Donoghue analyzes some of his favorite writers: Shakespeare, Virgina Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Johnson, John Donne, and a dozen more. Donoghue is conventional. Thomas and Turner’s classic is more subtle (nothing is as clear and simple as the truth) and ironic.

By all means read both books. But you’ll find one is merely good while the other is great.

Michael Pollan’s IN DEFENSE OF FOOD picks up where his brilliant (but dreadfully titled) THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA left off. Pollan wages war against “food-like” products that crowd our supermarket shelves. Pollan warns against the food marketers who develop faux food like Twinkies! Pollan’s message is: EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS. This is harder than it sounds given all the processed food in the Western diet. Currently, IN DEFENSE OF FOOD is Number One on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Sellers List. Deservedly so.

Timothy Ferriss’s approach to work is radical: work as little as you can for maximum bucks and have fun the rest of the time. Ferriss has developed a strategy that can make you a member of the New Rich while working as little as four hours per week. Sounds crazy, but Ferriss lays it all out. Along the way, Ferriss provides insight into business investment, interest rates, working the System, and time management. If you consider yourself overworked and underpaid, Ferriss shows you a way out of your dilemma.

I first read I AM LEGEND around 1960 (yes, I am old). There are at least three movie versions: Vincent Price in THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, Charlton Heston in THE OMEGA MAN, and now Will Smith in I AM LEGEND.

The setup is a world-wide plague has killed most humans. Some of the survivors have turned into vampires. One human is immune to the plague and seeks to find a cure: Robert Neville. In the current movie version, Emma Thompson plays a cancer researcher who discovers the Law of Unintended Consequences when she announces a “cure” for cancer that proceeds to go disastrously wrong.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, there were plenty of short stories and novels about nuclear war (and its aftermath) with the inevitable “last man alive” themes. In fact, Robert Bloch is credited with publishing the shortest horror story ever written: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on his door.” Writers like Richard Matheson and J. G. Ballard used other disasters like plagues or global floods as metaphors for the fragility of human existence.

With the prospects of terrorists with dirty bombs and global pandemics like bird flu, the time seems ripe for more stories like I AM LEGEND showing humanity on the edge of extinction.

If you’ve ever considered starting your own small business, you’ll find Kim Lavine’s MOMMY MILLIONAIRE both insightful and daunting. Lavine starts a small business with no small business experience, makes plenty of mistakes, gets lied to by attorneys, ripped-off by assorted scam artists, betrayed by snarky workers, nearly goes bankrupt, but with the help of some knowledgeable business friends Lavine not only survives but sees her business succeed beyond her wildest dreams! In the process of reading Lavine’s story, you’ll learn all about using QuickBooks, applying for a patent, registering a trademark, and gain dozens of tips on the process of generating sales.

I’ve read over a hundred books on small business management and entrepreneurship but MOMMY MILLIONAIRE stands out as one of the most practical and realistic books I’ve ever read in this field. Lavine never sugarcoats her struggles. You feel her frustrations, despair, and triumphs. She admits her mistakes, warns you of the pitfalls, and shows you how to avoid them. Plus MOMMY MILLIONAIRE has a happy ending. What more could you want?

THE NEW WRITER’S HANDBOOK 2007 is the start of a yearly series of volumes to help the novice writer. There are plenty of essays on how to write, how to revise, how to find an agent, how to get published, and what to do after you get published. Contributors include Barry Lopez, Richard Powers, Jane Yolen, Ridley Pearson, and William G. Tapply among others. And I really liked the introduction to this volume written by the irrepressible Erica Jong. It begins with a quote from George Orwell: “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing unless driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” Orwell nails it.

Start with a goofy kid who drinks too much and decides to legally change his name to “Johnny Rico”—the lead character in STARSHIP TROOPERS. Have Johnny enlist in the Army and get stationed in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. You would think this is the setup for an anti-war novel, but you would be wrong. This is a brutally honest look at life in today’s military.

Johnny Rico wants to leave Afghanistan and the Army to pursue his doctorate. But he discovers the contract he signed with the Army allows them to extend his “three-year” commitment to EIGHT YEARS!

The battle scenes have a surreal quality. Life in the military is boredom punctuated by stark terror. Rico captures the day-to-day routine and mixes in his own sexual obsessions.

If you’re interested in the nature of modern war and the people who fight in it, this is the book for you.

“So, there I was, tied to an altar made from outdated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians.” That’s how Alcatraz Smedry’s account of his adventures begins and it’s a wild ride. Alcatraz discovers our world is controlled by Evil Librarians who have subverted all information. There are THREE more continents on this planet, but they’re hidden by the Librarians who are trying to subject them to their evil rule. Why don’t we know about these three free continents? The Librarians control all the mapping satellites!

ALCATRAZ VERSUS THE EVIL LIBRARIANS isn’t going to challenge Harry Potter. Just consider it training wheels for future readers of Philip K. Dick.