The Forgotten Soldier is one of the best war memoirs I've read. An account of a Guy Sajer, a German soldier who joined the Wehrmacht in 1941- the worst possible timing.

After training, Sajer is assigned to a supply battalion on the Russian front. They arrive just before the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1942.

Sajer is soon transferred to a combat division. The next three years (1942-1945) are a continuous sequence of defeat and bloody retreat. The book overflows with carnage, death and cruelty.

"Ernst", I said. "I'm going to bandage you. Don't cry."

I was insane. Ernst wasn't crying: I was. His coat was covered with blood. With the dressings in my hand, I stared at my friend. He must have been hit in the lower jaw. His teeth were mixed with fragments of bone, and through the gore I could see the muscles of his face contracting, moving what was left of his features.

A wonderful book. It should be a companion volume to "How to Win Friends and Influence People". It could be retitled "How to screw people over, including yourself".

The excerpts listed below do not appear very connected. But they are. The book is chock-full of anecdotal evidence of people exhibiting hypocritical self-justifying behavior and and research evidence of why they do. But that's not the point. We know people do this and we know we're somewhat guilty of it our own selves - just not as bad as others.

But the point of the book is that you and I are as bad as the others. Every chapter explains in simple terms why you and I are just as hypocritical as the crooked politicians, the corrupt CEOs, the bad cops. The causes and steps we follow to rationalize wrongness, and how the process feeds on itself are laid out very simply.

This review ran on Slashdot in May. of 2004.

What's bad:

The first 350 pages of The Flickering Mind are as depressing as anything I've read. In case after case, Oppenheimer describes politicians' and educators' mindless acceptance of claims by technology pundits and technology companies. The sheer number of tax dollars poured into worthless software and soon-to-be-obsolete hardware is a little sickening. The fact that so few lessons have been learned in 20 years beggars the imagination.

Those are my words, not the author's. The book's examples are laid out in very plain, factual language. No raving rants, no wild tangents. Just record after record, study after study, interview after interview.

I showed it to Jules and he stuck it in the cassette player. It was a shock when we turned it on. It was a man singing and shouting in Russian. He screamed at the top of his lungs when he sang. I had never heard a man sing like that. He sounded like an irate drunk screaming at his wife through the bathroom door to hurry the hell up. Instead of sounding like birds singing or pretty ladies, or wind chimes, it sounded more like garbage bags being dropped out windows, or people throwing cups and dishes up against a wall because they were outraged. These were all sounds that you wouldn't think were music. It was exciting. Jules liked the tape as much as I did. It became the tape that we listened to all the time. We simply couldn't get enough of it. I listened to it in the bath, or lying on the carpet doing my homework.

Excerpts:

Every generation cherishes illusions which baffle its successors (who passionately defend their own), but intellectuals are expected to view the world with a healthy skepticism. Those who visited the soviet union in the starkest years of the Depression were so easily deceived, so eager to accept the flimsiest evidence, so determined to believe the most transparent misrepresentations, that one feels that some of the scorn directed nowadays at the appeasers of Nazi Germany should be reserved for men who ought to have known better. Bernard Baruch asked Lincoln Steffens, "So, you've been over into Russia?" and Steffens replied: "I have been over into the future, and it works."

He had seen what Stalin wanted him to see, on a rigged tour, the kind generals stage for visiting politicians.

Boyd is a biography of John Boyd, an Air Force colonel and a brilliant engineer. At the time of his death in 1997, he was 70 years old and largely unknown. Boyd's life story reads like a mixture of Top Gun and Failure is Not an option.

Anyone not wanting to read swear words should avoid the book and this review. Boyd's coarse language and combative personality earned him as many enemies as friends.

I loved the book, and I want to communicate its essence as best I can. This review is mainly paraphrases and direct quotes from one of the book's story arcs. Consider it the equivalent of a film trailer. Reading this review shouldn't detract from the value of the book. Boyd is 485 pages of great reading and is far deeper and more engaging that what's highlighted here:

• Boyd wrote Aerial Attack Study--the definitive air combat manual, which has remained essentially unchanged since the 1950s.

Many stories under the "patents" topic on Slashdot are about objectionable patents (Amazon's one-click purchase patent, for instance). These stories typically draw comments full of righteous indignation and jeers about the incompetence of the US patent & trademark office. Don't you wish you could package that sentiment in a handy, bound volume? Maybe with a few more hard facts than you're likely to find on /. ? Well, now you can.

Most of the themes and arguments in Steal this Idea will be familiar to anyone who's read a Slashdot thread on patents. Michael Perelman is an economics professor at California State University. In Steal This Idea, he takes the position that patents (and trademarks, to a lesser extent) hurt science and the economy more than they help. He makes a pretty convincing case.

Roughly half the book is devoted to the negative effects of patents on scientific research.

I had low expectations for this book. I picked it off the library's "new titles"shelf becuase nothing else on the shelf looked any good either.

I was happily surprised. Black Projects, White Knights is a collection of short stories by the same author, dealing with the same universe. They are loosely tied together, but each story stands on its own. Many of the stories derive lots of humor from the idea of time travel as a vehicle for commercial gain. Black Projects, White Knights is perfect for light reading.

In the book's universe, time travel has been perfected by scientists of a future age. The people of that age use time travel to mine valuable information and artifacts from the past, generating vast profits for the mega-corporation which controls the technology.

525 pages, not inlcuding the bibliography and index.

A few excerpts:

"One of our officers had a connection with the Coca-Cola company and whenever a supply of Coke was sent to Bassingbourn, he'd see to it that some Scotch was included. It went down easy, and it got you girls. Our money got 'em too. We were paid three times what a British soldier got, and they had to resent that, especially since we used that overage to steal their women."

The mechanics were at their hardstands by 3:00 a.m., just as the flight crews were being awakened. The ordnance men and armorers had begun their work even earlier. Roused from their bunks minutes after the mission order was recieved, they headed out to the bomb dump to begin loading that day's allotment of destruction - five hundred 1000-pound bombs neatly stacked in pyramidal piles in a fenced-off enclosure the men called boom city.