A Different View: Travels with Team Easy, Iraq 2007

Blog friend (and CEO of Cooking With The Troops ) C. Blake Powers, the Laughing Wolf, and co-blogger at Blackfive, has a new book out:

A Different View: Travels with Team Easy, Iraq 2007

Also available in Kindle.

The official book blurb states:

"A Different View Of Life At The Front Rather than combat, this book is about the day-to-day life with troops in Iraq. The focus is on the 90-99 percent of the time that is tedium or boredom, rather than the one percent that is the focus of most photographs seen on the news. Foreword by Matthew Currier Burden, author of "The Blogs of War" "You can see that in his excellent work here. And I sincerely believe that you will experience something new through his “arch” into a very untraveled world…" Introduction by JD Johannes, author and filmmaker, "Outside The Wire" "Blake’s photography shows the preferred normative, but because it is not news, rarely seen." “Blake has come a long way since his days as an assistant at Playboy Chicago. It’s great to see just how far, by his showing a side of combat that few ever see, or even have the opportunity to see. A super job, I’m glad to say I knew him ‘when’….” David Mecey, former staff photographer, Playboy Magazine. "Blake has generated an outstanding work that reframes the still quiet moments of war. One could easily use this book in reintegrating one's self, family, and life. The parallels drawn between the landscape of war and the landscape of our southern United States (which still bears the scars of past war) are particularly apt. I'm pleased to see this work become available to our community." - Damon Bryan Shackelford, creator of Delta Bravo Sierra military cartoons." (Bold typeface and links added for emphasis and all-around linkery goodness. - CAA.)

Bottom Line At Bottom (BLAB): Both Matty 0'Blackfive (the original "paratrooper of love") and the DBS cartoonist say you should read it.

(I guess I'd better read it too.)

re: "How We Became a Nation of Warriors"

Stephen Glain published a condensed version of his new book at Salon ("the award-winning online news and entertainment Web site").

Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF):

"State vs. Defense, the century-old competition between those who would confront America's overseas challenges through diplomatic means and those who would subdue them by force of arms, is all but decided. The economic and political resources commanded by the latter group are vast and powerful, while the former has been reduced to a cadre of supplicants forced to beg before the lavish table of the national security state. Such a lopsided state of affairs has been abetted by a citizenry generally uninterested in the policies carried out in its name and unwilling to share in the burden of their prosecution. Only now, with the specter of bankruptcy looming over the national accounts, are some in Washington daring to contest the bill for, if not the value of, unchecked global hegemony."

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Hat tip to The SWJ Editors

By Schism Rent Asunder, by David Weber (2008), 510 pp. hardback

By Schism Rent Asunder, by David Weber, copyright (c) 2008, A Tor Book, New York, New York. Hardback, 510 pp.

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This is the sequal to Off Armageddon Reef, the second of yet another David Weber series.

I liked this one better than its predecessor, perhaps because I'd stopped fighting it and simply let it take me on its journey.

This series is one of those that mixes SF genres. There's (in the story background) interstellar war, planetary bombardment, cross-loading of human personalities into cybernetic replacement bodies, plus political intrigue as a religious Reformation plays out in a Renaissance-like context.

This second volume doesn't drag the reader jarringly between these very different contexts in quite the same fashion as the first.

I was initially resistant to reading the first volume. After all, David Weber already has me reading several of his series and paper money doesn't grow on trees.

Well, U.S. currency is printed on linen-based paper, but that's not important right now and I get paid by direct electronic deposit.

But I liked this one and will almost certainly buy the next in the series.

I suppose it's poetic justice of a sort, David Weber has something of a grudge against consular officers after the nightmare he went through trying to adopt a child in Cambodia.