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The Rise of Siri by Shlok Vaidya 

Shlok Vaidya has launched his first novel,  dystopian techno-thriller in e-Book format entitled The Rise of Siri.  Having been the recipient of a late draft/early review copy, I can say Shlok on his first time out as a writer of sci-fi has crafted a genuine page turner.

Companion site to the book can be found here –  The Rise of Siri.com

Blending military-security action, politics, emerging tech and high-stakes business enterprise, the plot in The Rise of Siri moves at a rapid pace. I read the novel in two sittings and would have read it straight through in one except I began the book at close to midnight.  Set in a near-future America facing global economic meltdown and societal disintegration,  Apple led by CEO Tim Cook  and ex-operator Aaron Ridgeway, now head of  Apple Security Division, engages in a multi-leveled darwinian struggle of survival in the business, political and even paramilitary realms, racing against geopolitical crisis and market collapse , seeking corporate salvation but becoming in the process, a beacon of hope.

Vaidya’s writing style is sharp and spare and in The Rise of Siri he is blending in the real, the potential with the fictional. Public figures and emerging trends populate the novel; readers of this corner of the blogosphere will recognize themes and ideas that have been and are being debated by futurists and security specialists playing out in the Rise of Siri as Shlok delivers in an action packed format.

Strongly recommended and….fun!

Small Wars Journal has published the national security reading list  composed by members of  The Warlord Loop, a private listserv run by Colonel John Collins (ret.). You will find a wide-ranging list of titles in history, IR, strategic studies, military history, political philosophy and other fields recommended by experts and operators, soldiers and scholars and even a blogfriend or two. More than enough books to help fill out the empty shelves of your antilibrary.

The 2012 Warlord Loop Reading List

The U.S. national security community contains a slew of superlative political, military, economic, sociological, technological, and other specialists, but comparably qualified generalists prepared to cherry pick their products, then produce integrated policies, plans,  programs, and conduct operations that best suit this great Nation’s needs, are exceedingly scarce. The Warlord Loop’s 2012 reading list, which features interdisciplinary topics that cover the conflict spectrum from normal peacetime competition to what Herman Kahn’s classic On Thermonuclear War called a “wargasm,” is explicitly designed to help correct that imbalance.

Contributors include active and retired officials in executive and legislative branches of the U.S. Government, news media representatives, college professors, and   military personnel from every service who range in rank from noncommissioned officers to four-star generals and admirals. Males, females, liberals, conservatives, Republicans, Democrats, nonpartisans, assorted age groups, and a few foreigners span the complete range of public opinion. The Warlord recently challenged them to identify two books apiece that would help practitioners and concerned citizens better understand increasingly complex problems and optional solutions despite mutating situational changes that now circle this globe at bewildering speed. A cross-section of responses appears below. Publishers, dates, and synopses are available on the Internet.

Brigadier General Chris Arney, USA (Retired), a professor of mathematics at West Point, focuses on information networks, modeling, intelligence processing, and artificial intelligence.

          Mario Diani and Doug McAdam, Social Movements and Networks: Relational Approaches to Collective Action

          Howard Steven Friedman Howard, The Measure of a Nation: How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing               

Lieutenant General David Barno, USA, (Retired), who saw combat in Grenada and Panama, commanded all U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2003-2005. He now is a Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security.   

          Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command

          Colin Gray, Another Bloody Century

Captain Sean Barrett, USMC, is a Fellow for the Marine Corps Director of Intelligence, Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Department of Treasury. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Intelligence Officer.

          Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

          George Orwell, Animal Farm

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman, USA, formerly Office of Net Assessment, currently in International  Security Assistance Force Joint Command in Afghanistan.

          Azar Gat, A History of Military Thought

          John Lynn, ed., Feeding Mars, Logistics in Western Warfare, from the Middle Age to the Present   [….]

Read the rest here.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

The Last Lion, Winston Spenser Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, by William Manchester and Paul Reid

In the 1980’s, William Manchester wrote two of three planned volumes on the life of Winston Churchill. He had notes for the final volume but illness prevented him from completing. Instead, he brought in Paul Reid to finish his masterpiece. While it took 25 years, the wait was well worth it; Reid thus far (I’m halfway through) has channelled Manchester’s style and presenting a seamless connection to the first two volumes.

Strongest recommendation.

Cross posted at To Be or To Do.

For The Common Defense (Revised & Updated) by Allan R. Millett; Peter Maslowski 

In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland 

The Poison King by Adrienne Mayor

The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith  

I seem to be on another bibliomaniacal binge where my reach exceeds my time 🙂

For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America 1607-2012  is a courtesy review copy of the newly revised and updated 2012 edition.  I have referred students interested in a comprehensive look at American military history to older editions of For the Common Defense for years and I am curious about their handling of recent wars and how they applied new scholarship (Vietnam, Civil War) to explain old ones.

I am a big fan of Tom Holland already, having read his Persian Fire and Rubicon previously. Picking up In the Shadow of the Sword was a no-brainer.

The Poison King looks to be a fascinating read: Mithradates of Pontus was up there with Hannibal and the Parthians for dealing out devastating defeats to Roman power

I was sold on The Fate of Africa because it carried a robust endorsement on the book jacket from…. Ralph Peters!

Arakcheev: grand vizier of the Russian Empire by Michael Jenkins

Time Of Stalin, The: Portrait Of A Tyranny by Anton Antonov-Ovseenko

I just returned from a short vacation in Door County and was able to squeeze in some time to browse some of their independent and used bookstores. One in Ellison Bay had an unusually good Russian and Soviet collection and I picked up a few titles. Naturally, it would have been even cheaper on Amazon, but the used and rare bookstore is an experience for a serious reader, not just a transaction. Supporting their existence and preserving the tacit knowledge about books, authors and publishers of that niche market is worth a few extra dollars.

Count Alexei Andreievich Arakcheev was a somewhat terrifying figure from early 19th century Tsarist Russia whose career came to personify the out-of-control military authoritarianism nurtured by “the Gatchina system”. Gatchina was the princely estate of the Tsarevitch under Catherine the Great and it was here that military culture was first imported from Prussia and took root in Imperial Russia. While this had the beneficial effect of stimulating modernizing advances in Russian artillery, the Gatchina system also inculcated a zealous love of  “paradomania” in the Tsars and their army officers who served there – a fetish for obsessive detail in the minutia of barracks square drill, the ritualistic mummery of military insignia and a sadistic excess of harsh disciplinary measures for discipline’s sake.

Arakcheev, a parvenu who climbed into the ranks of the aristocracy through the Petrine state service nobility, embodied both aspects of the Gatchina system and combined it with the fanaticism of a totalitarian bureaucrat. He was loathed by the powerful families of  high boyar-descended nobility, but Arakcheev’s dog-like loyalty to the mad Emperor Paul I and the quixotic Tsar Alexander I made Arakcheev an invaluable figure who was part fixer, part chief of staff, friend and confidant to the supreme Autocrat.

I had not expected that Arakcheev would have a biography in English and skimming this one tells me that Jenkins is writing from an overly sympathetic POV for a historical figure who really merits very little empathy. While no Beria or Himmler and a more than competent artillery general and military reformer, Arakcheev was an intolerant man of violent temper, given to casually arbitrary brutalities that were shocking even by the standards of  Tsarist Russia. He presided over a disastrous experiment in agrarian military socialism that foreshadowed Soviet collective farms that intruded into the most intimate aspects of the lives of peasants and soldiers alike and combined all the disadvantages of serfdom with military service.

Anton Antonov-Ovseenko is the son of an Old Bolshevik executed by Stalin during the Great Terror, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, and a former inmate of Stalin’s Gulag himself. Given that his father had been an ally of Trotskii and Tukhachevskii, it is something of a minor miracle that the author survived to write a denunciation of his family’s great tormentor. Many other Soviet citizens of his generation, with tangential or purely imaginary connections to Stalin’s enemies vanished without a trace, unlettered and unremembered.

Despite being a professional historian, Antonov-Ovseenko’s The Time of Stalin belongs grouped with the dissident/defector literature of the likes of Kravchenko, Solzhenitsyn, Penkovskii, Amalrik, Kalugin, Chambers, Djilas, Pacepa, Voslenskii and many others. This book is less a work of objective history than an impassioned testimony of an eyewitness to horrific crimes or a memoir. Even from a casual thumbing through, one can see that there are valuable nuggets here but a critical eye is required of the reader. Stalin is admittedly one of the greatest monsters in all history but he was not superman, but a conductor of an orchestra of repression and democide.

Many hands lent themselves, often eagerly and more often fearfully, to carrying out Stalin’s will.