Recommended Reading

“Destruction and Creation” is a special case. Set in 12 pt. Arial and double-spaced, it runs about 15 pages or slightly over 250 words/page. Applying that ratio to the body of Boyd’s post-retirement work equates to a book of some 145 pages.  Which is not long, but not insubstantial, either, about the same length of Cleary’s The Japanese Art of War or the Griffith edition of Sun Tzu, both including the commentaries but without appendices. By comparison, the Sun Tzu text itself typically runs 8,000 – 10,000 words depending on the translator.

Given how long it takes to write a manuscript, not to mention finding a publisher who will promote it, it’s hard to see where Boyd would have found the time. Publishers typically want manuscripts of 80-100,000 words, which produces a 400 page book that can be priced in the $25-30 range (today’s prices). Check out Tom Barnett’s books, for example. Obviously, established authors can get different deals, but Boyd would have been a risk. And it would have been a big risk for Boyd because only a tiny fraction of manuscripts by unknown authors ever get published….

Campaign Reboot – Decision making and Failing at mental modelling 

Ribbonfarm –Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope 

Dart Throwing Chimp – A Chimp’s-Eye View of a Forecasting Experiment and When Is a Forecast Wrong?

Steven Pressfield Online – (Callie Oettinger) Outreach, Part I: The Introduction and (Shawn Coyne) Why It Takes So Long to Publish a Book

Slouching Toward Columbia – Kindly Seeking Mastery?

Dr. Tdaxp – The Rise of the Communists and the Fall of the KMT  

Michigan War Studies Review – Fighting Elites: A History of U.S. Special Forces and The War and Its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century 

That’s it.

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