Up to seven now.

Finished 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask by Thomas Woods Jr and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.

I liked the former, loved the latter. The first book I've been reading off and on as it's not really a book in the strictest sense and more a collection of short stories. It was enjoyable, but it got a little tiresome toward the end. I felt I had to keep parsing the book through a bunch of filters to remove all the politics from it. Apparently the guy who wrote it is a libertarian, and while I'm a libertarian too, we differ a lot on exactly what libertarianism is. There's a bit too much conservatism in this book for my taste and a little xenophobia sprinkled in for good measure. While the questions were generally good (others were not or simply rehashed from other authors) and his premises backed up with good research, but I just felt like it was more "I'm just asking questions" and less "revealing insight".

The Forever War is a book I've read several times in my life. I went ahead and picked it up to get back on track for getting one book a week read. It's a fast read and an enjoyable book, so I was able to finish it in just a couple of days worth of free time. It's a sci-fi story based in the future and featuring an interstellar war in a world where relativistic speeds cause real problems in terms of planning and executing a war -- once you arrive at a star that's 30 light years away, your enemy might have had 30 years in which to invent better technology with which to defeat you. It's also a story about the Vietnam war, and the parallels to today's Iraq war is very interesting. My only complaint is that the story is told solely from the perspective of one soldier in the war, and while I find his struggles to cope with the world moving on while he never ages and the war never ends extremely engaging, I'd really like to know more about the planning and operations going on behind the scenes. But since he doesn't know, we don't know. It's not really a flaw in the story, it's just I think there's another story lurking around in this universe and I'd love to read it.

Two more books down.

No time for a long post, but I finished up two more books to bring my total to five for the year.

This week it was The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things. This was fairly interesting in that I didn't know the book was written in 1999 before I picked it up and started reading it. Surprisingly, it was still relevant today and 10 years later, it appears we really haven't learned very much. I think it's human nature to overestimate some risks and underestimate those that are familiar to us. This probably has something to do with the fact that world in which we evolved in no way reflects the modern world in which we live in. I've found through reading books like these, I'm better able to check my emotions when assessing problems and assess them through a more rational state of mind. It's much more productive, especially at accurately assessing problems -- and not just every day dangers -- but I do find that even from an enlightened standpoint, I struggle with it. I suspect that many never stop to figure that out, and I doubt it's possible to change.

Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing was my second read, and I've spent a solid week reflecting on it. I often struggle with the problems in today's police force, and I can be highly critical of the way many law enforcement officers do their job. At the same time, I realize they're only human, and I've read both the Milgram Experiment conclusions and the Stanford Prison Experiment conclusions and realize this is a tough problem to solve.

Reading this book gave me interesting and valuable insight to the "other side", and it was presented in a way that I was sympathetic towards. It's also hard to talk about how to correct the flaws in a system if no one's willing to step and actually address the flaws, and I applaud Norm Stamper for doing so. I hope that his words will not fall on deaf ears in other police departments.

At the same time, I was a little disappointed with the book. By the end it had gotten a little tiresome to read -- there was very little "meat" to the book, it was mostly just his experiences as an officer, supervisor, and police chief, and the problems he encountered and saw, but very little investigation into why these things are happening, how we got there, and what we can do to fix it. I found I reached some understanding, but not enough to understand the decisions that were made 25, 50, or 100 years ago to get us where we are today and little understanding of how we can change minds and attitudes in today's overly militarized police force.

Overall, a good book, but I did expect more.