Tag: nonfiction

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#BookReview: God Is On Your Side by Joshua Ryan Butler

Max Lucado-Style Examination Of John. With a title like this, the easy assumptions are that the book is going to be some kind of fluffy bullshit “self help” slop that never actually helps anyone or that it is going to be so “inclusive” of everything that it excuses everything and just make everyone feel better about themselves, no matter how horrible they may be.

Except that is about as far from what we actually get here as is possible to be.

What we actually get here is an insightful look through the Gospel of John that shows elements both of the Gospel as a whole and of specific stories herein that even I, who have studied this Gospel extensively throughout my own 42 years and counting and even preached my one “official” sermon on one of the very passages Butler spends a chapter walking us through in this text, had never known before. Even Lucado, for all his awesomeness, hasn’t exposed some of the elements of these stories and this book the way Butler does here, at least not in anything I’ve read from Lucado. (Though Lucado *does* have an even stronger look at what was going on at the Feast of Tabernacles, in a vivid description I’ll never forget and have often retold…even though I don’t remember which of Lucado’s books it came from.)

Butler exposes here more clearly than I’ve ever seen anywhere just how much the Gospel of John was written explicitly to show people just how much God loves them, in a way that the people – particularly his fellow Jews – of the era would understand much more deeply than is obvious millennia later and in a completely different language and far different culture. In revealing all of this rich detail, he does for the overall Gospel exactly what Lucado did for the Feast of Tabernacles – he makes it *so much more real and vivid*. Even as someone who truly has studied this very text off and on almost literally since he could read at all – I’m fairly certain John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life” was literally one of the first things I could read at all, growing up in Sunday School and the Church nearly as much as I was in public school -, Butler reveals elements that make the book so much more alive even *for me*. Details like the entire structure of the book being a common way to structure Jewish tales even as far back as the time of Moses, that the frequent references to time were as much about story as about connecting those particular stories to particular periods of Holy Week / Passover – the days when Christ made His ultimate sacrifice. These are literary details that one may expect a Southern Baptist church to gloss over, perhaps, but I even took a Junior level collegiate class in Scriptural Literature as an elective in college and never learned this! Granted, this was a public college and not even a private school, much less an actual Seminary, but still! *Scriptural*. *Literature.*, and I didn’t learn about this *literary* technique! I had to learn about it over 20 yrs later in a random book by some preacher most people have never heard of!

Now, about the assumption at the top that this would be some kind of bullshit that excuses everything? Nah, Butler aint about that. Butler was pilloried barely two years ago for his book Beautiful Union: How God’s Vision for Sex Points Us to the Good, Unlocks the True, and (Sort of) Explains Everything, because he *dared* look at all aspects of sex from a Biblical, conservative Christian viewpoint. He got a *lot* of fire over that book, including one “reviewer” infamously going in and rating any book with his name attached to it at one star on Goodreads, even a book literally titled at the time “Untitled [I forget the year number here now] Joshua Ryan Butler Book”, which given when I saw that she had done this, I suspect he hadn’t even started writing yet at that moment! Yet here Butler references the exact same take on these same issues and has similar types of takes on many more.

And yet, like Lucado, Butler aint exactly about making people feel judged either. He’s not going to hesitate to call out sin… but he also does it in a caring manner that makes it clear that we are *all* sinners in need of grace, he more than any of us.

If you don’t like Christians or anything to do with Christianity… why are you reading a book that literally has the name of Jesus in the subtitle? Seriously, if you’re that bent out of shape for whatever reason – and maybe there is legitimate trauma there even… just ignore this book. If there is trauma there, get the help you need for it. But don’t bother reading this book until you do, because it is just going to piss you off – it is literally a book that talks about Christ on every single page, and you’re not ready for that. If you’re this type of person, just ignore the book – don’t bother reading it, and because you’re not going to read it, don’t be like that other asshole I told the story of above and rate one star something you never actually read. Yes, I know, it gives you that dopamine hit for a minute or two, but that’s it, just a shallow high that you’ll need something else to get that feeling in five minutes.

For those more open to Christianity – again, for whatever reason, even at just a comparative religions type level – check this one out. Even if you don’t agree with Butler’s takes on sin and the various societal and personal issues he discusses here, like I noted above, there’s a lot of legitimate learning here that even I didn’t previously know, despite my own extensive studies of this particular text. I might even go so far as to say that even if you have some Doctorate level degree specifically on the Gospel of John… there’s probably *something* in here even you wouldn’t be aware of.

Read this book, then write a review and let the rest of us know your own experience with it. This has been mine, and I’m interested to see what yours is like.

Oh, and that star deduction despite everything I’ve said above? As with so many others – even Lucado, maybe *especially* Lucado – there is rampant proof texting (citing Bible verses out of context as “proof” of some argument) here, even in a book whose overall narrative structure is walking through a single book of the Bible. I wage a war on this practice, and my only real “weapon” in that war is a star deduction on every review I write where the book uses it.

Very much recommended.

This review of God Is On Your Side by Joshua Ryan Butler was originally written on July 31, 2025.

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#BookReview: Mailman by Stephen Starring Grant

Inverted Hillbilly Elegy. That really is the easiest way to have a general idea about this book. Take nearly everything about Hillbilly Elegy, invert it, and you have a pretty solid approximation of Grant’s thinking. Told as a native of the eastern/ southern side of Appalachia rather than the western/ northern side, this is a man who went to prestigious Southern schools (his dad was shot in the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting) rather than prestigious Northern schools (“the” Ohio State and Yale). Instead of going into the military as a way out of Appalachia, Grant had already left Appalachia long ago as a businessman and came back during COVID to work in a purely peaceful, yet also Constitutionally guaranteed, service – the United States Postal Service, with its own sworn oath remarkably similar to that of the military’s. Instead of “spreading Democracy” as a desk jockey PR flack in Baghdad, Grant was the first person outside their homes and families that many people in his rural area of Virginia saw during the global shutdowns of COVID, spreading hope person to person in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the titular Postman of both David Brin’s original book and Kevin Costner’s movie (neither of which Grant ever mentions, to be clear). Instead of learning to fire a rifle from ROTC, Grant learned from his family and friends – including his avid fly fisherman dad. Instead of never really needing one in the safe zones of Baghdad (as Vance himself noted, to be clear), Grant speaks of the necessity of his John Browning designed 1911 pistol in the hinterlands of Appalachia – even against explicit USPS policy, as Grant notes more than once. Instead of the dangers of a broken family, Grant’s dangers come from both his own mind and the natural world around him, including an incident with a hornet nest as well as the burning and freezing of working out of a largely uninsulated metal box.

Now, Grant doesn’t seem to have any ambition for public office – even when Hillbilly Elegy came out, Vance was already running for US Senate – and that is truly one key distinction here. And yet, there are so many other similarities that the dichotomies really do speak to how you, the reader of my review of this book, can begin to get an idea of the overall nature of the book and whether you might be interested in reading it.

In all honesty, this is absolutely one I would recommend for anyone even remotely interested in learning about the lives of a “normal” (if any of us really are) American in a job most of us will never have, but who came to that job during a period where most all of us experienced massive upheaval. (To be clear, I was atypical during that period – the *only* difference in my job was that suddenly I was doing it from my home rather than driving across town to a cubicle I largely hated being in anyway. At the time I was working for a Fortune 50 global bank, and had been for a couple of years already. I wouldn’t leave there until long after the world had regained most normality, such as it had by the mid 2020s at least.)

Now, you may be asking me, “Jeff, why didn’t you deduct a star for relying on COVID so much? You literally did that in your very last review for a book set in that exact same year.” Which is a fair question, because I did do that and I do maintain that I largely don’t want to read anything about that year at all. But it is also a *nonfiction* and specifically *memoir* based look at that year (which also spared it the star deduction for lack of bibliography, as this was purely memoir), and it was clear from the description – that mentions Grant losing his job in March 2020 specifically and becoming a mail carrier after that point – that this book would be covering that period in some manner. Thus, I can’t exactly deduct a star for a real life look at that period that I was explicitly told up front was exactly that.

Overall a truly solid work perhaps more in the vein of the relatively unknown One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Frick (which told of a Dartmouth graduate’s experience as a Marine officer who was among the first “boots on the ground” in both Afghanistan and Iraq in the post 9/11 era) than Hillbilly Elegy, yet also with the direct contrasts between itself and Hillbilly. In other words, compelling, interesting, and…

Very Much Recommended.

This review of Mailman by Steven Starring Grant was originally written on July 14, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Road That Made America by James Dodson

Phenomenal Esoteric Tale of American History You’ve Likely Never Heard Of Marred By Dearth Of Bibliography.

Looking back on my own ancestry off and on over the years, I’ve traced at least some lines to within a generation or two of when Europeans were in the Americas at all, and most of those lines come from somewhere in the British Isles – mostly England and Ireland (indeed, 5 of 6 historic Counties of Ireland), with a few Rhineland region relatives tossed in at different points for good measure. The ones that I’ve traced that far, they generally showed up in the Americas in Virginia or so and ultimately worked their way along the eastern side of the Appalachian foothills until they reached its southern end in the northwest corner of Georgia, not far from the border with North Carolina and Tennessee in the region known as the Great Smoky Mountains. There, I can trace nearly every line of my family tree to that same region for the past 180 years or so – including one multiple-great grandfather who died fighting for the Union in a battle in northeastern Alabama during the Civil War.

As it turns out, there was a reason my family took the geographic path it did once it got to the region now known as the United States – apparently quite a few immigrants made their way mostly down one particular road that wound its way along this very region from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania all the way to Augusta, Georgia – where even I spent a few years living directly across the river in Aiken, South Carolina.

But what do you care about all of this?

Well… long before the Oregon Trail or the Trail of Tears or other famous trails that took Americans west from the Appalachian Mountains ultimately to the Pacific Ocean, there was the Old Wagon Road. The road that fueled expansion inland *to* the Appalachians, and along which quite a bit of American history took place from the colonial years right up through the Civil War years in particular. This book reveals a lot of that history in stories not as well known by many, even when some of them involve names known by most Americans. Names like Benjamin Franklin and Robert E. Lee and Woodrow Wilson, just to name a few you’ll hear about in this text and recognize.

The real magic here though is in the names you *don’t* recognize. The tales you’ve *never* heard of before. This is where the “real” history of America lies – the history that is rapidly being forgotten and overwritten. The so-called “esoteric” history that supposedly only matters to fanatics and those whose ancestors directly played roles in or who were directly affected by, But one could argue – and Dodson makes a truly excellent case for throughout this book – that this is the very history that builds communities and tightens bonds within them. It is the history that binds people to place and whole to piece. It is the vagaries of one man choosing one path over another – and walking into the history books (for good or ill, at differing times) because of the path he chose that night. It is the history of families and communities coming together to celebrate the great times – and mourn the bad times. It is our history as Americans, and it is my personal history – even though Dodson’s tales here don’t touch on a single name I recognize from my family tree – because it is the history of how the nation came together via the individual and community actions of those who came so long before.

Narratively, this book is both memoir and history, following one man through time and space as he travels the road – as best as he can know it – from its origins in Philadelphia to its terminus in Augusta, learning the history of each place along the way and reflecting on his experience with it.

It is a stirring narrative, both in the communal and personal histories and in Dodson’s ability to craft his words in such an evocative way. And yes, there are sections where no matter your own personal politics, Dodson is likely going to say something you don’t overly like, whether it be espousing support for the so-called “1619 Project” in one chapter or supporting the right for Confederate monuments to exist in seemingly the very next chapter. But don’t defenestrate the book, no matter how tempting iq may be in the moment. Read Dodson’s words, and carefully consider them. This is no polemic. It is a pilgrimage, and one that we’re brought along for the ride on and asked to experience for ourselves via Dodson’s narrative here.

Overall a particularly strong book about histories largely forgotten and certainly far too often ignored. And yet it is this particular strength that also leads to its one flaw: For a book that shows so much history and even references quite a few texts along the way, for the bibliography to be only a page or two is damn near criminal. While the book did contain quite a few personal and direct interviews, there is also quite a bit of history discussed, and it would serve Dodson’s readers to have a more complete bibliography so that they could read up on the same sources he used in his own research.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Road That Made America by James Dodson was originally written on July 5, 2025.

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#BookReview: Algospeak by Adam Aleksic

More About Influencer / Hyper Online Culture Of The Last Decade And How To Manipulate The Algorithms To Increase Your Reach. This is one of those books where I suspect most people will go into it with one expectation – to learn about the etymology of various terms used online and how the creation and propagation of these terms is shaping the future of language.

Instead, what we largely get is a look at influencer and hyper-online culture of the last decade and tips on how to manipulate language so that the algorithms of social media don’t shadow ban (or outright ban) you and even how to use them to gain more followers for yourself.

In and of itself, this is a rather fascinating look at what it actually is… but that isn’t really what was “sold” to us in the (current, one month to the day before publication) description of the book. But is it *quite* enough to justify a star deduction in and of itself? Normally, possibly, but here I’ll allow it simply because Aleksic does do a truly great job of explaining what he actually wants to explain… even if this isn’t what the description of the book (which isn’t controlled exclusively by Aleksic) wants us to believe the book is about.

Thus, the star deduction here is actually for the dearth of even really a modicum of a bibliography, at least in the Advance Review Copy of the book I read. Perhaps the final form will include one, and perhaps that bibliography will be roughly 15% or more of the overall text. That would be *awesome* – but that is NOT the version of the book I read, and thus is not the version of the book I must judge.

Overall truly an eye opening book roughly about linguistics and etymology, but really more about influencer culture and how to manipulate the algorithms to your own personal gain, this one will be one that will likely fly about that high – perhaps gaining a modicum of attention for a few moments, before the algorithm instead pushes the next Big Thing.

Very much recommended.

This review of Algospeak by Adam Aleksic was originally written on June 15, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Magic Of Code by Samuel Arbesman

Solid Explanation Of Why Knowing The Basics Of Software Development Is Essential In Modern Life. Full disclosure up front: My degree is in Computer Science. I actually started the program at 16 years old and was already going into Programming 3 by the time I graduated high school. I spent over three years in college as a Programming 1 tutor, having never made less than a 95 on *any* assignment or test – including the handwritten final exam – in Programming 1. I was a middle school/ high school teacher for a year before spending the last 18 years as a professional software developer building everything from credit card processing applications at a Fortune 50 megacorporation to various medical billing systems to even a couple of stints at the Savannah River Site as a nuclear software engineer on various projects, including one that informed the chemical engineers of when any one of a couple dozen nuclear waste tanks ranging in size from a few hundred thousand gallons to over a million gallons were about to explode within 24 hours if they didn’t act in time.

All that to say, obviously, I love my craft. I’m a 25+ year student of this industry as well as practitioner, and I’ve learned, done, and seen quite a bit. I *know* how critical my industry is to modern life.

Here, Arbesman does a truly remarkable job of explaining to everyone *else* what I’ve known for quite some time. No matter your background outside of software development – including those non-coders inside of the more general Information Technology industry – Arbesman does a truly great job of explaining the basics of coding and why it is important to modern life – both for good and ill – in such a way that it is both easily approachable and easily understandable by pretty well anyone who can read at all.

Reasonably well documented – at least by my more recent, more relaxed standards – at 15% or so, this book explains the wonders and pitfalls of this industry in ways that will make most anyone understand just how critical it is and why it is critically important that they have at least some understanding of it… and also make those of us who have been in the trenches for quite some time come to love what we do all over again. It is both informed and inspiring, and while it doesn’t go into all of the complexities of the field, it does give a solid overview of at least a lot of the key issues in such a way that it invites the reader to discover even more about this industry.

Overall a great book for anyone, and seemingly destined to be at minimum suggested reading – if not required – in perhaps a lot of Computer 101 courses in college or even high school.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Magic Of Code by Samuel Arbesman was originally written on June 15, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Case For Kringle by Kent Holloway

Hitler In Heaven, Pope Francis In Hell, And The Surprising Connection To Why Santa Claus Is The Best Missionary In The History Of Christianity. Got your attention with that title, right? And I know you’re asking, seriously, dude? Hitler? THAT Hitler? In Heaven???? And the recently deceased Pope Francis, the freaking POPE, the HEAD OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH POPE, in Hell????

And what, by God, does either one of those things have to do with Santa Claus AT ALL?????

Well… you need to read this book. 😀 (Though to be clear, I *did* modify Holloway’s premise for purposes of this review. In the text, Holloway actually uses Mother Teresa rather than Pope Francis, but I thought Pope Francis was more relevant to the current moment while serving the exact same purpose. 🙂 ) I fully cop to the simple fact that the title of this review and indeed most of it to this point is openly written to attempt to trigger the Outrage Machine (as Tobias Rose-Stockwell called it in his book of the same name almost two years to the day before this book is released) / Algospeak (as Adam Aleksic proclaims it in his book of the same name releasing on the same day as this book). My duty as a reviewer is first to be completely honest about my thoughts on a given book, but second to do everything in my power to help promote my review of the book (and thus the book itself), so this is an experiment in that line of thinking.

Seriously, this book is all about the pros and cons of Santa Claus, as seen by an ordained Baptist minister who actively dons the red and white suit every year and openly professes his love of (nearly) all things Christmas and Santa.

Yet even though Holloway is quite open with his natural bias here, he is also quite thorough in looking through the common complaints of Santa and examining each in turn – both from the left (“shaming isn’t cool, y’all, and we need to protect the feelings of the young flowers”) and from the right (“Heresy!!! There is NOTHING about Santa in the Bible!!!”). And Holloway truly does a pretty even handed look at all aspects of the complaints at hand, writing as both defense lawyer and prosecutor of both sides. Truly, it works quite well and since he uses a very conversational tone, it also reads quite easily.

Further, at barely 150 pages, this is also a very *quick* read – I read it in under 3 hrs, and that included getting a few chores done around the house preparing for my sister in law to arrive later today as I write this review.

Truly, anyone interested in any form of Christmas – even the secular, Santa/ Rudolph only version – will appreciate the overall discussion here, as while this *is* an explicitly Christian book and Holloway explicitly talks about using his time in the suit to spread the Christian message – part of the whole “best missionary in the history of Christianity bit”, though read the book to see what Holloway does with this and how carefully and sensitively he approaches it – this is truly a book that looks at several non-religious arguments for and against Santa as well, and these discussions could be beneficial to even the most ardent secularist/ anti-Christian.

Indeed, the *only* reason for the star deduction is that even though Holloway does include at least some footnotes at the end of each chapter, they’re all brief enough that I daresay they wouldn’t quite get to the 15% or so of the text that even my recently relaxed bibliographic standards require in order to get the full amount of stars in the rating.

Truly an well written quick read that does everything it sets out to do… and maybe a bit more.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Case For Kringle by Kent Holloway was originally written on June 6, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo And Ulrich Hoffrage

Not So Hidden, Yet Authors Explain In Ways Perhaps Others Have Not Considered. This is one of those books that reads as though you’ve always known exactly what the authors are presenting… you just never considered actually breaking it out exactly like this. Part Corporate Leadership, part Corporate Ethics, and part Self Help, it is a guide to thinking ethically even in tough situations – lest you find yourself and your company embroiled in scandals as infamous as the ones detailed herein (and others far less famous, yet impactful).

Speaking as someone who *has* worked in one of the largest companies in the world (a global megacorporation generally in the lower half of the Fortune 50 the entire time I worked there), this is one that corporate leaders are going to *love* so that they can claim they are doing something about corporate ethics/ education… so we’ll see how much those same companies really take to heart the actual message of this text and truly make changes across the board, rather than just dictating to crew dogs some (usually not completely thought out, at least at the lowest levels) written in stone and just as hard to adapt rules to follow that will change with the next corporate ethics book Leadership reads. Hell, maybe they can even save some money and just buy a lot of copies of this book rather than hiring expensive “consultants” to tell them the exact same thing… *because they read this book*.

But seriously, having been involved in the mentorship program at that employer as a mentor to more junior colleagues, this is absolutely a book I would have recommended they read, and indeed even in my current role where I also help mentor a junior colleague, I’m absolutely going to recommend this book to both my boss and my colleague. It really does lay things out quite clearly, at least so far as its framework goes.

The one criticism I have, though not rising quite to the level of a star deduction, is that its application of its framework can feel at times forced and at other times a touch too heavy handed or even myopic. Yes, it *technically* fits with both Enron and Theranos as described… but there were absolutely other factors in both of those situations that were just as critical to their scandals that *don’t* fit the overall framework as neatly which were ignored or explained away with essentially a hand wave.

But read this book anyway. It really is quite solid, and it absolutely gives off the “I always knew this” impression… even when you clearly didn’t think of it in these exact terms or framework, and these exact terms and framework may indeed help you to be a more ethical worker and leader.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Dark Pattern by Guido Palazzo and Ulrich Hoffrage was originally written on June 2, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Hiroshima Men by Iain MacGregor

Among The More Complete Histories Of The Nuclear Bombing Of Japan. Clocking in at nearly 450 pages, with only about 10% of that bibliography – and hence the star deduction – this account really is one of the more complete accounts of the entire event I’ve yet come across in all my years both reading books generally and studying WWII in its various facets more specifically. It was also the last of three books about the bomb and/ or the use of it that I read over the few days of US Memorial Day Weekend 2025 or in the days immediately after, the other two being Evan Thomas’ 2023 book Road To Surrender and Frank Close’s June 2025 book Destroyer Of Worlds.

Specifically, in tracking exactly who it does – including several key US personnel involved with both war planning and the Manhattan Project itself, the pilot of the bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the reporter who really opened America’s eyes to the horrors of nuclear fallout, and even the Mayor of Hiroshima himself – this book really does give a complete all around picture of all aspects of the creation and use of the atomic bomb and the repercussions for both American leadership and Japanese civilians.

Reading almost like a Tom Clancy or perhaps Robert Ludlum war thriller at times, this text *also* manages to have the emotional heavy hitting of Hersey’s original Hiroshima report, which it covers in nearly as much detail as Lesley MM Blume’s 2020 book Fallout – which told the story of that report exclusively. Leaning more towards the American position that as horrific as this event was, it very likely saved lives – American, Japanese, and even Russian – this is one of those texts that largely doesn’t speak of the efforts in both America and Japan by several key, yet not quite highly ranked enough, leaders to at least consider trying to end the war through dialogue (ala Evan Thomas’ 2023 book Road To Surrender), but instead seeks to offer the reader a more complete understanding of the men who *were* making the decisions in these moments, from the President of the United States all the way to the commander of the airplane that actually dropped the bomb itself.

Ultimately a thorough yet sobering account, and with its release intentionally timed just barely a month before the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, this really is one of the most complete books I’ve ever encountered on the topic, one that at least attempts to strive for a balance in understanding *all* involved in this event. Thus, all -American, Japanese, and everyone else interested in discussing the event with intelligence and facts – would do well to read this particular accounting.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Hiroshima Men by Iain MacGregor was originally written on June 1, 2025.

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#BookReview: Road To Surrender by Evan Thomas

History In All Its Complexity. This is one of the better histories of the nuclear bombings of Japan that I’ve come across over the years in that it isn’t “hoo-rah we didn’t drop *enough* bombs on Japan!”, but it also isn’t “nuclear weapons are an absolute abomination and their use made the term “war crime” seem like stealing a piece of gum, it was so much worse than that”. (The second there being closer to my own position on the matter, for what that’s worth.)

Instead, Thomas takes pains to show the complex realities on both sides of the war, both in what the leaders at the time knew and in the various pressures each was facing in trying to lead nations during a war. This is a Western-based book, and thus ultimately comes down on the side of the deployment of these weapons being “necessary”, but Thomas really shows effort to show that at least some of the American leaders that ultimately selected the targets and ordered the strikes did at least attempt to consider other alternatives – but again, given their own intelligence estimates, planning, and pressures, ultimately concluded to issue the orders they did.

One thing that becomes crystal clear when reading this text, however, is that while there may not have been (apparently clearly were not) actual communications regarding this between the governments, there absolutely were people – high ranking people – on both sides that were seeking ways to avoid this fate. There were those on the American side high enough up to know what was being built in top secrecy but low enough to not be able to countermand the order to actually use them that wanted to avoid civilian deaths at *all* costs – even if it meant not dropping these bombs at all. There were those on the Japanese side that were striving, as early as late 1944 in particular, to find some way to end the war and still allow Japan to retain its Imperial system, or at bare minimum its Emperor. (Which, to be clear, despite the US “insisting” on “unconditional” surrender, *was* ultimately allowed – and yes, Thomas goes into detail here too about what the terms actually meant to both sides.)

Truly one of the better histories of the topic I’ve ever come across, and I’m glad I finally read this text on US Memorial Weekend 2025, as we begin to go through the 80th anniversary of many of the final events detailed in this book.

Very much recommended.

This review of Road To Surrender by Evan Thomas was originally written on June 1, 2025.

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#BookReview: Fuji Fire by Chas Henry

Mass Effect. September 11. Small Exurban Atlanta, Georgia. A Blimp Commonly Seen At Major US Sporting Events. All Connected By One Event. Many, many years ago – nearly as far back as the fire at the heart of this book, though I’m not quite *that* old – I attended a Family Day (or whatever they called it at the time) at the Goodyear plant in Rockmart, Ga, just outside metropolitan Atlanta at the time. My dad and several uncles all worked for Goodyear at one of their two plants in my hometown of Cartersville, just up the road, and for whatever reason this year (and maybe one other?) Goodyear was combining the event for all three plants. Little did I know that in attending that event, I would have a direct – if extremely remote – connection to a fire that killed 13 US Marines and injured nearly 50 other people when my dad was 19 and just before my mom’s 19th birthday, nearly a year before they wed and within 5 yrs before my birth. To the level that given my family and community connections, it is at least somewhat likely that I actually know people who know the people who likely never even knew that something they had made had unfortunately indirectly caused so much devastation.

And little did Henry know that in including the tiny detail of who made the fuel bladder that leaked the fuel that burned and caused these casualties, he would instantly make this tale that much more personal to a reviewer who had never heard of this tragedy before seeing this book.

But there are wider connections here, both more in the aftermath than the setup. One issue Henry dives into for a page or two (of just barely 230 pages of actual text here) actually connects directly to an issue explored early in the first Mass Effect game in an encounter that is almost unavoidable, but to reveal which one would be a major spoiler for the discussion at this point of the book, as they are in fact identical, with identical reasonings if not identical particulars.

The other, perhaps even most surprising connection of all, is actually that this 1979 USMC tragedy along the slopes of Mount Fuji in Japan is directly connected to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City – and directly helped save lives in 2001. All because one doc in particular was there in 1979 trying to save the lives of as many of these Marines as he could and learned lessons that became directly applicable that Tuesday in New York.

Read this book to learn of the Marines tragically lost over those two months in late 1979. Their stories have rarely been told outside of Marine circles, and everyone deserves to be remembered and have their stories known. Read this book to learn of the mistakes that were made that caused this calamity – or certainly exacerbated it, at minimum – and what we can do better both in the military (which *has* updated and clarified the relevant regulations over the intervening decades) and as a society in response to emergency and traumatic situations. Read this book to learn of the selflessness and heroism of so many working to save as many people as possible, and of the Marines themselves who were so often so much more worried about their fellow Marine than their own body. Read this book because so few of us have ever heard these stories, yet the sacrifice and courage of so many truly deserve to be more well known by so many more of us.

And yes, after you read this book… leave your own review. Tell the world what you thought of Henry’s reporting here (reads like a thriller, even as you know it is all too real) or the events shown here (I think I’ve been clear on that point). Help get the word out about this book so that the world can see what happened in 1979… and since.

And then go hug a loved one, because as this tale so poignantly points out… you never really know when it will be the last time you have a chance to do so.

Very much recommended.

PS: The star deduction? Unfortunately there was no bibliography at all in the Advance Review Copy edition of the book I read, and while I understand that this is original investigation, even by my more relaxed bibliographic requirements of nonfiction books these last few years I still really need to see at least around 15% of the text be bibliography, as that does seem to be a rough industry standard and is the standard I’ve been judging nonfiction books by for quite some time.

This review of Fuji Fire by Chas Henry was originally written on May 30, 2025.