Jason Robert’s A Sense Of the World is a biography of James Holman, the Blind Traveler. Living in the early 19th century, Holman traveled the world, not letting his blindness come in the way of his successful career as a writer or his circumnavigation of the globe. I found the book itself to be wanting in detail – the sense of adventure in his travels is often missing – though this is more likely due to the lack of source material than the author’s talent. For those stricken with a case of wanderlust, or, as Roberts so skillfully puts it, the “freedom of abandon”, this account of “poet turned warrior turned wanderer”, the clear predecessor to Burton, is a recommended read.

The difference between journalists and writers is that journalists report events after the fact, constructing images from rumor and hearsay, presenting it as fact. Writers live in the moment. They pen what they see, hear, feel, taste, and smell – not purporting it to be fact, but only what was experienced.

Sarah Chayes begins The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban as a journalist and ends as a writer: the difference is starkly obvious. As such, I found the beginning of the book slow and mundane, but the rest an exciting and rich source of information. Overall, the book is a marked second to The Places In Between, but her summation of the history of Afghanistan, focusing particularly on the city of Kandahar, is well worth the read. And her exposure of the weakness of the Karzai government, the meddling of Pakistan, and the critique of post-Taliban U.S. policy is a crucial piece of insight into the region’s modern standing.

There’s a certain madness in walking across the most heavily land-mined country in the world, in the middle of winter, during a war – but it clearly would make for a wonderful book. Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between is just such a book. The portrait of Afghanistan, it’s people, landscape and cultures in awe-some. It is a rare look that focuses not on the military history of the land, but of the people. The tale should be read by all.

Fawn Brodie’s The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton is an awe-inspiring look at the life of one of the most important figures of the 19th Century. In an age when relativism was unknown, conquest the norm, Burton was able to shed off Mother Culture and view the world with his own eyes, shocking British Society and displaying a prime example of what Hakim Bey would today call poetic terrorism. In describing himself, Burton once said “he speaks the things that others think and hide.”

Explorer, linguist, archaeologist, anthropologist, soldier, spy, rogue, pervert; all have been used in attempts to label and tame Burton’s legacy. He is a man whom I am proud to look up to, and I’m thankful for this glimpse into his life.

Eclipse is Volume One of John Shirley’s oft-overlooked cyberpunk trilogy, A Song Called Youth.

In it, NATO and the Russians, fighting World War 3, have agreed to limit their warfare to only small-scale, tactical nukes – painfully drawing out the death of the planet (and FirStep, the space colony). Behind the scenes is the Second Alliance, a sort of combination of PNAC, Blackwater, and Jesus Camp. Worldtalk, a stand in for Newscorp, has developed a device allowing them to scan and selectively remove memory of their subjects. The New Resistance, a collection of fighters, refugees, philosophers (and a musician) headed by an ex-Mossad agent (with questionable funding and support), is the only hope against the neo-fascist-corpolitical takeover.

An excellent book, it is perhaps the most disturbing look at our corporate-dominated future. Shirley truly puts the punk in cyberpunk.