While browsing Wikipedia for unrelated reasons, I discovered that today is the 40th anniversary of the Newhall incident, which was a contributing factor in the start of the officer survival movement.
Ayoob’s summary of the incident doesn’t seem to be available online, but can be found in Ayoob Files: The Book
Edited to add: Obit watch: Wilma Mankiller, former chief of the Cherokee Nation.
Mankiller met snide remarks about her surname — a Cherokee military title — with humor, often delivering a straight-faced, “Mankiller is actually a well-earned nickname.”
and I figured if I could hit shotgun shells from 25 feet away consistently, I’d have a good chance on bowling pins with a real gun. Especially since I was using a 
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and 
. At some point, I should probably write a longer appreciation of Joe Bob.)
, by Robert J. Ringer. Other people came to libertarianism through Ayn Rand, or Milton Friedman: I came to libertarianism through Ringer’s book, then read Rand and Nozick and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and all the other classics.
, by William Gibson. This is the book that restored my faith in science fiction, which I felt had become stagnant in the early 1980’s. It also made me want to be a Gibsonian protagonist, but 
, by Richard Feynman (with Ralph Leighton). At one point in my life, I wanted to be a physicist. For various reasons, this didn’t work out, but Feynman’s approach to looking at the world was still a major influence on me. (The link above is a bit of a cheat, as it goes to the more recent omnibus that contains Surely You’re Joking, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and some extra material. If you happen to know a smart high school or junior high student, you could do a lot worse than to buy two copies of this book; one for you, and one for them.)
, by Dashiell Hammett. Cheating again, but the complete Hammett novels were a Christmas present one year. Hammett’s work, especially Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, got me back into reading mysteries, and are a major influence on my own writing.
, edited by Jerry Pournelle. I read this not long after Restoring the American Dream. Pournelle got laughed at a lot in the mid and late 80’s for his militaristic SF anthologies, like There Will Be War, but The Survival of Freedom is a shockingly strong anthology. It contains classic stories by William Tenn, Larry Niven, and Harlan Ellison (“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” was the first Ellison story I consciously read.), essays on libertarianian and anarcho- libertarianian philosophy by people like 
, by Oliver Sacks. At the time I read this, I was very interested in artificial intelligence, and had this idea that we could understand and develop machine cognition by understanding how the human mind worked, and especially how it failed. That didn’t exactly pan out, but the work of Oliver Sacks started me on an amateur interest in neurology that continues to this day.
, by Donald Norman. Donald Norman is a personal hero of mine (as is Dr. Sacks). This is the book that got me started thinking seriously about human interface design. Oddly enough, Norman’s work (especially the essay “
. As a little kid, I loved the How and Why Wonder Books, and this was probably my favorite of the lot. I owe my fondness for firearms at least partially to this (and partially to growing up around guns).
, by Frederick Forsyth. When I was a little kid, I also hated fiction. I remember my elementary school teachers laughing at my comment that “Fiction is gross.” But much of the fiction targeted to people of my age at that time was “gross”, for values of “gross” that include “boring and condescending” (I didn’t know the word “condescending” at the time): it wasn’t until after I became an adult that fiction for kids and young adults began the great movement in the direction of dealing with the real world. The Day of the Jackal was the first fiction book I remember reading that had that feeling of “making it seem real like”. (I was also unfamiliar with the word “verisimilitude”.) Forsyth and Arthur “Airport” Hailey were pretty much my entire fiction diet for longer than I care to remember.
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. How could I forget that?
