My own rating is probably closer to 3 stars, but I have a very strong feeling that is simply because I am so familiar with this story from other sourcMy own rating is probably closer to 3 stars, but I have a very strong feeling that is simply because I am so familiar with this story from other sources that little in the book felt fresh or interesting to me. So I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt of an extra star, since I'm inclined to think anyone who was not so already well informed would be duly impressed and fascinated by this account of what is probably the definitive American naval action. Midway gets the glamour and the fame, and it's easy to understand why, and Midway is indeed a remarkable story. But to me, no story of the war so captures it as the action off Samar between the Japanese high seas surface fleet in all it's might, and some forgotten working class elements of the American third line sailors aboard their tiny mass manufactured tubs and tin cans.
This is the story of the greatest naval battle in human history, and the most remarkable victory a fighting force ever earned. History is filled with stories of the badly outnumbered making a heroic last stand for the ages in places that will always be remembered like Thermopylae and The Alamo. This story is more remarkable yet....more
Three and half stars. While the tome begins well and has some wondrous prose, it mostly serves to show that even a subject as focused as American operThree and half stars. While the tome begins well and has some wondrous prose, it mostly serves to show that even a subject as focused as American operations in North Africa is too hefty for a single book - even one that clocks in at 541 pages plus end notes. Once operations are truly joined, the battles begin to blur together for lack of specifics. After a while, Mr. Atkinson is content to write 4 or 5 pages of a very formulaic descriptions of the battles - big egos manifested, personal grievances, inept blundering, numbers of casualties, and someone's ironic, biting, or sarcastic comment about the whole affair. There is so much going on here that I feel like 541 pages later I've still only scratched the surface, and the surface I've been exposed to is mostly 50 year old men who are supposed to be in command acting like spoiled petulant children. Still, it is nice to see focus on the generally little understood and much under studied North African campaign, and I found the book worthwhile and interesting....more
You think you know something, and then you discover that in fact most of what you know is wrong.
I love reading.
This is masterful treatment of probablYou think you know something, and then you discover that in fact most of what you know is wrong.
I love reading.
This is masterful treatment of probably one of the most analyzed battles of all time, which by examining closely the Japanese sources of the battle revises much of what we think we know about the battle. In particular, the author's patient explanation of the exact operational details of Japanese carrier operations is endlessly fascinating and enlightening, and serve to show that much of what has been written about the battle is clearly misguided if not outright impossible. The writing also never falls prey to that cardinal sin of the historian - being dull. Instead, the informal tone and willingness to employ humor, together with the lurid and compelling descriptions of the violence of battle, causes the book to read more like a Summer blockbuster action-adventure movie than the serious textbook of operational analysis that it also is.
If the book has any flaw at all, it is one inevitable to the recounting of a true narrative - the climax of this story occurs rather suddenly early on in the account and the denouement is rather longer and more anticlimactic than one would wish, precisely because that is what actually happened. As a minor nitpick, I was also mystified that - when broaching the taboo subject of national character and culture which a historian must tread if he wishes to be truthful despite the prevailing political climate - that no mention was made regarding the abundant evidence of the defects of the Japanese martial culture so on display prior to Tsushima. The author might leave a new reader with the impression that these defects arose after Tsushima rather than were - as a result of their own literature and philosophy - deeply written into the Japanese character right back into at least the middle ages. They are evident in philosophy of the martial art of Iaido, in the 'Book of the Five Rings', and the conduct of Japanese battle time and again long before WW2 or even the Sino-Russian War. Appealing to sources like Sun Tzu or their admiration for the Royal Navy seemed to me to appealing more to Parshall's 'proximate causes' rather than 'root causes', since the Japanese undoubtedly choose to admire these things only because they saw their own beliefs reflected in them, and only where they saw their beliefs within them. Parshall is right when he asserts a cultural strength is also a cultural weakness - the same culture that produced the miracle of the Meiji restitution also produced the horrors of Nanking and Manila and for much the same reasons - but he seems not to want to track this particular thread back as far as he could despite making oblique mention to it in his final paragraph.
One very much gets the impression that the author is simply not up to the job of covering his interesting subject. Disappointing in almost every regarOne very much gets the impression that the author is simply not up to the job of covering his interesting subject. Disappointing in almost every regard, the author simply hasn't done sufficiently thorough and rigorous research, nor does his writing ever transcend pedestrian recounting of events. The minor errors - like continually misidentifying the standard 10.5 cm leFH 18 as an '88' - could perhaps be overlooked. So to we could perhaps overlook the journeyman storytelling. But there are far more serious problems, such as the fact that when you peruse the footnotes, you quickly realize that the book is basically Truscott's 'Command Missions' retold in third person, with very few other sources informing the account at all. The author through a family friend managed to get Truscott's private letters, which serves to give us good insight into the mind of Truscott's wife, but little to no insight into Truscott's conduct of the war or the reasoning that animated his decision making. We are continually told what happened, but rarely what Truscott did, and almost never why he did it. In short, we'd probably just be better off reading Truscott's own words rather than getting them second hand with little added context. Instead of giving us multiple perspectives on the man and his thinking, the third person account is tinged with the same biases and tunnel vision perspective that you'd expect of a first person account.
The heart of good military history, and even good military biography, is good operational analysis. The writer needs to be able to pick out on a day to day basis why things actually happened the way they did. You need to be able to count trucks in the motor pool, or the minutes required to load a bomb on a plane, and figure out in the data where the really critical decisions were made. Then you need to tell the reader why those decisions were made and explain how consequential they turned out to be. There are snatches and bits of trains of thought here and there, but maddeningly never fully explored or followed up on. Where are the communiques? The memos? The responses? The orders? What are the day to day operations of the 3rd Infantry like? Why the heck don't I already intimately know the men under Truscott's command? Truscott gets orders - and then nothing. The plans he formulated either aren't worthy of mention or couldn't be uncovered from the research, assuming the author tried. I found it almost impossible to get really into the head of the commander that is the subject of the book.
Ok, I get it: Truscott's tough and you admire him. His back story is fascinating. But by the middle of the book, I'm starting to think you should have written about Field Marshall Kesselring, whom you seem to feel more interested in explain his plans and thinking than your protagonist.
The soul of good military history is the drama. Make me feel like I'm there. Put me in those boots. Let me feel it. Let me weep and grieve and rage. It's not too much to ask, because the best books do that. This one committed the sin of being as boring as a high school textbook, a crime that I find hard to forgive, because it's a crime that turns so many away from the study of history....more
The vast majority of the non-fiction works I've read were read back when I had access to a college library and tended to live in it - often to the detThe vast majority of the non-fiction works I've read were read back when I had access to a college library and tended to live in it - often to the detriment of my studies. They aren't listed in Goodreads simply because they tend to unmemorable academic titles and I forget their names until someone mentions one in some discussion, and I think, "Oh yeah. I remember that book."
Fine's work might not be a particularly stellar or insightful bit of academic research, but it's still extremely valuable simply because in 1983 no one else had the guts or the foresight to consider academic research and historical documentation of the nascent gaming hobby to be important. As such he leaves behind what is probably the only contemporary historical records of the early days of gaming and the culture of early role playing groups, something that is of increasing importance as more and more of the grognards from those early days turn in their final character sheets.
As a munchkin coming in to the game at the very end of that era, I can testify that Fine captures some of the essence of early gaming both good and bad. Some things a modern gaming reader will recognize as very familiar. Some arguments and particular social frictions never go away. Some things I think will seem a bit bizarre.
One thing that modern gamers might not understand about the early days of D&D is that it was a frontier. And like most frontiers, by and large, gaming was largely peopled by groups of very much marginalized people. And was coming out of the '70s which made it in many ways an experimental counter-cultural lifestyle of its own before it became normalized through sheer popularity. Gaming was seen as a sort of delinquency both because it was new and a bit weird, and because the people playing it were legitimately weird and often as not anti-social in one way or the other. Comic books like 'The Knights of the Dinner Table' record the truth of that in parody, but it shouldn't be thought that because it is parody that it's really that over the top. As Homer Simpson observes, "It's funny because it is true." Groups that I knew of at the time were combining D&D with drug use, or living together in a hippy commune, or bought occult tomes so that they could really cast spells (or at least try to) while gaming, or invented weird and sometimes startlingly dangerous sorts of D&D meets LARPing. As gaming stores didn't exist in many areas, some of the earliest carriers of D&D works were occult book stores where you'd push your way through the haze of incense and other smoke to find D&D books on the shelf next to works on neo-Druidism and modern Witchcraft. I can only imagine what I'd known about if I was older. But even so I find the presentation of gaming culture in E.T. is remarkably spot on, particularly if you confine it to the younger players with little knowledge of the 70's groups, and particularly in the novelization where the references to drugs and the mother's fears regarding the older son are more explicit. Fine captures some of that in his work in an era that is just before society begins to revolt against gaming in the "Occult Scare" of the mid'80's, and really just before society even notices the gamers and before nerds really get their revenge by becoming the creators of the art - whether Game of Thrones, the Marvel Universe, or video games - that everyone else is consuming. It's hard these days to find anything in popular entertainment that hasn't been influenced by gamers, and it all starts in the groups that Fine takes the time to study.
If I had to criticize, I'd say that Fine spent too much time with some of the leading game creators of that era and not enough time out in 'the wilds' of the larger community. But the very fact that someone was paying attention and took the time to try to understand what was going on is still amazing....more
This book identifies a collection of Christian writers who were seeking to find God over the centuries. There isn't quite an even coverage of writers This book identifies a collection of Christian writers who were seeking to find God over the centuries. There isn't quite an even coverage of writers from the whole twenty centuries of Christian faith, but there is a fair sample - even if it is not necessarily the most representative sample.
I opened this book thinking that in the older writers I would find things strange and alien, and that I'd see a progression toward more familiar expressions of Christian theology and faith and obedience. Instead, I found rather quite the contrary. It was the older writers who expressed the ideas I found the most familiar, and many of the newer ones I found the most strange and different from the faith I grew up with.
It was pretty good, but overall I can't really recommend it as a work on its own, as the biographies and excerpts are really too short to be anything but a starting point to investigating the lives mentioned within and the beliefs that they held. Of course, this was a big part of why I read it, in what was intended as sort of History of Christianity 101 survey course, to find some clues as to whose writings I wanted to pursue, before digging in a bit deeper. I found writers both familiar and new, and I'll certainly be chasing down some of the "new" faces like Gregory of Nyssa and old faces I've neglected like Ignatius of Loyola....more
It wasn't quite the book I expected from the title or the blurb. I was expecting a more narrative account of seemingly strange anecdotes from medievalIt wasn't quite the book I expected from the title or the blurb. I was expecting a more narrative account of seemingly strange anecdotes from medieval and renaissance history. Instead, the book is a scholarly thesis trying to impress on his reader a simple point that I didn't really feel needed to be stressed outside of say Survey of European History 101. At least, the point was clearly stressed to me whenever I took college level world history; namely, that the historian errs when he tries to explain history by ascribing to the persons of the past limited intelligence or savageness or other traits associated with the stereotype of primitive as an explanation for their actions. Instead, the proper approach to history is accept that the persons involved were ordinary people no different than you or I, or other people we might encounter in the modern world, possessing of the same degree of intelligence, perceptiveness and the same emotions, but that their actions were informed by at times wildly different sets of beliefs and values.
In particularly, the book seems to be aimed at fellow scholars that have great difficulty dealing with pre-modern world views which are informed by what they consider superstition, and so ascribe to the persons insanity or stupidity as an explanation for historical events. One would hope this explanation would be unneeded, but one could easily see in the current culture why it might be.
I'm deducting one star for the text being drier than it need be considering the subject matter. Oldridge also carries his otherwise worthy thesis a bit too far at times, ignoring or downplaying evidence that certain persons struck even their contemporaries with the same world view, culture and facts as being overly zealous, possessing poor judgment, or even perhaps insane.
I deduct a second star because I think Oldridge goes much too far in assuming that the views of his actors are remote and inexplicable to his readership, as there are strong parallels in many cases with modern world views - not only within the modern religious but within other subcultures as well. That is to say, when your thesis is that people of the past aren't actually so different than the people of today, it might do well to actually recognize that this is true across the board. Modern believers in conspiracy theories that cut across political and religious lines - for example vaccinations relationship to autism - strike me as a very apt comparison. Indeed, hysteria and fear in general is not unique to earlier times, nor is the problem of how we are to distinguish between information and misinformation coming from experts or self-proclaimed experts in any way a problem relegated to the past. I think any one that believes that they are not deceived on some small points or another, having taken for granted some plausible urban legend or failed to realize that they hold a belief which at one time was well regarded but has since been discredited, is deceiving themselves. Likewise, reasonableness requires us to imagine that at least some of the beliefs we hold very dear, and to be completely obvious, logical and reasonable, will fall into disrepute in future generations for reasons that will seem good to them....more
When I was younger, I spent endless hours in the history sections of college library browsing through the history books looking for concrete lists of When I was younger, I spent endless hours in the history sections of college library browsing through the history books looking for concrete lists of facts, numbers, measurements, parts, names, and well lists that I could gather and utilize in my role playing games. Every such book was viewed through a lens of how much data it could provide to my simulations, and with few exceptions most were judged unworthy being filled with dry stories and no concrete facts.
Now though, it seems every historian out there is ready to cater to my earlier needs. Facts are collected and drawn up in tidy little lists, and everything is categorized and laid out in logical sections as if ready to draw up the requirements or setting encyclopedia for the latest wargame or RPG. And naturally, far from content, I find myself missing history that was stories and contained long direct quotes from the real life characters. So it is with this book. I'd have loved 25 years ago.
It's still an excellent introduction to the subject matter, and might be a decent 'sophomore text book' on the Age of Piracy. But as History, it needs more story in it, and a bit more history rather than just a study and summary of history, however well organized it is. I found myself yearning for the actual journals that were the author's source material, and wished for more direct views into their contents. Most of all, I would have preferred more detail about how it was actually done, with examples. It's all well and good to say that the Pirates preferred an ambush, but how was that actually accomplished on the open sea with boats that would sail 3mph or so in a fair wind? What customary behavior might ships have had that allowed a nare-do-well to cozen his prey into close range? We glimpse the scene I think too dimly, and with too little information. The only hints we are given are brief mentions of flying false colors and hiding your crew below decks so as to seem more harmless than you are, but I think that's probably only a taste of a broad range of aiming to misbehave....more
This is the second book I've read on the Iraq war. It's not that I've not followed the progress of the Iraq War extremely closely, because I have. It'This is the second book I've read on the Iraq war. It's not that I've not followed the progress of the Iraq War extremely closely, because I have. It's that hitherto, all the books on the Iraq war stuck me as being written by parties removed from the daily affairs of the war, observing it at a distance as I was, and engaging not in the writing of history but in punditry, self-justification, spin, and axe grinding. Authors seemed to feel quite free to write books based on anonymous sourcing, innuendo, unrecorded conversations, rumors, and media coverage of doubtable competency and even veracity. So it's not that I didn't want to read the details of what was happening in Iraq, but that I did that largely kept me away from the dross being cranked out and inflicted on a certain class of willing consumer.
Thus, it was with great relish that I picked up Peter Mansoor's account of his first tour of service in Iraq. A brigade commander is uniquely placed to serve in the role of historian. The perspective that it provides is sufficiently high up that the larger picture can be discerned, but not so high up that you are observing the events from a distance.
Peter Mansoor lacks pretension. Rather than attempting to write a history of the Iraq war, he writes simply an account of his experiences. Writing an account of the Iraq War is at this point probably impossible because of the lack of creditable material. Writing an account of Iraq War at this point is too high of an ambition for anyone, much less someone who wasn't centrally placed in it. To my mind, Peter Mansoor was as centrally placed as any author thus far, and it’s to his credit that he doesn't pretend to be able to tell the whole story.
Col. Mansoor opens the book with a brief, candid and endearing biography. He spills his life story in a few brief pages. It is self-effacing. It is honest, and we know it is honest because no one who wanted to impress us would write so unglamorously. This sets the pattern for the entire book.
Humility is the rarest trait in a gifted soldier. Commanders are generally ego-driven, highly competitive, and ambitious individuals. Narcissists and self-trumpeting blow-hards, even incompetent ones, often achieve high rank: the humble man however skilled rarely does. The shelves of military biographies are filled with useless self-serving tracts written by men with a gift for judging others, but no gift for examining themselves. This is the rarest sort of autobiography of all - the one that will be worthy of study because it’s not afraid to admit to failings.
There is way too much in this book to write about in such a short space, and I'm chagrined that I did not attempt this review when the material was fresher in my mind. Col. Mansoor deserves better, but this will have to do.
Pundits on either side of the aisle with have a difficult time dealing with Peter Mansoor's account. For myself, reading the book I got the uncanny feeling that everyone, whether critics or proponents of the war, was in fact describing the same war. I got the feeling reading the text, that whether you were for or against the war, that many of the central claims being made were largely true. I don't know why this should startle me and force me to reevaluate my thinking, because my mantra is, 'The truth is never simple.', but on this subject it did. I guess I found it impossible to reconcile the conflicting accounts and ideologies behind the positive and negative spin and imagine that such two disparate accounts could be describing the same entity. One or both had to be wrong; but, what I discovered reading the text is that did not have to be the case. The both could be right. Everyone trumpeting a simple truth was no better than one of the blind men groping the elephant.
Another thing that really drew me into the book from the beginning was my ability to follow along with almost all of the major events in the book, and compare them to how I had experienced them as an observer getting most of my news by sifting through various stories in the media. As I said, I followed the Iraq war very closely, following along with the different changes in strategy, the minor operations, and the major campaigns. Peter Mansoor however was in the thick of it, responsible for a section of Baghdad that was repeatedly in the news during that first year.
Mansoor's account of that trying year is somehow exhausting, inspiring, and heart-breaking at the same time. I promise you that around page 228, this book will kick you in the stomach, stick a knife in you, and twist it repeatedly. I don't know how soldiers cope with it. I really don't. It hurts me from here all the way across those miles and years. I don't know what to say except that my admiration for the strength, courage, and honor on display is very great indeed.
Peter Mansoor's account is very tough reading. He is open and forthcoming about the mistakes he made that got people killed; and the things that he did that saved lives and - at this point I think we can safely say although he doesn't - helped win the war. He is unsparing on himself, and lavish on the praise of those he served with. He doesn't however sugar coat things and pretend that everyone always used the best of judgment. Prisoner abuse and mistreatment of Iraqis was an ongoing problem that comes up repeatedly in the book. He makes a full accounting of the stupidity he encountered and the disciplinary steps he was forced to take, while keeping the persons involved anonymous.
He is circumspect but suggestive about the failings of those in higher positions. Those in charge of planning and running the war do not get off without criticism, and its difficult for me to imagine from the text that he actually supported starting the war. He definitely supports winning it. His sometimes exasperation with and sometimes deep love for the Iraqi people also comes clearly through. Few groups, however, get quite as scathing of a review or are as consistently associated with incompetency in the text as the media, which comes off as being less than useless. Given the typically vast disparity between events as they happened and as they were reported, I think that this assessment will go down as fair.
It's still hard at this point to know, but in the future I think the most important part of the text will be judged to be the documentation it provides of the growing interpersonal relationship between the American military on one hand and the Iraqi public on the other. Peter Mansoor, as an American of Arab descent, was in some ways somewhat well positioned to be at the forefront of this deepening understanding between the occupier and the occupied, between the liberated and the liberator, and between the conqueror and the conquered. I think this relationship must be described in this way because I think it was somehow simultaneously all of those things. But also and more importantly, I think it is important to see that for all that complexity, ultimately it was simply face to face relationships between two individuals who were forced by the circumstances to rub elbows, share a life, and try to work together.
And although it would be looking well ahead beyond the events of this book, it ultimately turns out that these personal relationships - and not any weapon of war - that are the decisive factor in the outcome of the war. Ultimately, and perhaps not surprisingly, you win a war against a low level insurgency by being better at making friends than the insurgents are.
Fortunately, in this case, given all the mistakes we made, that didn't prove to be particularly hard.
There are a few things that disappointed me. Really, it must be admitted that it is still too early to begin writing even such unambitious texts as 'Baghdad at Sunrise'. There are a number of points where it seemed that Col. Mansoor deliberately turned away from the train of thought he had been following because of the fact that the war is ongoing. There are times when he says simply, 'We devised a strategy', where I very much would like to have heard the details. As a textbook - and I've little doubt this will become required reading at a war college somewhere - the book would be much improved if the writer didn't have to be so careful to avoid operationally useful information. Likewise, there are times when I think the book would be improved were Mansoor retired and better able to speak his full mind. This is not to say however, that I hope his retirement comes soon. His country still needs men like him.
Because of his frankness concerning his mistakes, Mansoor gets away with trumpeting his own efforts from time to time. He relates how he became to be something of a cult figure to the Iraqi tribal leaders, and how he found himself on Al-Qaeda’s most wanted. But always he does so somewhat sarcastically, comparing his own modest self with the fantasy version of himself others created. Near the end of the book he allows himself a little more latitude describing commands he gave and responsibilities he undertook during the Karbala campaign for which he is in my opinion justifiably proud. Those events in March and April of 2004 I recall as the darkest and scariest days of the whole war - the closest I ever came to feeling that we might lose. It was so welcome to see an inside account of these critical events.
Someday I hope there will be movies about Iraq that are worth watching that portray the war in all its ugly glory without any motivation other than tell a story which is at least mostly true and one would hope central to the larger story. It probably won't be any time soon. It would be too much to hope that Hollywood would pick up 'Baghdad at Sunrise' or Lt. Col. Neil Prakash's equally fascinating and important account as a screenplay. But I hope that it is not too much to hope that Col. Mansoor honors us with a sequel.
Actually, the rating of this book is likely to evolve as I get a chance to try more recipes. The principle value of the book thus far is as an amazingActually, the rating of this book is likely to evolve as I get a chance to try more recipes. The principle value of the book thus far is as an amazing cultural guidebook to the historic cuisine of Louisiana.
Unbelievably comprehensive and fantastically well-researched. As a consequence though, the book weighs a ton and is therefore somewhat impractical in the kitchen. Good coffee table book though....more
I first encountered this book in college, sitting forgotten and forelornly on an academic shelf. This is certainly not the proper setting for this booI first encountered this book in college, sitting forgotten and forelornly on an academic shelf. This is certainly not the proper setting for this book, which is hardly heady intellectualism but rip-rollicking good adventure stories disguising what in other hands might be dull history.
As such, this is one of my favorite overviews of the Age of Sail, and in a perfect world would be in the hands of every elementary aged school kid as a way to get them to 'eat thier brocolli' and enjoy it. The book is a fairly comprehensive survey of the period's naval history, and I especially liked its coverage of lesser known wars like the four Anglo-Dutch wars and somewhat forgotten but inspiring commanders like Michiel de Ruyter.
The writing is gripping and strikes a narrative tone suitable for popular history. I found the books account of the major campaigns every bit as exciting as any modern thriller, and the personalities of the great commanders that are the focus of the book are fascinating and inspired me to read a few more detailed and well-rounded (and definately drier) biographies.
