Mark Harris weaves an intriguing story of five top-notch motion-picture directors that abandoned their careers in Hollywood and joined the military to help win World War II by producing documentary, propaganda, and information films. He has integrated numerous moving parts into a coherent tale with keen interest. It’s a heavy book that deserves a careful […]
Author Archives: smartinshelton
Early Leica Cameras
Ernst Leitz GmbH, Wetzlar produced their first Leica camera in 1913. In 1925 Leitz introduced the Leica model 1A and continued its production until 1930. The model 1A was the first mass produced 35mm camera of high quality. Following were a series of several dozen cameras with constantly improving functions and reliability. Introduced in 1933, […]
Book Review: Forgotten Ally by Rana Mitter
Rana Mitter has his premise exactly correct. The 1937-1945 war in China is largely unknown and not long remembered. In 1943, Allied leaders decided that the campaign in China was second tier in their long-term plan to defeat the Axis Powers—Germany, Italy, Japan, and other minor players. Yet the Sino-Japanese war was critical to our […]
The Sun’s Energy
The folderol re global warming, i.e. climate change, focuses, on-the-whole, on man’s pollution of the atmospheric. I would suggest that this notion is misguided. All energy and life on our planet emanates from the sun—a cauldron of nuclear fusion (H-bombs). Let’s explore how much of the sun’s energy reaches the earth—93 millions-miles distant. Astrophysicists calculate […]
Malaysia Missing Flight
It’s now thirteen weeks since Malaysia Flight 370—a Boeing model 777 aircraft disappeared. It’s not where the searchers heard the pings in the Indian Ocean: about one-thousand miles off the coast of western Australia. Searchers are at a loss. Flight 370 seems to have vanished into the ether, or elsewhere. Today, I received an email […]
Thoughts About D-Day, 6 June 1944
We thank and honor the men who landed on the Normandy beaches on June 6th 1944. All are heroes. I was fifteen years old when we heard a radio announcer blurt that the Allies had landed on the beaches in northern France. Involved were 130,000 Allied soldiers from USA, Britain, Canada, and the Free French. There was […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Guns of Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944 to 1945 Volume III by Rick Atkinson
The Guns of Last Light, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2013, 877 pp. Contents, 29 maps, photographs, Notes, 167 pp.; Selected Sources, 28 pp,; Acknowledgements, 6 pp.; Index, 26 pp. Volume Three of Atkinson’s liberation trilogy details the exploits of the United States Army in North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe during World War […]
Famous Missing Flights
Malaysia Flight 370 disappeared over six weeks ago. The primary search instrument is damaged, and for now, the hunt for this airplane is on hold. Some of the searchers wonder if this airplane is in the wide area in which they are looking. Meantime, let’s review some of the more famous aircraft disappearances. 8 […]
Captain America Movie Review
Marvel Productions. Kevin Feige, Producer; Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, Directors. Staring: Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, and Scarlett Johansson. 136 minutes. A special effects extravaganza with a plot as thin as a wet tissue, best describes this “moving picture.” (I hesitate to use the term.) And move it does—all the time, all over the […]
Other Missing Flights
Malaysia Flight 370 has been missing for 41 days. Best deductions from all data indicates that Flight 370’s Boeing 777 aircraft is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean about 1,200 nautical miles west of Perth, Down Under. It’s black-box is dead—no longer transmitting locating pings. Experts in the field speculate that it may years […]