Rating – Five Stars Toland presents in this superb tome a view of the Pacific War (1941-1945) that most of us have never thought about or seen. He writes in a smooth, engaging style. We are engrossed in the narrative of this page-turner. We view the details of this horrendous campaign from the Japanese perspective—it’s […]
Category Archives: Military
Book Review- Killing the Rising Sun
Rating – Five Stars Bill O’Reilly hits a home run with his compendium of the 1940s Pacific War. He writes in an easy, sparse, and empathetic style. He paints the big pictures of the major land and sea battles and tells the stories of the “grunts” that did the fighting and dying. We know these […]
Book Review- Prof: Alan Turing Decoded
Rating – Two Stars I’m sorely disappointed with this biography of Alan Turing, one of the 20th century’s greatest mathematicians. He was the lead cryptographer at Bletchley Park and helped break the German’s Enigma codes, significantly hastening the end of the War in Europe. To this end, his intellect led to the development of the […]
Book Review: The Decisive Campaigns of the Desert Air Force 1942 – 1945
Rating – Four Stars Evans relates the large-scale accomplishments of the Royal Air Force in the Cyrenaica, Sicilian, and Italian campaigns in World War II. His matter-of-fact style, presents the Desert Air Force’s (DAF) campaigns in a chronological, military style order. I would suggest that this book is for the military aficionado—clearly not for the […]
July 17, Anniversary of The Regicide
In the early hours of 17 July 1918, the Cheka firing squad (the Soviet secret police) fired volley after volley into Nicholas Romanov, Czar of all the Russias, and his family: Empress Alexandra, son Nikkei, and four daughters, Maria, Olga, Tatiana, and Anastasia. In the March 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks successfully overthrew the Romanov’s régime […]
Book Review: Hell and Good Company by Richard Rhodes
Rating – Three Stars Rhodes writes an easy read, semi-informative book about the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) that pitted the Fascists forces of General Francisco Franco against Spain’s “Republican” government. The Spanish government was far from a democracy—it was a pseudo-communist government that was suffused with Comintern agents of the Soviet Union. In May […]
Book Review: Air War Over Khalkhin Gol: The Nomonhan Incident
Rating – Three Stars From May to September, 1939, the Union of Socialists Soviet Republics and the Empire of Japan waged an undeclared war near the Khalkhin Gol (River) over the border between Soviet controlled Mongolia and the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo (formerly the Chinese Province Manchuria). In this little remembered war, casualties in men […]
Book Review: The First World War in the Middle East by Kristian Coates Ulrichsen
Rating – Two Stars This is a heavy book. Not in its weight but in its syntax. It’s tedious. This text reads as if it were a doctorial dissertation modified for publication. Here’s one example from page 15: “For their part, the localised backlashes […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Armies of Warlord China 1911-1928 by Philip Jowett
Rating-Four Stars This is a large (11” x 9”), heavy book–in weight and content. Jowett tells us just about everything we’d want to know about the history of the warlords of China that ruled the Northern provinces (and a few in the south). He laces his narrative with relevant photographs. Unfortunately, the organization of this […]