Rating – 3 Stars This is a heavy and beautiful book. Its design, execution, printing, and binding is extraordinary and professional. It is a “coffee table” travel book of startling heft in weight and content. Starting in Xi’an, China, the narrator leads us by the hand and we vicariously travel the Silk Road. We […]
Tag Archives: Book Review
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 […]
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: Bill O’Reilly’s Legends and Lies by Bill O’Reilly, David Fisher
Rating – Five Stars Fisher and O’Reilly have a winner on their hands. This is an outstanding book—an easy read, informative, and factual. Fisher leads us through the life and adventures of a dozen famous men of the “wild” West. He starts with Daniel Boone and concludes with Butch Cassidy. Fisher strips these biographies of the folderol […]
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: Steve Canyon, Milton Caniff, Vol. 6: 1957 to 1958
Two stars. Headline: Lieutenant Colonel Steven (Steve) Canyon, USAFR, intensifies his domestic agenda. Egad! Milton Caniff, what have you done to our iconic hero? The eight stories in this book all hinge on some sort of domesticity, teenage nonsense or failed romance. Unfortunately, this book is an overblown telenovela, a Bollywood par excellence, a classic […]
BOOK REVIEW: The Mexican Revolution: A Short History 1910-1920 by Stuart Easterling
Easterling makes a reasonable clarification of the chaos of the Mexican Revolution—as he says “…ten years of social conflict, deprivation, and bloody warfare.” He skims through the ten-year revolution with seminal characters in this petite book as: Profirio Diaz (1839-1915). Dictator of Mexico from 1884 to 1911. Overthrown by Gustavo Madero (1875-19130. President 1911 to […]
BOOK REVIEW: Terry and the Pirates Volume Two: 1948-1949 by George Wunder
The Hermes Press is leaking slowly reproductions of the famous comic strip titled “Terry and the Pirates.” The talented Milton Caniff created this innovate and artful adventure comic strip in 1934 and continued it until 1944. George Wunder continued the strip until 1973. In this volume are three rather mediocre stories of Terry and his […]
BOOK REVIEW: Steve Canyon, Volume 1955 to 1956 by Milton Caniff
I opened the cover of this tome with eager anticipation—to read and view another of Caniff’s boffo comic-strip stories about the rousing adventures of the heroic Lieutenant Colonel Steven B. Canyon, USAF. Alas! I was disappointed. I found that Caniff’s stories in this volume had plots that are incongruous to the Steve Canyon mystic, and […]