Carrier Books

At any rate they should since we have created their habitats in, around and under our cities, towns and farms, and we feed them well. Occasionally we try to poison them but it never works for long. Usually, as Barnett, who is Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the Australian National University, explains they reject our poisons outright as something new in a familiar environment ("neophobia")--one of their clever tricks--and when we counter with one of OUR tricks (pre-baiting) we kill them all right, but they counter by upping their breeding schedule and soon the losses are made up.

I think Barnett does a good job of making this an interesting read although the latter parts of the book are perhaps more scientific than some would like. He begins with the rat in history and literature, recalls the black plague and other rat-carried diseases, and then tells the story of how the rat became domesticated in the nineteenth century primarily as a laboratory animal to run mazes and push levers for rewards and punishments. He explains how this white albino rat has come to differ in its habits and traits from its wild counterpart, the so-called Norway rat, noting, for example, that lab rats are usually not neophobic. Instead they approach just about anything new. There is some interesting material on the black rat which tends to live in trees or on or near the top of dwellings while the Norway likes the ground and sewers. The material on the mole rat of India and the rice rat of Malaysia and some other species could have been expanded.

Barnett goes into some of the research done on rats, both in the lab and in the field, and demonstrates just how hard it is to conduct useful and rigorous experiments and how easy it is to misread the findings. He looks into the mystery of rats seemingly dying because of stress and suggests that what kills them is a lowered immune system response to disease agents. (p. 170) There might be an unstated suggestion that stress can do the same thing to humans, perhaps to a lesser degree.

I think that Barnett's excursion into the philosophy of science and the limitations of applying animal research to humans (with quotes from philosopher K. R. Popper and geneticist R.C. Lewontin) toward the end of the book might have worked better in some other volume. At any rate I would have preferred instead more material on Barnett's personal experiences with rats. The material he does give us from his early days in London during World War II and from his lifelong research and experience is interesting and could have been expanded, especially in a book like this aimed at a general readership.

There are a number of black and white photos and drawings of rats, a Glossary, a list of References, and an Index. Bottom line: interesting and not nearly as repellant as a work on rats could easily be.

I picked up this book thinking it would be an elegant blend of science, history and philisophical musings a la Lewis Thomas--but Barnett has failed utterly. He shifts from psuedo-philisophical ponderings to sounding as though he's lecturing to a bunch of college freshman. I can't possibly give it a one star because I did find a lot of the information interesting, but on the whole, I put down the book rather dissatisfied.

Whether you love rats, hate rats, or have no understanding of them at all, this is a great book. It's very objective, written in an accessible format, and absolutely fascinating.
This book should be a must read for anyone who keeps rats as pets, as it lends a much better understanding of "rat psychology" than one would get from simple pet care books.

Barnett has spent most of his life studying rats and writes an excellent book on their society, habits, and impact on humans. Although hated and feared by most people, Barnett's work with and observations of these rodents seems to have given him appreciation for the survivors rats are. Unsensationalized and respectful, Barnett offers an honest view of rats place among us and ours among them.

I bought THE STORY OF RATS by Anthony Barnett for my 14 year old granddaughter who is in an advanced placement science class at her high school, and who has an affinity for repulsive animals (she has a pet lizard she feeds live crickets). I ended up reading the book before I handed it to her, and, what an interesting little book it is. RATS is a paperback with reasonably large type, so easy to read and filled with illustrations and photographs, but more than that it's filled with interesting material (even though it may not be up to AP standards).

Did you know that not only do rats eat human foods such as corn, rice and other grain, but, according to Barnett, humans have been known to eat rats? (The Hindu God Ganesha is accompanied by a rat, but Hindus have a proscription against eating them.) When Britain ruled the waves, British sailors found rats appetizing alternative to hard tack or starvation (apparently, rats cannot board modern ships as easily as they could board the old wooden ships, so they are no longer part of the sea-faring cuisine). However, even today, some folks in the far-flung places the British ships visited and populated with rats still eat them. Photos show markets where vendors sell rats roasted and strung up by their tails along with other butchered meat.

Barnett discusses the bad things rats do such as eat human food stores and spread noxious diseases like the Bubonic Plague and Hanta virus, as well as the good things rats do, such as become pets or lab rats. The author includes chapters discussing the use of rats in experiments, so if you are squeamish about animal testing this may not the book for you (most of the experiments involve psychological studies, not physical torture). Nuclear testing by the US Navy suggest that if and when humans destroy the planet, rats will probably survive. On the other hand, Chernobyl, deserted by humans after the nuclear accident a few years ago, has returned to it's natural state of "wilderness" sans `Rattus' who just can't get along without humans. So, it seems even if rats can survive manmade follies, they may perish because they rely on humans for food and shelter.

Hawaii was the first place ever to feel the force of a massed attack from a fleet of aircraft carriers. How such a weapons system came to be is the subject of "American & British Aircraft Carrier Development."
The authors say this is not ancient history, nor inside baseball, but it really is ancient history. There were six carrier-to-carrier battles, and there will never be another. Carriers are still valuable as floating, mobile airfields, but the old arguments about the carrier's place in the fleet are obsolete.
"Our conclusions . . . bear on the present," the authors say. They do not say what weapons systems of today they are thinking of, but likely candidates are Aegis antiaircraft missiles, Star Wars and aircraft carriers themselves.
This book came out of a Pentagon study, which it reveals in being about twice as wordy as necessary. The authors are Thomas Hone, an instructor at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces; Norman Friedman, a prolific author on military topics; and Mark Mandeles, head of a military policy think tank and a former instructor at the American Military University.
They conclude, to their own surprise, that the conventional history of the evolution of aviation at sea is far from complete or correct.
The carrier methods adopted by the Americans were regarded as successful, those adopted by the British unsuccessful. (The Japanese followed a path similar to the Americans' -- with two major differences -- but little documentary material is available on that navy.)
Again and again, say the authors, the decisions made seemed reasonable at the time. Even building more battleships was reasonable in context, though carriers superseded the battleships in usefulness in the Pacific War.
The big problem facing naval aviators was the extreme vulnerability of carriers. Battleships are built to dish it out and to take it. When operating as designed, as part of a battle line, they were virtually invulnerable to air attack in World War II, unless misplaced in restricted waters.
Because one or two smallish bombs can knock a carrier out of action, its defense is a good offense. The side that got in the first strike was expected to prevail.
This was the case at the Battle of Midway, though not at the Battle of the Coral Sea. However, the authors end their inquiry in 1941, infuriatingly leaving the debate hanging in midair, when most of the questions were resolved by events.
Carriers certainly were vulnerable. By the end of 1942, almost all the fleet carriers in the world had been sunk or damaged -- including all six of America's big flattops.
The British, taking a more cautious approach, had armored their carriers' flight decks. But that meant carrying fewer than half as many combat planes as a U.S. Navy carrier of similar size.
The British also insisted on storing all their planes within the protected hangars. Through a complex series of what-ifs, clearly analyzed by the authors, this decision meant that the British went to war with obsolete carrier aircraft.
This, however, was not merely because the Royal Navy had lost control of its own air arm in 1921. Hone, Friedman and Mandeles agree that America was fortunate to block the formation of an independent air force in the 1920s and '30s, but they find that it was not the existence of the RAF alone that hamstrung the Royal Navy's aviation.
In the end, they find that the more open American political society was an advantage. Even relatively junior Navy officers (junior meaning rear admirals and occasionally captains) had access to Congressmen, heads of industrial companies, newspaper editors and pressure groups.
Nowadays, that would be called the military-industrial complex, and we are supposed to despise it, but it served America well, say the authors, in the runup to World War II.
By contrast, the highest aviation planning body overseeing the Royal Navy was occupied largely by titled incompetents during the '20s and '30s.
Furthermore, only one Royal Navy officer concerned with aviation was permitted to present the Navy's case to the government.
The authors find that personal, institutional and organizational systems work together to create a climate that does -- or does not -- allow creation of a successful new weapons technology. On the individual level, they give pride of place to American Adm. Joseph Reeves, who proved in 1926 that carriers could deliver heavy strikes.
This whole issue has been muddied over the years by a number of untenable assumptions that have become enshrined in history books.
Worst of all is the common belief that Army Gen. Billy Mitchell was right about strategic bombing and the future defeat of the battleship by the airplane.
He was wrong twice. Battleships were vulnerable to planes, in limited circumstances, but never to the kind Mitchell wanted the nation to have.
Though Navy aviators fought Mitchell and won, they agreed with him that aviators should command aviation forces afloat. No historians, including Hone, Friedman and Mandeles, question this concept, though World War II proved it to be wrong.
The most effective carrier commander was Adm. Raymond Spruance, whom the aviators despised as a member of the "Gun Club." But in truth, Spruance completely understood the concept of getting their "fustest with the mostest," as Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest said; while also protecting the main mission.
Spruance was not an aviator, but he never lost a battle. Adm. William Halsey was a go-for-broke aviator, and by following the Mitchell offensive line, he lost the greatest naval battle in history. The fact that the Japanese failed to cash in after Halsey was maneuvered out of action has obscured that event (the Battle of Leyte Gulf).
Not many aviation enthusiasts -- and Hone, Friedman and Mandeles are among their number -- are going to admit that Halsey was a failure in high command, but it is a surprise to find them rating the Japanese Zero as a superior weapon.
In their book, they have something to say about recruiting, training and keeping pilots, but not much. The Zero's superior performance was obtained at the price of pilot protection.
Hone, Freidman and Mandeles do realize that modern naval battles are wars of attrition. The Japanese strategy of preserving cheap airplanes at the cost of expensive pilots was a war-losing decision.
U.S. Navy pilots had parachutes, self-sealing gas tanks, radios and some armor plate. Even if they lost a battle with a Zero, they had some chance of living to fly again.
The Zero pilot had none of those things, and had to triumph completely every time. This cannot happen in a war of attrition, so eventually the last Zero pilot was killed.
Except that the British won the argument at the end. As a fighter, the Zero was a loser. As a kamikaze, no one could stop it as a bomb delivery machine.
In the Okinawa campaign in 1945, the American Navy was losing a carrier every week or two to kamikazes, and it had only about 15 to start with. The British carriers, by that time serving with the U.S. Fifth Fleet, were hit many times by kamikazes, but unlike the American flattops, they were able to keep operating.

There are many good insights and much worthwhile information here. But there is no apparent organization of ideas, either among the chapters, within a chapter, within a page or sometimes within a paragraph. Ideas and facts are presented, and repeated later, as if this were several slightly different articles on the same subject laid end-to-end. We are told about the movie "Helldivers" at least twice, for instance, and both times it is introduced as if new; and many times it is repeated that the Royal Navy did not have an institutional way of resolving technical aviation issues, while the USN had an interaction among BuAer, the War College and Fleet exercises. This repetition (in a book of only 200 pages) masks the fact that there is not really a book's worth of information here, and that and the poor organization mean that many important questions just aren't brought up (like, just how were the personnel policies for Naval Aviators decided? What actually were the options considered at various points in time?). It also masks some flaws in logic: the authors are fond of saying that the interwar navies were like cash-strapped gamblers in a casino, who could not afford to lose, and so spread their bets evenly. Apart from the implicit assumption that a rich man can afford to lose everything, this is an excellent way to military disaster, making onself weak everywhere; and it is not explained how refusing to make a choice among options is actually making a choice. Neither is the book particularly well-written; in too many places I had to go over again a sentence or paragraph, trying to figure out just what the authors were trying to say. "Related to the concept of cost is that of risk"--immediately after two paragraphs apparently discussing risk. This book might be useful to find some facts and ideas not otherwise immediately available; or, I would hope, as an inspiration for a more thorough and organized study.--CDR, USNR, ret.

An intelligent and thoughtful study of how it happened that the United States started late, yet managed to enter World War II with a better carrier force than the Royal Navy. (In part, this was because the US *did* start late, and therefore didn't have an installed base of obsolete equipment.)

The only problem with this book is that it doesn't give equal time to the Japanese carrier fleet, which as it happened was America's only real competitor in this developing science.

Britain started out ahead, but partly for that reason her carrier forces (and especially planes) were less suited for combat than America's. This is an excellent study of how that came to pass. Sadly missing is an equally insightful look at the Japanese carrier fleet, which in the winter of 1941-42 was arguably the equal of America's.

Book was better than previous books by Douglass that I have read. Being a life member of the United States Naval Institute I have some knowledge of the proposed "Arsenal Ship" that the author used. He also used a plot ploy of "Micro-management" & "target selection" from the White House, which being a ARMY Special Forces Veteran from the Viet Nam War I am very familiar with (Johnson & then Nixon chose individual targets & "managed" the war themselves. All and all, a great entertaining adventure, but different from Clancy, which it is inevitably compared with. Definitly worth the price of "admission"

Keith Douglas does it again! This book has it all. From the exploits of the SEAL team on board the USS Jefferson to Tombstone Magruder's final combat mission.

This latest part of the "Carrier" series, is one of Douglass's best to date. The Carrier battle group is literally placed in the same position as our Vietnam era forces, with the enemy (Cuban revolutionaries) on one front,and meddling, micro-managing U.S. politicians on the other. Give Douglass his due...the man knows how the military functions, and how it can respond in times of national emergencies. You feel as if you are on the deck of the Carrier Thomas Jefferson, or in the cockpit of an F-18 Hornet. You won't want to put it down!

It is a high compliment to Keith Douglass that I went enjoyed Carrier 10 despite a number of what I saw as unrealistic scenarios. For example, with what knowledge I have of the permissible action links for nuclear release, I have a real problem believing a senator and a couple of admirals could manage to launch a nuclear weapon at Cuba (using a remote piloted vehicle, no less) and more importantly that they could believe that they would get away with it.

Douglass is at his best when describing individual flying. He's less so when dealing with strategic issues or land warfare (The ad hoc exfiltration plans of the SEAL team when they knew they'd be burdened with a civilian were downright embarrassing)

Still, he is a yarn teller of the first order. It isn't easy to keep up the suspension of disbelief in the face of even minor errors, but he manages. If he would either broaden his research or narrow his scope, Douglass would be great.

Dr. Carrier is a phenomenal ethnographer and writer. He's done a magnificent job in bringing anthropological methods to life in a very palatable form.

Fascinating book, based on author's research over two decades. Wonderful insight, on a topic not often written about.

This book provided a lot of good information pertaining to homosexuality among Mexican men. The nice part about it is that if presents many stories of real people and their interactions with homosexuality in Guadalajara. I would recommend this book with the understanding that it is very explicit sexually.

Dr. Carrier pioneered long-term fieldwork among a subculture of males who have sex with males. This book presents some of his data from Guadalajara, extending back to his dissertation fieldwork in the early 1970s. Like most anthropologists, he has no tools for making sense out of changes. That he has data extending over decades does not mean he treats these data historically. The data _are_ important and interesting, but the author is at a loss about what to do with them. (Like Annick Prieur and Don Kulick, among others, he is not at all hesitant to overgeneralize from a relatively narrow, unrandom sample: taking the network the anthropologist happened to enter as a microcosmic epitome of a culture/society is something else anthropologists do all too readily!)

Because "gay research" was so stigmatized, Carrier has never had an academic job. He obviously has not followed developments in the field of research he helped create. Other than data (and ignoring the probale difficulty of publishing about homosexuality then!), this book could be from the 1970s. One might think that being outside academia might be an advantage for immediacy and freshness, but Carrier's ponderous writing is "academic" in the worst sense. Although his writing is not obscured by "queer theory," it is dry and often awkward. So much academic talking and writing about gender and homosexuality lacks systematic data that it is very unfortunate that someone who actually has lots of data that he has gathered over a long duration of time has not been able to do more to make sense of changes or continuities in how young Mexican males live their desires for other males or to use the data to address contemporary concerns.

The most inclusive book on this rodent I've ever read.It includes the origin and natural history of the rat,rat behaviour,mans' attempts to eradicate them,rats' links to disease,rat folklore,rats in art and literature,rats in the lab,rats as pets,rat attacks, even recipes for cooked rats(:-P).Don't think I'll be trying any of those.The book has many facts about rats I've seen nowhere else,including this : scientists were able to impregnate a female mus musculus with the semen of a Norway Rat.Attempts to cross rattus norvegicus with rattus rattus have failed. That means that the common house mouse is basically a tiny rat...or that the norway rat is a huge mouse,however you want to look at it.

Of course,all this information in a book of less than 300 pages means the book reads like some rivers out west...a mile wide and only 6 inches deep.Furthermore,Mr. Hendrickson uses neither endnotes or footnotes,so if the reader wants to verify the info by consulting the original sources,s/he is SOL.This is most irritating when one is reading the horrific attacks of rats 'swarming'human victims and eating them alive.Behaviour that unusual in an animal that prefers to avoid people begs for better verification,rats being one of the animals that inspires Urban Legends.(At least one story RH repeats was identified as such by Jan Harold Brunvand;the one where two people check into a hotel room,one leaves,when she returns,the second person has vanished,and no one remembers her ...)The author does include an index and a bibliography.And while I do understand that most people would read this book for the horrific elements, I wish the role of the rat as pet had been covered better.Any rat person will tell you that a rat is friendlier than a cat,smarter than a dog,more trainable than a guinea pig or hamster,and cleaner than any of these other animal companions.For that matter,wild norway rats have been tamed and trained by any number of convicts and POWS and other,lonely people forsaken by their human brethren.

I gave this book 4 stars out of 5 because I reserve 5 stars for one-in-a-million masterpieces.I took off 1/2 a star for the lack of documentation...use endnotes or footnotes, PLEASE!

WARNING:THIS BOOK SHOULD NOT BE PURCHASED BY A PROSPECTIVE RAT OWNER,WITH THE IDEA THAT IF A RECALCITRANT PARENT/SPOUSE/SO READS IT,THEY'LL BECOME ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT GETTING A RAT! :-)

While I would have like to have seen a slightly more sympathetic view of rodentia, this book is jam-packed with incredible facts and very intriguing, well-researched and well-written.

I had read an earlier edition of this book and thought the book needed updated. When I bought the recent edition and read it, I was disappointed. The facts are there, but as previously noted, there are no citations.

I grow weary of the same old 19th century drawings of rats that appear in this and most other books dealing with rats. I guess real photos just don't look menacing enough. Rats get lots of bad press. These old illustrations just add to it. The book is history, however and these are presented as such. If a book is about rats, all I ask for are illustration that look like rats.

The book is a good read. Packed with information, humor and insite, it has a lot to say. The title is very appropriate. With an animal that is as cunning, diverse and adaptable as the Rat, genetic engineering needs to appoach with a bit of caution.

A lot of the reviews have focused on how well-researched this book is and while some of the elements are, a lot of them are obviously urban legends or horribly over-exaggerated anecdotes given by people who obviously are not aware of much about rats and are speaking only from fear or cultural stereotypes. I spent a great deal of time examining the points he made about how rats are ferocious, disease-ridden, gluttonous and tend to over-populate their environment and I couldn't help but draw a parallel with humankind and wonder if that is why humans have always held them in such horror - because they hold up a very unflattering mirror to us. Nonetheless, he tends to open up each chapter with horrifying, sensationlistic stories about rats lurking in corners preparing to jump out and eat babies or some other such nonsense whereas anyone who knows anything about rats will tell you that rats much prefer to avoid humans and will not tend to bite unless they are provoked (or you smell like food, because they are remarkably short-sighted) - and being at heart lazy animals, prefer much easier to attain meals than humans, which are much larger than they are. His hysterical listing of the diseases that rats carry is outdated; many of the diseases listed have since been determined to actually be much more frequently carried by other animals, including other rodents that humans find "cute," such as prairie dogs and squirrels (but we don't find mass extermination campaigns against them, do we?). Zoonosis from rodents, in any case, is extremely rare in industrialized countries in the modern era. Overall I was very disappointed in this book - I was hoping for some cold, hard facts and instead I got all the same sort of hysteria and sensationalism I could get reading the Star. The only reason I gave it 3 stars was because there were a few interesting facts in there, and the bibliography is most useful. If you are actually interested in learning about rats, I suggest you look elsewhere.

Fire on the Hanger Deck is a well written account of a trajic event during the Vietnam War. While the author wasn't an eyewitness, he was wounded just before the fire while serving in Attack Squadron 163, nicknamed "the Saints," one of the squadrons affected by this devastating fire. It is not focused on gore, but gives a vivid impression through accounts of various sailors and officers who fought this fire for several hours. The fire happened between the capture of two other Saints, Admiral James Stockdale who ran for Vice President with Ross Perot in 1992 and Admiral John McCain who ran for the Republican nomination in 2000. Having served in VA-163 after the fire, this book is true to the accounts I heard from those who preceded me. I find it good literature as well as an exciting as well as heart rending account.

The hangar deck fire that cost the lives of 44 men on the USS ORISKANY is little known to most. It was the first of three fires aboard carriers operating in the Tonkin Gulf during the VietNam war and in comparison to the other two, the loss of life was small. The other two fires, on board the FORRESTAL and the ENTERPRISE, began on the flight decks and so were captured on film by the PLAT cameras. The ORISKANY's trial by fire began in a stowage space, below decks, just after dawn. The casualties were 36 officers, almost all aviators, and 8 enlisted men. The aviators died in their rooms, asphyxiated by smoke and then, in some instances, burned.

CAPT Foster served aboard the ORISKANY with VA-163, an attack squadron, and had left the ship shortly before the fire after being wounded, so he writes feelingly of men and a ship he knew.
This is far from just a documentation of a tragic event, made doubly so by the fact that it stemmed from an accident. Losses are expected in combat, but not from misadventure and the shock was intense for the air wing and ship's company. Like all naval vessels, there were countless drills for fire at sea, but when the real thing happened, it was first broadcast over the 1MC as a "drill." Five sailors may have died because they made no attempt to leave a threatened space, thinking it was just a practice; they were found asphyxiated.

The culprit in this incident was a Mark 24 Mod 3 aerial flare that was mishandled by two young, and as it turned out, poorly trained sailors. It was accidentally ignited and in a panic move, thrown into a locker containing even more flares. As the flares burn at 4,500 degrees, there was no easy way to extinguish them and the fire raged.

The book contains details of the ship and portraits of the men, both victims and survivors. One particularly poignant story is that of an aviator who lost contact with his roommate in the smoke filled passageways, blamed himself for his buddy's death, and then was himself killed in action a year later. The story of Dick Bellinger, skipper of VF-162, and his escape through a 14" porthole is legendary and is retold here.

The investigation that followed the fire is also recounted and there is much about the Navy's bedrock value of command responsibility. There have been other books with accounts of this fire included but this is the first full treatment of it and is long overdue. CAPT Foster has done an excellent job of reminding everyone that not all the dangers in carrier aviation are in the sky. Bravo Zulu, Captain Hook!

I found this writting to be passable. "There are too many $10.00 words" which a 'common person' would have to spend too much time referencing to follow the story. It was HIGHLY evident that this book was written by an Officer as the story was dominated by the achievments of fellow Officers and little of the Enlisted person!
Being stationed on a aircraft carrier myself at that exact time and place I personally know that in a 'combat' area there are over 4000 enlisted to 150 officers assigned to the ship....so what were all those enlisted persons doing during the fire?? Surely they were saving lives as much as or more that those few officers?? Why weren't those achievments documented with equal vigor?
Lastly, most of the facts within this story are very true, however, it seemed as if some the facts and background of the individuals mentioned (especially the enlisted) kind of ran together or showed traces of multiple facts of diffent stories mixed together to depict an individual meerly for the sake adding him into the plot instead of being exactly trueful as to their actions as it actually happened.

S.M. COFFELT (survivor)

The greatest wwII book ever written. Degan is a masterful writer. A must for any wwII history buff.

I expected a truly informed book of WWII aircraft carrier combat. That is, I wanted to know how the two sides used the assets they had available and why they chose to use them in that way. I wanted to know how a carrier group goes about trying to protect itself while trying to inflict harm on its enemies. I wanted to know what tactics the torpedo bombers adopted to successfully approach enemy shipping and what tactics the defending aircraft used to destroy the torpedo planes before they could launch while avoiding their own flak. None of these things are presented. For example, Imperial Japanese Naval air operations officers Genda and Fuchida are referred to as geniuses but I have no idea why. What was it about the way they chose to do plan air operations that qualified them as geniuses?

What we have here is a fairly standard treatment of the most famous WWII Pacific aircraft carrier engagments. I wanted to feel the anti-aircraft gunfire riddle my wings and smell the blood on a burning flight deck. I wanted to know what formations the various aircraft used on various missions and why. I wanted to know how it was possible that a pilot could maintain such good navigational skills while engaged in life or death combat that he could rendevous with a ship that was no longer where it was when he flew off the deck. Instead we get that a certain squadron launched from a certain carrier attacking a certain other carrier and either did or did not achieve a number of hits.

Admittedly, I am spoiled having just read Shelby Foote's excellent Civil War. Oh, what might have been! If the author had drawn character portraits as concisely and described battles as vividly as Foote, that would have been a book!

I have spent a lot of money on this book which contains lots of information about bloody fighting in WW II only to realize that the author used MOSTLY american literature. It is a shame that he did not consider some japanese books also.

The story goes that when the small carrier 'Liscome Bay' was sunk, her airborne planes had to have a place to set down or they would have to crash in the ocean. The man who gave the order on the carrier 'Yorktown' to turn on her landing lights after dark to give them a place to land was Jocko Clark.

That alone would justify reading more about him, but there is lots more. An indian, he went to the Naval Academy (Class of 1918) while the indian wars were a fresh memory. Early recognizing the value of aircraft, he became a pilot when planes were still wood and fabric. World War II came with the Japanese attack at Pearl. Getting rid of the battleships left the carriers and the aircraft admirals in position to win the war.

Younger than the famous admirals of World War II, he was commander of the Seventh Fleet operating off of Korea. He lived through the transition from wood and fabric through to the time of the jets. Not just lived, he commanded.

Too much glory to the Admiral - seems he had everything figured out and the majority of those who did not agree with him were incompetent or just plain stupid. I did not care to hear of his drinking or womanizing exploits - not certain what those "abilities" have to do with being an admiral. A Navy Patton???

Feel the author spends too much verse in glamorizing Clark and down grading the other Naval heros of the era.

This is an excellent book about a great carrier commander. Jocko Clark was the initial commander of the new Yorktown, and a great task group commander as part of task force 58 under Marc Mitscher. In fact, he was Mitscher's leading commander, the one that Mitscher looked to for all the challenges. And, he delivered. This book provides how he did that - his personality traits, including his angry tirades, his physical challenges, including his continual bouts with an ulcer that required a special diet. However, he was a loyal commander and an individual who supported his men. Many a time, he wanted to look for downed flyers when the previous task force commander prior to Mitscher was nervous about lingering in an area too long and the threat of Japanese submarines. If you want a book that provides the panorama of the Pacific carrier war in detail - each minor and major action - Jocko was in the Gilberts, Marshalls, Marianas, through Halsey's typhoons - this is a great book for the WWII enthusiast in the pacific. Highly recommended.

this culling of information is one is a series of bio-bibliographies of many personalities by virtually unknown 'writers' who have taken indivduals and then catalogued the events of their lives. It's not really writing, is just cooelating and, at that, there are glaring omissions and inaccuracries. Finally, however, its the general price of these books that is rather outrageous. Over priced.

If you are searching for a Biography of Tallulah Bankhead that centers on her specific talents from the Stage, movies, and/or Radio and Television, including dates, and exhaustive research, then this is the book. This book represents good and accurate research, not tabloid information that is so present in many of the other books on Tallulah Bankhead. Highly recommended for individuals interested in the life and work of Tallulah, devoid of the exaggerated gossipy stories so prevalent in the other biographies. No unnecessary frills here, but you will find excellent research, and a good basic biography. A great deal of time in obtaining precise and accurate research was spent by the Author in putting this Bio-Biography together. This is really a well done research work.

This is the ultimate book for Tallulah Bankhead fans. Mr. Carrier's writing does justice to Tallulah Bankhead's life story. With complete listings of her performances in all media, this is THE reference book on Miss Bankhead. An enjoyable read!

100 was simply too many questions for the subject, perhaps 50 of the questions are really important to someone so ill they are considering a stem cell transplant
Otherwise, as with the other title I purchased from this series, the book is clear, easy to read and worth the nominal purchase price

I first came across this book in the library at the local Cancer center and after my husband and I had both read it, we decided to buy our own copy. It is highly recommended for anyone who is waiting for bone marrow transplant ( most are done by stem cell transplants now rather than using surgery.) For us it helped to clarify the procedures I will be going through, and it helped us to know what questions to ask my doctor ...and to understand her answers. There is so much to learn about what will be happening to the patient and it is well worth while arming yourself with the knowledge. I felt really empowered when I read this book. It is dealing with a very complex procedure, but it is able to explain it in terms a layman can understand. A must-read for patients and their caregivers alike.