United Kingdom Books

It has become almost a commonplace to note that though we live longer and healthier lives, we are also more concerned about our health than ever before. Whilst many commentators have written on different aspects of this paradox , there has until now been no satisfactory survey of the whole. Fitzpatrick gives us, from his perspective as a GP, the most penetrating analysis yet published of the rise of the New Public Health, and of its dangers for patients, doctors and the relationship between them.

Fitzpatrick presents a history of the way that health has become a major personal and political topic, by looking at the different health scares of the last few years, the screening tests and 'healthy living' recommendations that have been introduced and accepted in spite of dissenting academic criticism We are all familiar with instructions to eat healthily (just why is it five or six portions of fruit or vegetables per day anyway?), drink a certain number of units of alcohol a week, take exercise, and subject ourselves to screening tests of dubious efficacy . However, it is only when we are confronted by the whole panoply of measures that we realise how far things have gone and how rapid the pace of change has been. The result is that we now tolerate, if not actively seek out, a level of interference in our personal lives which would have been unthinkable even ten years ago.

How to explain the astonishing success of the new public health amongst doctors and the public? A cynic would say that there is a straightforward financial motive for many doctors' enthusiasm for these measures, and though there is some truth in this, it is not the most important part of the story. Fitzpatrick provides an excellent account of the gradual process by which the medical profession has lost confidence in itself, as the old arrogance has been replaced by acute self doubt. The crisis of modern medicine is graphically illustrated by the volte face of the BMA in its attitude to alternative medicine: from a defiant defence of the 'demonstrable and reproducible benefits' of orthodox medicine in 1986 to a posture of 'abject relativism' in response to 'complementary ' approaches only seven years later .

Fitzpatrick also considers why health has become such a public concern over the last decade or so. This section is short and thus appears

somewhat schematic but does provide the basis for further work. Many commentators have noted that the ending of the Cold War has thrown up massive problems for the old ideologues of the West, as the initial triumphalism rapidly evaporated to be replaced by a general feeling of stagnation. Fitzpatrick notes that '[c]hanges in society now appear no longer to be the result of conscious or planned human activity , indeed things appear to be out of control'. At first sight this may seem exaggerated, but then think of the almost mediaeval suspicion with which GM food has been greeted. In these circumstances, any hope of achieving progress in society is just not on the agenda , and the retreat to narrow concerns about health is understandable. It is also understandable that the government should take advantage of concerns about health to strengthen its grip over an increasingly fragmented society The result , as Fitzpatrick puts it, is that 'when health becomes the goal of human endeavour it acquires an oppressive influence over the life of the individual'.

In the short term, the trends identified in The Tyranny of Health are likely to get worse . Only last week a distinguished cancer specialist was advocating that men over 50 (a category in which I have recently acquired a vested interest) should abstain from sexual intercourse and thus cut their risk of cancer of the prostate . Indeed the prostate looks set to become the organ of the decade, although I fear that until we have acquired our own distinctive ribbon we cannot compete with the other cancers.

How then to reverse the tyranny of health ? Fitzpatrick recognises that this book is very much a preliminary work , but it does lay the basis for future work which should be aimed at defining the links between, on the one hand, the tyranny of health and the crisis of medicine, and on the other, the stasis of the new world order. The medicalisation of life and the politicisation of medicine should both be resisted, for as he puts it '[i]n the absence of a forceful movement from below, medical intervention becomes a vehicle of government policy, not politics writ large, but politics on a small scale, petty, intrusive and moralising'. Fitzpatrick is certainly not against the idea of doctors being involved in the politics of health , but he emphasises the importance of maintaining clear boundaries. Doctors should reassert their autonomy from the state and '[d]octors who aspire to a wider political role, would be best advised to pursue this, not in their surgery, but in the public sphere. At a time when health has become such a political issue, he insists that 'the first responsibility of a doctor as a doctor is to provide medical treatment for individual patients'.

On first inspection, this book appears similar to Petr Skrabanek's The Death of Humane Medicine (1994). But Skrabanek's' critique, though often perceptive, was that of a cynical, detached libertarian,. Mocking his gullible medical colleagues and expressing a certain contempt for the general public, his approach was ultimately sterile. In contrast, Fitzpatrick's is a much more serious work. It is a major contribution to our ideas of health and disease at the begining of the 21st century, which deserves to be considered alongside contributions by writers such as Susan Sontag and John Berger .

In the preface to this remarkable book Dr. Fitzpatrick describes breaking into the house of an elderly couple during a bitterly cold February. The couple had succumbed to a combination of infection and hypothermia. While waiting for the ambulance, Fitzpatrick, a primary care physician working in a blue collar Borough of London, England, found an untouched leaflet describing the dangers of anonymous sex and the virtues of condoms. This leaflet had been distributed to 23 million homes in the UK, around half of which contained either an elderly couple or an old person living alone. At this moment Fitzpatrick reflected upon the absurdity of the "everyone is at risk" campaign and the motives of a government that did little to prevent the elderly from freezing to death and yet enthusiastically supported "healthy living".

The conclusion that Fitzpatrick reaches will surprise and enrage both those who agree and disagree with his view. The author is nothing if not blunt stating, "the governments health policy is really a programme of social control packaged as health promotion." In an era when social institutions are increasingly discredited (think Congress, the Senate or any other political institution), irrelevant (e.g., unions) or ignored (e.g., religious proscriptions against premarital sex) the government has seized upon personal health as a means of reconnecting with society and regulating and supervising people's lives.

At first glance Fitzpatrick's contention might be viewed as absurd and eccentric but think about it, how many aspects of your life are affected by concerns about health? Do you feel guilty driving to work when you might walk? Do you eat salad when you would prefer a steak? Do you miss out on a Friday night excursion so as to not have a drink or to avoid a smoky atmosphere? Medical jurisdiction over lifestyle extends into the home, the workplace, our schools and neighborhoods. This might not appear coercive but combined with endless screening programs of increasingly intrusive nature and daily announcements regarding another necessary alteration to keep us healthy and the insidious regulation of life becomes more apparent.

This might all be forgivable if it were the case that these changes in lifestyle were of benefit but Fitzpatrick explains they are not. With the exception of smoking there is very little evidence that the proposed adoption of a "healthy lifestyle" will have any noticeable benefit to the individual. For example, changes in diet to reduce cholesterol will increase the life expectancy of an average 65-year-old man by between 2.5 and 5.0 months. If you are younger than this, the benefits are so small as to be incalculable. Essentially your odds of having a heart attack under the age of 65 are very small; if you start a diet of muesli and skimmed milk while avoiding all fatty food your risk will be reduced to very, very small. When stated like this many might choose to live happily, if a little more riskily, eating bacon and drinking whole milk rather than existing "safely" on a boring diet.

Fitzpatrick's bottom line is that people need less moralizing when they are well and more health care when they are ill. Doctors should retreat from the moral sphere and return to helping people live their lives, as long and as healthily as possible, with their vices that make life happy and livable.

This work by a professor of art history and architecture at the University of Essex in England constitutes a Great Books course in miniature. From the window of his specialties, Jules Lubbock reviews four centuries of political, economic, and social history, delineating their influences - including those of sumptuary laws, or restrictions upon consumption - upon aesthetic concepts of design and town planning, as well as the effects of theological, moral, and nationalistic ideas on the evolving physical appearance of Britain in general and of London in particular. The reader's familiarity with Plato and Locke, Disraeli and Bevan, Pugin and Inigo Jones, is extended and made vivid. Discourses on the design of everything from buildings, carpets, and furniture to items as seemingly insignificant as an excessively or inappropriately decorated tea cup, cream jug, or gas lamp are brilliantly analyzed for their larger social and moral implications. Although Professor Lubbock's point of view is unmistakably Protestant Episcopalian rather than high-church Anglican Catholic, his nationalism therefore betraying a clear and not atypical though well-compensated bias against absolutism, Roman Catholicism, and Islam, these very British traits nonetheless do not prevent him from depicting and appreciating fully - even celebrating - the ecclesiastical beauty and pervasive influence of classical or Gothic, French (e.g., Pugin) and Italianate art and architecture. The author traces the transfer of power from the landed aristocracy - whose maintenance of magnificent country estates he attributes not to intraclass rivalry but rather to a benign desire and recognized duty to provide hospitality and employment through "housekeeping" by leading a simple, virtuous life at home in the country in preference to residing in the more appealing, sophisticated, and corrupting milieu of London - to the gentrified commercial classes whose ascendancy resulted from the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant increase of international trade. True to his holistic approach, Professor Lubbock makes frequent references to the reflections of these trends of intellectual history in British philosophy and, especially, literature, citing Shakespeare, Milton, Addison and Steele, Pope, Hume, Dickens, and Wordsworth explicitly and novelists such as Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Austen, and Thackeray implicitly - in so doing, incidentally giving the lie to the New Critics' foci upon literature in a vacuum and upon "universal" character development to the exclusion of historical context. The author's own book is filled with handome reproductions and illustrations of the works of art and architecture that he so expertly describes, and it contains amusing parables written by some of the renowned personages into whom he breathes renewed vitality and relevance.

This work by a professor of art history and architecture at the University of Essex in England constitutes a Great Books course in miniature. From the window of his specialties, Jules Lubbock reviews four centuries of political, economic, and social history, delineating their influences - including those of sumptuary laws, or restrictions upon consumption - upon aesthetic concepts of design and town planning, as well as the effects of theological, moral, and nationalistic ideas on the evolving physical appearance of Britain in general and of London in particular. The reader's familiarity with Plato and Locke, Disraeli and Bevan, Pugin and Inigo Jones, is extended and made vivid. Discourses on the design of everything from buildings, carpets, and furniture to items as seemingly insignificant as an excessively or inappropriately decorated tea cup, cream jug, or gas lamp are brilliantly analyzed for their larger social and moral implications. Although Professor Lubbock's point of view is unmistakably Protestant Episcopalian rather than high-church Anglican Catholic, his nationalism therefore betraying a clear and not atypical though well-compensated bias against Roman Catholicism and Islam, these very British traits nonetheless do not prevent him from depicting and appreciating fully - even celebrating - the ecclesiastical beauty and pervasive influence of classical or Gothic, French (e.g., Pugin) and Italianate art and architecture. The author traces the transfer of power from the landed aristocracy - whose maintenance of magnificent country estates he attributes not to intraclass rivalry but rather to a benign desire and recognized duty to provide hospitality and employment through "housekeeping" by leading a simple, virtuous life at home in the country in preference to residing in the more appealing, sophisticated, and corrupting milieu of London - to the gentrified commercial classes whose ascendancy resulted from the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant increase of international trade. True to his holistic approach, Professor Lubbock makes frequent references to the reflections of these trends of intellectual history in British philosophy and, especially, literature, citing Shakespeare, Milton, Addison and Steele, Pope, Hume, Dickens, and Wordsworth explicitly and novelists such as Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, Austen, and Thackeray implicitly - in so doing, incidentally giving the lie to the New Critics' foci upon literature in a vacuum and upon "universal" character development to the exclusion of historical context. The author's own book is filled with handome reproductions and illustrations of the works of art and architecture that he so expertly describes, and it contains amusing parables written by some of the renowned personages into whom he breathes renewed vitality and relevance.

Though the USAAF was the primary user of B-24s, the Navy utilized Liberators worldwide as PB4Y long-range patrol bombers. Based at Dunkeswell, England, Fleet Air Wing-7 operated different models of the B-24/PB4Y-1 for anti-submarine sweeps of the Bay of Biscay, convoy escort and conventional bombing strikes against Axis shipping. Alan Carey, a well-known authority of USN Liberator ops, chronicles the combat exploits of the various squadrons assigned to FAW-7 in this well-written and well-illustrated volume from Schiffer Publishing.

Seven squadrons were assigned to FAW-7 between August 1943 and war's end: VB-103, -105, -107, -110, -111, -112 and -114. FAW-7 crews logged thousands of hours criss-crossing the Bay of Biscay searching for U-boats. Contacts were few; Navy Libs eventually sinking five U-boats and damaging others. Though patrols could be deadly dull, long-range Junkers 88s prowled the same area, acounting for a number of B-24s. The English weather also proved to be as deadly as U-boat flak defenses. FAW-7 lost 40 aircraft and over 200 personnel to all causes.

Carey does a first-rate job relating FAW-7's war; the tedium, the brief, sometimes terrifying battles with U-boats or Luftwaffe fighters, the dangerous weather conditions that claimed aircraft and lives along with life on the base. A number of reminiscences from various VP personnel and Dunkeswell civilians are skillfully interwoven into Carey's smooth-flowing text.

The book runs to 160 pages and is positively bulging with illustrations: over 300 black & white photos, eight pages of color pix and 12 pages of color profiles of FAW-7 and RAF Coastal Command Libs along with maps and diagrams. At $29.95, this book is a steal!

While this book may not be the final word on Fleet Air Wing-7 operations, it comes damn close. It does combine a well-written and informative text with a wealth of illustrative material to entertainingly tell the story of the men and aircraft of Fleet Air Wing-7 at war. Nice job, Mr. Carey!

Hi! I'm a brazilian amateur historicician, about the U-Boats and yours enemys in the Battle of Atlantic.
Thos book is very good about the Liberators in the Europe theatre and the atuation in ASW actions.
Bets regards, Sergio Carvalho

The Toronto Star
May 4, 1991, Saturday

A saga of tawdry double dealing
By Paul William Roberts

Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War

By Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander

....

ANYONE PUZZLED by President George Bush's hypocritical actions during the period immediately following his order reining in Desert Storm's dogs of war will be terminally confounded by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander's meticulously- researched saga of the tawdry double-dealing strewn along the road leading to this confrontation with Saddam Hussein.

Back when he was CIA director, Bush was personally responsible for the mass slaughter of Kurds by the Baghdad regime, having urged them to revolt, armed them, then failed to provide any backup. Now, as President, he's betrayed them again, and in much the same way, standing in the ditch he calls high moral ground while Iraqi helicopter-gunships and troops butcher countless thousands of men, women and children. If this is "an Iraqi internal affair" in Washington's eyes, then so was the Nazi holocaust. With 200,000 or so troops still within Iraqi borders, Bush apparently sees nothing wrong with upholding Saddam's sovereign right to slaughter any religious or ethnic faction he feels inclined to. Why?

Unholy Babylon provides answers to this and numerous other tricky questions, raising still trickier questions in the process. Darwish is one of the most respected and authoritative investigative reporters covering Middle East affairs. Egyptian by birth, he currently corresponds for The Independent, which consistently provided critical commentary of the war while most Western media waved the Stars and Stripes like hapless vassals. His co-author, "Gregory Alexander," is regarded by those who are aware of his actual identity as one of the two or three supreme experts on international arms trading. He employs a pseudonym and lives in conditions that make Salman Rushdie's arrangements seem positively freewheeling. I'm betraying no confidence by saying he was once a British army officer serving in the Middle East, and then actually worked in the international arms industry for several years before conscience called.

Although people like Judith Miller (Saddam Hussein And The Crisis In The Gulf) and Samir al-Khalil (Republic Of Fear) have done yeoman's work covering similar territory, Darwish and Alexander, besides having access to stratospherically high-level source material, manage a level of concision and readability that makes coherent sense of close to a century's worth of history, much of it deliberately obfuscated, partially erased, or hopelessly tangled to protect the guilty. Who the guilty actually are is Unholy Babylon's main theme.

The book confirms that Iraq's plot to annex Kuwait was made known to most Arab leaders by February, 1990. Both the CIA and the Egyptian intelligence service warned their respective governments repeatedly, stating unequivocally by late September that Saddam's troops would definitely be moving across the border within days. Presidents Bush and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak chose to ignore these warnings. Why?

Reading this chilling and repulsive tale of big politics and even bigger business, you find yourself yodelling why? every 10 minutes. Why, for example, didn't we see much evidence of the $ 50 billion or so in high-tech arms sold by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia over the last few years? Why was America aligning itself with countries that had human rights records at least as bad as those of Saddam's Ba'athist regime they were conscripted to topple? And why did Bush encourage Iraqi Kurds and Shiites to embark on a civil war if he had no intention of supporting them - particularly since he'd stopped Stormin' Norman from trashing Saddam's war machine when the opportunity was available, and thus knew full well the rebels did not stand a chance against the kind of punch Baghdad could still deploy against them?

The truth is - as Unholy Babylon makes abundantly clear - that Washington prefers Saddam, the monster it made, and a Ba'athist reign of terror in Iraq to the prospect of a Kurdistan which could end up controlling the world's second largest oilfields, and a Shiite state in southern Iraq that would inevitably find itself a satellite of fundamentalist Iran. America's fear of Iran, the authors reveal, is indeed so great it must be considered the major factor in the decade-long cultivation of Saddam Hussein's regime - a cultivation that paralleled the lavish U.S. cossetting of the Shah's Iran, entailing techno-military assistance of the first order, including hands-on involvement by numerous American allies in the construction of weapons facilities more advanced than any outside North America or NATO. They became Desert Storm's first targets.

Besides naked greed and the mega-politics of oil, the only thing approaching reasons and answers this book offers is the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy has more to do with chaos and instability than it does with putting order in the "new world order." As long as the U.S. is creating the chaos, it can operate within it quite happily and much more easily than it could within, say, a truly democratic Middle East.

Darwish and Alexander make no comment on the diabolical facts they began assembling even before August 2, 1990 but I'd like to meet the reader who does not finish Unholy Babylon with a sizzling sense of rage, despair and abject frustration aimed at those we have allowed to govern the allegedly-free world and who have abused that privilege by licensing a wrecking-crew to exploit and enslave the wretched of the Earth.

---
Toronto Star Newspapers
July 6, 1991 Saturday

Authors examine the effects of international greed

Unholy Babylon presents a detailed account of the world's financing of Iraq's military machine and the history of events that led to the invasion of Kuwait and the diplomatic posturing prior to the Persian Gulf War.

Authors Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander display a sophisticated knowledge of Arab politics and history and the ruthless practices of the international arms trade. They combine extensive research with broad contacts and experience, giving Unholy Babylon an authority and depth that is both fascinating and chilling.

Darwish and Alexander contend that world leaders ignored warning signals, bungled messages and recklessly pursued their own short-sighted goals in the years and months that led up to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Again and again, they missed opportunities to curb Saddam Hussein's belligerence, even as Iraqi tanks rolled south towards Kuwait.

Furthermore, leaders of the East and West share the blame for helping create Saddam Hussein's mighty war machine.

Generous loans and financing from foreign governments and banks allowed Iraq to spend between $80 and $105 billion on armaments from 1980-90. During the mid 1980s, Iraq became the world's leading importer of arms. Even after the end of its war with Iran, Iraq continued to pump billions of dollars a year into weapons of mass destruction.

A few diplomats and intelligence officials raised murmurs of alarm, but these invariably were side-stepped by businesses and ministries of trade and commerce who were anxious to sell military wares to virtually any nation willing to buy. Effective embargoes were few.

The effects of international greed were compounded by anxious government and military leaders who were willing to do almost anything to stop the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Better Saddam Hussein than the Ayatollah Khomeini, they reasoned. Saddam was pleased to take all the armaments they could offer.

Unholy Babylon makes clear that despite official government policy, most nations are prepared to turn a blind eye when arms sales boost local employment and stimulate the GNP.

As U.S. President George Bush trumpets a new policy of international arms control without controlling arms, the world seems to have learned little. Saddam Hussein is bloodied but unbowed. Billions of dollars worth of armaments continue to flow to the Middle East.
--
Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada)

December 4, 1991 Wednesday

...Readers bemused by the peaceniks' vitriolic attacks upon the Americans for the victory over Iraq will find Unholy Babylon most enlightening.

Written by two respected experts on the Middle East, Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander, the book is sub-titled 'The Secret History of Saddam's War' and reveals much background material not generally known in North America, including Western bungling which allowed Saddam to invade Kuwait with impunity.

Meaty and detailed, yet readily understandable, the book will repay study by anyone wanting more than he finds in the media to understand the Gulf War.

--

The Nation
March 29, 2004

... Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander in their 1991 book, Unholy Babylon, [reported] that Washington was extremely alarmed by Qassim and the Communists, and therefore wooed the Baath Party as an alternative. When the Baath briefly came to power in 1963, the CIA passed to Saddam Hussein, probably an agency asset, a list of hundreds of Iraqi Communists, whom the new regime liquidated. The Baath was in the wilderness when the coup collapsed, but came back to stay in 1968. Again, Darwish and Alexander report assertions of US backing for the 1968 coup, confirmed to me by other journalists who have talked to retired CIA and State Department officials.

Unholy Babylon is the detailed chronicle of the creation of a monster - Saddam Hussein - aided and abetted by the United States and other western powers. The US needed Saddam, in their estimation, to counter the Iranian threat. The US and European countries were willing to tolerate and to support internal totalitarianism and terror, suppression of dissent by force, gas warfare and other war crimes against internal enemies and Iran, as long as Saddam would fight the Iranian menace. The British looked the other way as Saddam murdered dissenters on their soil. Everyone looked away as virtually every country in Europe, plus the US and Canada, lined up to supply Saddam Hussein with long range rockets and essential atomic bomb technology.
Adel Darwish is eminently qualified for the job of investigating Saddam's empire, having been a veteran foreign correspondent in Iraq before he was thrown out for reporting a major missile testing mis-hap and thus revealing Saddam's secret missile development program.
The hard cover edition of Unholy Babylon has been updated and corrected and is probably well worth the extra investment.
Read this book to understand what is happening now. It has been the source book (sometimes not acknowledged) for several "informed analyses."...

Please read as much as you can about Virginia Woolf before tackling this book, specifically the two major biographies; Jeanne Schulkind's collection, "Moments of Being"; at least two of Woolf's novels to include "To the Lighthouse" and "Mrs Dalloway"; and, if possible, "The Voyage Out." By then you will feel you know Virginia Woolf as well as anyone and will appreciate Roger Poole that much more. I don't think you have to read Leonard's autobiography. You should be able to find all these books at half-price bookstores or used copies through Amazon. Only one thing could possibly enhance my enjoyment and appreciation of this work: to discuss it with a female psychologist, preferably one with a love for England.

In this exelent book, Roger Poole studies Virginia Woolf's personality, discarding any kind of mental ilness. The book is a profound research, based on Virginia Woolf's literature, as well as other testimonies of the ones close to her.
Poole defends Woolf's mental health, very interesting book for those who want to understand what was really happening inside Woolf's head. The book is well written and includes a very interesting study on Virginia Woolf's suicide note.

This book is a classic work in urban planning.
I wish Amazon provid more good book in urban planning.

When I was the first year postgraduate student in Bartlett School of Planning, UCL,University of London, this book was like a compass to explore the world of urban planning. The lecture by Peter was not easy, but something complicated. Because this book was highly recommended as an introductory book by UCL, I could overcome my lack of knowlege on Western planning context. If you need to understand the general and historical context of urban and regional planning in developed countries, this book is the best to satisfy your requirement.

This book about the valour is a very powerful and almost complete stories about the tales of gurkhas. The valour states all the 10 gurkha regiments and tell the events of everyone of them in the theatre of war.When i got down to read it i was so enthralled by the heroic tales and bravery of these courageous men that i skip my lunch and dinner. I was keen to finish the book and to look for the next title on gurkhas. It' s an excellent book overall. A must read for all those interested in military.

This book about the valour is a very powerful and almost complete stories about the tales of gurkhas. The valour states all the 10 gurkha regiments and tell the events of everyone of them in the theatre of war.When i got down to read it i was so enthralled by the heroic tales and bravery of these courageous men that i skip my lunch and dinner. I was keen to finish the book and to look for the next title on gurkhas. It' s an excellent book overall. A must read for all those interested in military.

The title of this review sums it up. Five stars are for pictures only. The text is fluff, but the pictures, well...Yum Yum, Give Me Some!

if you love the verve you must buy this book. but if you dont think there totaly cute dont

The most successful Nazi naval operations depended on stealth (U-boats) and deception (commerce raiders). The Royal Navy's Operational Intelligence Center combined the Nazi "red side" intelligence with the Allied navies' "blue side" operational information to form a fused picture of the war at sea. Patrick Beesly was a verteran of the OIC, personnally responsible for hunting down Hitler's surface commerce raiders.

Beesly tells the counter-deception side of the surface raider story in his recently republished memoir: Very Special Intelligence: The story of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Center 1939-1945. Assigned to the Admiralty's OIC in June 1940, Beesley single-handedly took on tracking down the surface raiders.

The British code breakers never decrypted Cipher 100 or Tibet, the Enigma codes used by the raiders and their supply ships, while the frequent interruptions in the British ability to read the U-boat code Triton/Shark limited British opportunities to intercept rendezvous arrangements between the raiders and U-boats. The raiders zealously minimized transmissions and would steam miles after transmitting to defeat British direction finding. Because the raiders operated independently, they (unlike the U-boats) had little need to keep in touch with the Kriegsmarine headquarters.

Beesly and the OIC had almost nothing to go on, and initially could not even estimate the number of raiders. Beesly started slowly reconstructing the historical records of sinkings (where known), raider sightings, direction-finding cuts, time-distance estimates, and whatever intelligence flotsam seemed to point to the mysterious raiders. By May 1941, the code breakers had captured sufficient German code materials to begin reading the U-boat Enigma occasionally and were able to locate German supply ships.

After almost a year, Beesly had identified the seven raiders at sea, and in May 1941 published details on raider appearances, characteristic deception operations, and means to identify them. OIC established a central plot (Checkpoint) of all known friendly merchantmen and a real-time report to help wary ships confirm the identity of an unidentified vessel.

U-boat ULTRA intelligence occasionally helped find the raiders. The raider Atlantis, ordered to rendezvous with U-126 while steaming home, was sighted and sunk. Other U-boats, recovering Atlantis's survivors, led the British to a second raider supply ship, which was sunk. Decrypts helped sink eight of the supply ships. Sustaining the raiders at sea became problematic.

Of the seven raiders that slipped to sea undetected through 1940, four (Komet, Orion, Thor, Widder) were still afloat by the end of 1941, but all had returned to port. The OIC was able to monitor the work-ups of new raiders in German home waters through ULTRA, photoreconnaissance, and direction finding. When German raiders tried to run the gauntlet again in late 1941 and 1942, they were tracked down the Channel and harassed, with Komet sunk beginning her second cruise. By 1943, the German raider operations had ended.

Beesly's detailed account of his experiences in applying intelligence directly to ongoing naval operations is a model for effective operational and intelligence fusion up to the present day. Not only is his memoir a classic of the genre, it is also a book full of lessons for today's counter-terrorism operators and their intelligence auxillaries in search of shadowly, deceptive, elusive, and deadly opponents. Beesly provides a blueprint on how to "find the dots," connect them together, hunt them down, and destroy them. It is highly recommended.

This is a brilliant piece of work, and extremely relevant today. Had America had an Operational Intelligence (OpIntel) Plot (24/7 operationally-oriented put it all together all the time watch center), I daresay the terrorist attacks on America would have been prevented in good time.


I started reading this book the week prior to the attacks, having bought it off the shelves of the Army War College bookstore, whose judgment I have always respected, and I have been absolutely absorbed--thrilled--with the deep insights that this work provides on how best to manage an operationally-oriented watch center that does "all-source fusion" against a constantly changing real-time real-world threat.

It became clear to me as I worked through every word of this superior work that modern intelligence has become too bureaucratic and that all-source analysis has become too distant from both the sources and the consumers. The Operational Intelligence Center (OIC) whose story is told here worked with no fewer than seventeen distinct sources streams, each with its own idiosyncrasies, its own fits and starts--and it worked directly with its operational clients, fully appraised of friendly plans and intentions and able to provide workmanlike inputs at every turn. We need to get back to this approach!

There are a number of vital lessons to be learned from this book, which I recommend in the strongest terms as one of my "top ten" relevant *today*. Among them:

Sharing Secrets Matters. It was the Russians who helped the British get started in 1914 with a gift of a German Naval Signal book, and it was the Poles who saved the day early on in World War II with a gift of two working Enigma machines.

Ops Must Sleep With Intel. Too many times I have seen operators ignore intelligence because they do not understand it-there are too many breakdowns in communication along the way, and if the operators have not trained with, lived with, slept with, caroused with, their intelligence counterparts, the two cultures do not come together effectively in times of crisis.

Ops Cannot Do Raw Sources. The corollary of the above is that Ops simply cannot keep up with the nuances of sources and is not able to evaluate sources in context to good effect.

Intel Must Sleep With Ops. The intelligence propensity to compartment everything to the point of meaningless, and the "green door" mentality that is especially characteristic of the crypto-analysis community, amounts to a death wish. Some secret sources must be "ultra" secret, but some form of bridge is needed-the OpIntel Center (which the U.S. Navy, alone within today's US secret bureaucratic archipelago, does well) appears to be a vital and relevant solution.

Plots Must Be Co-Located and Ideally Integrated. Early separation and distance between the intelligence plot, the commercial shipping plot and the operational plot leads to waste and death. Ultimately an integrated plot, or at least a blue-green plot next door to the red plot, is absolutely vital to effective prosecution of real-time war.

Lose the Old Guys. The first thing that needs doing when preparing for a long war is to lose the old guys. No disrespect intended, but as has been documented time and again, those that get promoted in peacetime bureaucracies tend to be too conformist and too subservient to peacetime protocols to adapt well to unconventional and very fast-moving wartime conditions. [Present company always excepted!.]

Hire the Retired. This is not a contradiction. Old guys with big egos and high ranks have to go-but bringing in the best of the retired, generally at the field grade level, can have an extraordinary positive impact in the rapid maturation and stabilization of the full-speed-ahead wartime watch.

Doctrinal Disputes Kill. Unless there is a homeland defense doctrine that fully integrates and exercises the capabilities and internal cultures of the Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and civilian agencies (and civilian agencies!) there will be a year or two of major and almost catastrophic losses until it gets sorted out the hard way.

Home Arrogance Kills (UK Version). The persistent unwillingness of home side personnel to admit that their own security measures can be broken by clever enemies, and the general sloppiness of all hands with respect to Operations Security (OPSEC) will take a heavy toll.

Home Arrogance Kills (US Version). There is a theme with regard to the Americans. While their money and their manpower are gratefully accepted, their arrogance knows no bounds. They entered the war believing that there was nothing the British could teach them-further on into the war, the Americans risked Ultra by acting too aggressively on its information.

Red Cell Oversight Needed. One thing that jumped out at me from this book was the urgent need for having a very senior person-a retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for example, managing a Red Cell to provide oversight over operational decisions to exploit the most sensitive sources. [By this I mean, a senior authority who can overrule and forbid operations whose success might endanger the special source.]

Negative Reports Matter. I was really struck by the circumstances surrounding a German break-out up the Channel, in which a number of normally reliable and overlapping intelligence collection endeavors all were forced back by weather, broken down or what-not. From this I took the lesson that negative reports matter. By failing to report to the OIC on their non-status, they failed to focus the OIC on all the possibilities. Thinking the flank covered, the OIC left the flank open.

Tommy Brown Matters. The book ends on a marvelous note, pointing out that without the heroism of Tommy Brown, a 16 year old cabin boy and youngest recipient of the George Medal as well as two other adults who died in the process of grabbing vital enemy signals materials off a sinking vessel, the allies would have been deaf for much of 1943. At the end of the day the best technical intelligence comes down to a brave human who risks all to make it possible.

Second Empire Paris proclaimed itself Europe's first modern city, extensively rebuilt by the autocratic remodeling of Napoleon III. Londoners, however, had to achieve the monumental changes of the middle of the nineteenth century in bits and pieces by cooperation with various authorities rather than an imposition by a dictator. Certainly, the modernization of London in the mid-nineteenth century produced a city that was greatly different form Paris, according to _Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in 19th Century London_ (Yale University Press) by Lynda Nead. Nead is a professor of art history, and her well-illustrated book explains the changes in the city and the society from around 1850 to 1880. "London's municipal government emerged out of a fog of local hostility and resistance," Nead writes.

Nead details the changes that came to the city because of its huge sewer system, or the installation of gas lighting. For instance, gas made night shopping and strolling possible, and enabled men and women to dance, drink, and generally be naughty at the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens. The moralists of the time fought against Cremorne's various licenses, and eventually it went under, but not before inspiring Whistler's famous _Nocturne in Black and Gold_ which led to his lawsuit against Ruskin. The moralists were in further quandary over Holywell Street, the history of which is the most engaging part of the book. It was the home of pornographers who put their wares in the windows, hazarding youth and especially (according to the view of the time) women, who loved bright colors. Holywell was especially cited in debate over the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, and police closed down some of the businesses and seized some of their goods, but it seems that such efforts are never very effective. The street soldiered on in its popular and sinful way until the very end of Victoria's reign, when it was finally done in by razing to make way for the new Kingsway thoroughfare. Parliament never did solve the problem of defining what is obscene; those who want to censor the Internet have the same problem today.

Nead has written a book about how people affect the city environment and vice versa. It is extremely well illustrated, with quality reproductions of engravings, oils, and sheet music covers, producing a good-looking book whose illustrations and text reinforce each other with style.

This is a truly one-of-a-kind writing on the subject of Victorian culture. Many of my other sources are exceedingly boring to read or seem stuck on the ethereal "you had to be there" sort of atmosphere of the time. I can really connect with Nead and her use of art and architecture.