Portsmouth Books

Well documented, full of stories, detailled technics, the different phases and improvements...etc...Everything about this test submarine and her evolution.

Very good text.

Some nice b&w pictures.

I would have liked to see more drawings. It is the reason why I do not give a 5 stars.

I recommend this book !

I <3 LArge$$ and dis hrr B00k mdea me rilly hapie cuz he id teh best-0r3z t34(h3r 3\/4R!

The USS Albacore, preserved today at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is the prototype of the modern submarine in all respects except nuclear power. She served the US Navy as a floating test bed for numerous technological advances including the teardrop hull, single-stick control, and the towed sonar array, for nearly twenty years. This book is based on interviews with her captains, crew members, the engineers and scientists who conceived and designed her, and the shipyard workers who built her.

I brought my family to the memorial at the end of our vacation. We had a great a great time. I bought the book on impulse and was rewarded with a very interesting read.
I served on submarines (SSN-703 & SSBN 626B)and I think this is a very informative book. A must read for an submarine history buff.

I have been facinated with subs ever since reading about the Hunley in Clive Cussler's book Sea Hunters, so I was pleased to find the USS Albacore only 45 minutes away from my home. I have visited her on several occasions and have wanted to know about her history for some time. This book gave me just what I wanted! The photos are a great part of the book, especially the ones of her arrival in her final resting place in Portsmouth, along I-95 and Rt. 1.

Well written and amazing to read. Author captured the moment and took you there. Book was flooded with facts.

I would highly recommend this book, it is not only for the history buffs.
If you do enjoy history, you will love the author's details.

I very good book that gives the reader an interesting twist on what was believed to be gospel. The author's research is convincing.

An awesome book....definitely a different view .... a must read for anyone seeking to truely understand Benedict Arnold's story.

Who would have thought that what was assumed by the average student of American history to be an open and shut case against Benedict Arnold could be brought into question. And, furthermore, to do so with such detailed facts woven into a rather gripping novel format. Mr. WIlczak has laid out a compelling case that Arnold was not a traitor but a collaborator with George Washington to ultimately fool the British. This book could be the basis of an excellent movie.

This book expresses a thoroughly researched, fresh approach to one of history's most infamous legends. When I began to read the book I felt my feelings regarding Benedict Arnold could not be swayed. The author, however, through meticulous use of timeline, documented fact, and letters of many of the involved, opened my eyes to the possibility that Arnold may have been the protaganist in a great scheme to free the colonies and help create the United States. I highly recommend this book to anyone who seeks the truth instead of the commonly handed down history stories we have been fed since childhood. AAAAA+++++

Starting with Mary (Kiddie) Ruggieri's departure from Camp Stoneman in Pittsburg, California she takes the reader on a journey across the ocean to Japan shortly after World War II and back home again. She wrote about her onboard quarters and activities on her ocean voyage as well as the family she left behind.

As a member of the 8000th WAC Detachment that arrived in Japan in October 1946, Mary saw a whole new world open to her eyes. Having a penchant for photography she certainly used her hobby to intertwine her storyline in this book. She wrote of her first sight of the Japanese people and the land that would be her home for the following months. She provided descriptions of the women's quarters compared to where the men were living and to where other WACs were living within the country itself.

From a non-travelers point of view this was a very interesting book. It included more than 485 photos and facts that accompanied each segment of the author's journals, letters and memories. Mary brought her photos to life with her entries. She wrote about the soldier she met and fell in love with along with the things they did for fun. But I was still amazed at how much sight-seeing time she seemed to have while in Japan. I was also surprised to read about and see photos of Nagasaki since Mary was there just a couple of years after the USA had dropped an atomic bomb on it.

Throughout this book Mary takes the reader to places most of us have only read about or never heard of before this. She introduces the reader to the sights, sounds and smells of Japan following the war. When her time was finally up Mary returned to the USA aboard another ship. Again she wrote of the activities aboard the ship. She was a very happy woman once she stepped foot on US soil in May 1948.

This book is well worth reading.

Reviewed by Kam Aures for Rebeccas Reads (3/08)

"From Japan With Love" is a wonderful memoir illustrating what life was like in Post-War Japan through the eyes of Mary Ruggieri, a member of the Women's Army Corps (WAC). The story of the era is told through a composition of journal entries, personal letters to friends and family, and photographs. Throughout the book there are also boxes explaining some of the historical figures, places and events of the time period.

Tech sergeant Ruggieri's journey began in October of 1946 when she boarded the Army Transport Admiral Sims headed for Yokohama, Japan. The luxury of the trip with "maid service and swell meals" was a far cry from what was to await her and her shipmates when they arrived in the distant land. When they pulled into the harbor they saw the destruction and devastation that the country had suffered at the hands of war in the form of sunken ships and the impoverished manner in which the native people were dressed. Their living quarters for their occupation in Japan were Quonset huts which were void of any luxuries. Each woman had `8'9' of space into which to place a cot, a foot locker, and a wall locker." While the accommodations were less than welcoming, the American GIs that were stationed there made up for it by treating the women like royalty with barrages of parties and assistance. One of these GI's the author became especially fond of and started dating.

Ruggieri's time spent in Japan was definitely not all work. On the weekends she had the opportunity to take some incredible trips and see some amazing sights. While the travel to and from these destinations was not always the most pleasant journey, the experiences that she had more than made up for any hardships along the way. The book contains over 400 photographs which definitely enhance the story that she tells. There are pictures of the Quonset huts, Japanese people, the hotels they stayed at on their trips, Mount Fuji, and plenty of the author herself and other members of the WAC. Even though Ruggieri is very skilled at writing descriptive passages, the multitudes of pictures really provide you with a complete picture of everything that happened.

To have saved all of these letters, journals and pictures from over sixty-years ago and to be able to compile them to create a book as complete as "From Japan With Love" is incredible. The memoir is well-written, thought-provoking, and insightful. Her writing is so descriptive that you truly feel like you are there with her and her humor and straightforwardness will definitely keep you entertained. "From Japan With Love" is an excellent book and I highly recommend it!

Offering a fascinating, informative, personal, and unique perspective of live in post-war Japan through excerpts from the letters, journals and photographs of Mary A. Ruggieri, an American college girl stationed in Japan from 1946 to 1948 as a member of Women's Army Corps as part of the American military post-war occupation , "From Japan With Love" takes the reader from an army hut encampment to some of Japan's most memorable shrines and august temples. Ruggieri writes eloquently of the Japanese people and culture, her falling in love with Japan, as well as meeting the American soldier who would become her husband. Remarkable for her articulate eyewitness account which is peppered throughout with her black-and-white photography, "From Japan With Love" is as engaging as it is informed, making it very highly recommended reading for anyone with an interest in the post-war Japan reformation, mid-twentieth century Japanese culture, and the transition of Japan from a defeated nation to its nescient emergence as a western style democracy..

This is a warm, rich, charming, evocative, and often humorous memoir of life and love in post-war Japan, with many rare photos of the era (certainly including the photo of the bridge from Takeishima Island, page 118), which makes this tapestry of reminiscence such a uniquely delightful and easy read.

The "Rules Of The Road" posted in the Central Tokyo Police Station, in 1947, are hilarious.

The letters written by the author are sometimes poignant ("Never do I forget how wondrously fortunate I am to have you. . ."), sometimes funny ("My interview consisted of a major asking me how much clerical work I had done, and my telling him that I did very little and didn't like it, so of course I got a clerical job..."), but always fun and insightful.

It is a wonderful book.

At the price Amazon is offering this powerful book (I paid $35 for it), this is an incredible bargain for a fascinating read. With its size, scope, and beautiful pictures (2 large sections in color), a publisher like Abrams might charge $90 for it! Author J. Dennis Robinson is known throughout New England for both writing must-read history but also for being a spellbinding lecturer. His knowledge of New England history is deep and sweeping, but more important is his love and "feel" for that history. Not just a history of landmark Strawbery Banke colonial museum, this is a hard-hitting history of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is even today loaded with hundreds of stunningly huge colonial homes. In these months of a highly interesting presidential race, make sure you read this book to get the true feel of where our nation came from and why we love it so.

Not just a beautifully illustrated history of a New England seaport town's colonial village museum, Robinson's book is a lively portrait of New Hampshire's only seaport, Portsmouth. Through the personalities and events that shaped it, Robinson shows how the town grew and shrank and thrived and burned (twice!) and transformed itself again and again to meet the changing times, without being overtaken by them.

First visited by close-mouthed fishermen and settled by venturesome capitalists, Strawberry Banke (as it was first known) resisted the onslaught of Puritans from Massachusetts as best it could, given its isolation, economic woes, and small population. Robinson introduces readers to the men who carved a town from the wilderness, jockeyed for power and abandoned the place when the going got tough.

Robinson brings these and later adventurers to life as he chronicles the early years, Portsmouth's role in the Revolution, the economic woes of the early 19th century and the devastating fires, which drove men, like the young lawyer Daniel Webster to leave Portsmouth forever. He describes the rise of the red-light district, the descent of the waterfront, and the ongoing cries for urban renewal, destruction, and preservation right up to the present day.

Portsmouth's determination to thrive created friction early on between preservationists and those eager to embrace the future by discarding the past. As in many towns the preservationists were often descendants of moneyed summer visitors, like John Mead Howells, son of editor and author William Dean Howells, and Stephen Decatur IV, the latest in a long line of famous military men. Howells and Decatur teamed up with an ambitious plan to restore the waterfront and before their plan fizzled Portsmouth had hit the top ten list of possible National Park projects.

Though Howells failed, his grandson married a woman who was a major player in the founding of the Strawbery Banke Museum, which has preserved and restored many of the city's oldest buildings and relocated them to its village setting across the road from the Piscataqua River.

Robinson weaves the genesis and development of the museum into his narrative. We meet the people who built and lived in the houses that now make up the museum and see the transformations of many of the buildings over the years as people added on, modernized or changed their use entirely.

The hundreds of photographs and illustrations that accompany Robinson's history are integral to the story. They have been carefully chosen to enhance the narrative, from the first drawings of the colonial grounds to the mechanics of moving a building to the Strawbery Banke site and, always, the people who have given Portsmouth its life since the early 1600s.

Well organized, engaging, and attractively designed, this is a book to be savored from cover to cover.

This is, as the title suggests, a history of a museum, but in addition it's a rather amazing story about how history reached out and touched the folks in a small New England town. It has a wonderful balance of lively prose and what seems to be hundreds of photographs, all beautifully reproduced, that really bring the people and the place to life. If the Thorton Wilder wrote books instead of plays, it would be a lot like this!

This book is NOT out of stock, as it has been reprinted in 1988 and remains avaliable from Whalesback Books. For orders, call 202/333-2182.

This is a reprint of a book originally published in the 1930s, which describes with great sophistication the architecture of the many 18th century homes that dot the Piscataqua River valley, primarily in Portsmouth. At the time it was written, many of these homes were still occupied by descendants of the original owners, whereas now they are owned by non-profit organizations and are open to the public. It is enormously rewarding to compare the black and white pictures in the book with the houses as they are today. It also contains an introductory essay that gives a superb explanation of the evolution of domestic architecture from America's earliest settlements through the 18th century. As the book explains, Portsmouth, along with Newburyport, Annapolis, and Charleston, are unique among historic American cities because they prospered in the 18th century only to decline thereafter, thereby allowing their wonderful examples of Georgian and Federal/Adam architecture to be preserved. By way of contrast, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia grew so rapidly in the 19th century that most of their examples of this type of home were lost to the wrecker's ball.

This is one of those ground-breaking books that are also exasperating, because you know the author is right at least half of the time, but you don't know which half is right. Grimm's overall objective is to find a way to make higher education "fairer" for students who lack the advantages of most mainstream students who grow up in white, middle-class households, and she has written a thoughtful analysis based on wide reading across several disciplines (there are well over 100 items in the Works Cited). From the perspective of the Writing Center, which originated at the same time that growing numbers of nontraditional students began flooding American colleges and universities, she has a first-hand perspective of the mismatch between these students and the expectations of their professors.

Although political, the book is not a polemic so much as an academic inquiry into time-honored values of liberal education. And she uses postmodern thought as a basis for asking questions that get at long-held assumptions about what students should learn and how they should learn it. She articulates well how discourse (the conversation that takes place among people creating knowledge) locks its participants into certain viewpoints that make it hard for them to see the perspectives ot those outside the discourse itself. But the drawback of postmodernism is that it is yet another form of discourse, with its own assumptions, and that's where a reader of the book can begin to experience it as a kind of hall of mirrors, where everything is called into question, including the author's own argument. The subject of literacy, which may seem to be a simple concept, becomes far more complex than you may have ever imagined.

Fewer than 150 pages in length, the book has more packed into it than many others on similar subjects. It handles complex ideas clearly and is quite readable, with a minimum of postmodern jargon. It comes to life especially when Grimm uses the examples of actual students and tutors in her Writing Lab at Michigan Technical University in the Upper Pennisula. I strongly recommend her book to anyone looking for fresh perspectives on education and new ways of understanding literacy.

If you are involved with student writers, you must read this book! Multicultural classrooms, reluctant student writers, uncertainty of how to tutor students with their writing . . . whatever the writing-related problem you bring to the reading, Grimm will give you insight and a desire to deal with it! An great read . . . many applicable anecdotes and a fabulous afterword. If you are thinking there must be something more for teaching writing, training tutors, or supporting student writers, this is it!

This is an excellent book. The contents are not strictly confined to the harbor but it does remain the focus that history of Rye surrounds. Excellent work, well researched.

Cannot find tab for AUTHOR REVIEW, so am writing review here.
A short hour north of Boston, but a lifetime away, lies Rye Harbor, New Hampshire, on Ocean Boulevard. The coastline approach from the south along Route 1A is stunningly threaded with imposing old mansions, dangerous curves, cliffs, and dazzling ocean. The area is a precious time capsule taking one back to "olden days." Just before the sharpest curve of all, at Ragged Neck, sits Rye Harbor. We as the AUTHORS consider the book a delight because it presents the history and adventure of the spot dating from the 1600s, detailing storms, shipwrecks, the 1874 Transatlantic cable coming ashore, lurking submarines of World War II, a coastal marsh nearly destroyed with dredging material magically brought back to life, Onassis's nearly convincing the area in the early 1970s to allow a massive offshore oil terminal, foreign fleets stealing fish and gear, and recent crushing federal fishing regulations. Intertwined with the history are 120 B/W photos with stories of fishermen battling the winter ice, a explosive fire at sea nearly killing a captain and his son, one Coast Guard captain's forging off-shore a sudden bond with his rebellious teenage daughter, a world-famous giant squid expert who spent his youth as a harbor lobsterman, and another boy leaving the spot to fight in the Vietnamese war and write poetry about Rye Harbor as he planned battles overseas. The book grows and rises with the wind and waves as it urges you to explore all harbors and find that special one to love forever.

If your a fan of "Football Factory" or Football Hooliganism, this book will trasport you back to a time when you chose where you walked and what you wore very carefully. Very enjoyable.

for all those football fans across the world this book is a must read. this book exemplifies the dedication and fanaticism of the football fan!!! this book gives a first hand look into the insanely furious times of 1980's football. if you have any interest in any sports, you should read this book. this is what being a fan is all about,willing to fight anyone who disrespects you and your team. a must read

I didn't know much about the naval history of Hampton Roads until I picked up a copy of Alan Flanders's Bluejackets on the Elizabeth! He writes with the right amount of historiography-
the facts are there-but he also writes it in a very entertaining style. You literally fly along once you start and go back to the colonial era and the first development of Norfolk and Portsmouth as colonial ports. But Flanders takes you through the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War of 1845, Civil War, Spanish-American War, WWI, WWII, Cold War and even gets you to the latest war on Terrorism all within the scope of maritime lore within Hampton Roads. I really recommend this book for both the serious student and someone who wants something entertaining and fun. I learned a lot about Norfolk and Portsmouth. Bluejackets made me want to learn more and more. Charles Recter, Ph.D.

Delightfully preserved memoirs and photos of lives of medical pioneers long ago in the seacoast New Hampshire town of Portsmouth, the reader gleans a deep appreciation for the medical care we so often diss. As a nurse at the current Portsmouth Hospital, I loved reading about the roots of the hearty predecessors that made my job possible. The ledgers are fun to read with very different terminology than we now use.