An intense madness follows throughout this book without the huomour of catch 22.

I suppose a comparison to Joseph Heller's CATCH 22 isn't a completely fair one. CATCH 22 is one of the great novels of the century, a startlingly funny and original story that captures both the insanity of war, and the humanity of people stuck in the middle of it. It is a novel that is as true and relevant now as when it was written. It hasn't aged a day.

That's one of the problems with THE AARDVARK IS READY FOR WAR. It attempts to do for the Gulf War what CATCH 22 did for World War II, and to some extent, it does succeed. AARDVARK does capture the language of warfare in today's age, and it contrasts nicely against the overall shallowness of modern society. The Gulf War was a war fought via MTV and Nintendo, a war that never felt like one, a war with no personal impact for the majority of the North American population.

From this angle, AARDVARK succeeds. Its unnamed protagonist is a true product of the times, a video voyeur who views life as a more personal and intimate experience when experienced through a camera lens.

But this is not a new idea. It is already a cliche' that society's version of intimacy has devolved into a detatched cynicism. Through the overwhelming media intrusion into our lives, we have become numb to the shocks that the world still has in store for us.

By adopting this outlook, AARDVARK unfortunately falls prey to the very trap it condemns. AARDVARK, like its hero, is shallow, only fooling itself into thinking it's deep and meaningful. Unlike CATCH 22, which AARDVARK mirrors in many ways (including major plot points), AARDVARK simply doesn't have anything new to say. It carpets its unoriginality in a new form, and does it well enough. But, similar to the Gulf War itself, once it ends, it's forgotten as soon as you change the channel.

Though it is not as good as "Catch-22", this novel sparkles with sassy dialogue, military argot and flashy gadgets, becoming, in the process, an authentic account of the technologised conflict which was the Gulf War. It implies how, in the light of how life today is dominated by digital satellite technology, camcorders and computers, everyone has assumed the role of voyeur. The anonymous narrator is a recruit enlisted to fight in the "hyperral" Gulf War crisis, in which, by virtue of the hi-tech surveillance equipment employed, the perception of a thing becomes a way of "manipulating" it. The book is stuffed with borrowings from such postmodern epigones as Baudrillard, and is far more philosophically complex than one might expect, though redeemed also by its irreverent humour.

This is one of those books that is almost impossible to objectively review. The writing is elegant and evocative of an era in the South that died almost in tandem with Mr. Percy and yet I find some parts of it so arrogant and condescending that I feel myself grinding my teeth. You see, I am descended from those Mississippi hill people Percy so despised and, even after all this time, I can almost see the languid gaze and soft, drawling voice. My people came to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Flood of '27 and we build and earned what we got without the benefit of the massive slave labor that built Mr. Percy's fortune.

But this is a book review and I'll put aside old feelings to say that this is a literary gem that brings to life a way of life on which so many stereotypes of the South are built. And Will Percy is amazingly honest in his descriptions of his society. However, a society this simple and yet this complex takes more than just one book to grasp.

Thus, I also recommend "Rising Tide" by John Barry and "The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity" by James Cobb to balance your view of this time and place in history.

Bottom line: This is a wonderful, beautifully written story that is refreshingly candid with none of the defensiveness and politically correct breast beating of many of the works of southern writers of recent years.

Percy's autobiogrpahy offers excellent insights into the heart and mind of those of his class (as close to an agricultural elite as this country has ever produced. But the best of this book is offered unconsciously, by accident or indirection.
If you're only going to read one book about the South, or about this elite, read John Barry's Rising Tide, a truly brilliant and magnificently-- almost breathtakingly-- written book. There you gte all of Percy's story plus more perspective and deeper understanding-- indeed, RT may even give you a deeper understanding of Percy than his autobuiography does.
If you're going to read 2 books on the South, then read RT and Mind of the South by Cash. Cash focuses more on the mindset of the rednecks, while Percy is very much an aristocrat. To a certain extent the Percy and Cash books complement each other. In fact, to Percy the word "anglo-saxon" was an insult. He considered himself descended from the Norman conquerors of the Anglo-saxons, and saw them as serfs. That little insight comes from Rising Tide.

Noble, refined, and distinctly tragic in sentiment, this book captures the proud soul of William Percy in eloquent prose. A man, in love with a vision of what is best in the world, in love with what is best in his fellow men, in love with what is best in his home emerges from these pages. He stands defiant in defense of the vision, despite all its imperfections, confident that its beauty outshines its faults. The book stands not only as a proud memorial to a noble vision that has passed into history, but a testimony to the beauty of the human spirit that continues to animate men to strive for nobility of life and the security virtues.

The book is written by a respected US Gov Official. He has nothing to gain from writing this book but the contentment of disseminating the reality of US involvement in the middle east. Since writing the book, he has been chastised for being unpatriotic and even anti-semitic - all these reaction being confirmations of guilt. There is little subjectivity in this book - in fact it is not invigorating. Rather, Clark works through hard fact, in an appropriate level of detail, to describe just how misled the general public can be about war, and the incredible effects of sensationalist media and gov propaganda on the collective opinion. Read It.

Since the British lost their grip on the Middle-East, the U.S. have taken over. Mr. Clark very accurately describes how the role of the U.S. during the Gulf war fits into the bigger picture of how the U.S. have tried (and succeeded) for decades to remain the world's number one power. At first, I only wanted to read the book because I had some little doubts about the objectivity of the information that we received via the media. On the whole, I agreed that action was needed, and that the war against Iraq could not be avoided. Until I read this book...It was like shells fell from my eyes. I realise now that not only there was a lot more violence used against Iraq than we were told, and that the purpose of this war was not to get Iraq out of Kuwait (which was indeed the 19th province of Iraq before England "created" Kuwait out of it in 1922), but to cripple an entire nation for decades to come. But also that this war was carefully planned by the U.S. for years. Mr. Clark shows this with countless examples, that make you say to yourself: "yes, I always had doubts about that". One of them is that although the CIA was already aware for sixth months that during the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq used poison gas against the kurds in the North of Iraq, it never revealled this information to the press until after the Iran-Iraq ceasefire in 1988, 3 hours before an Iraqi delegate arrived in the U.S. and gave a press conference. This delegate was rather taken by surprise by the questions he got at this press-conference. I can hardly exagerate the need for everybody to read this book, and learn what price the Iraqi people had to pay to secure U.S. access to cheap oil...that's what bothers me most: this war was not about democracy or human rights, it was about money and power only. And by the way: all this talk about U.S. attempts to eliminate Mr. Hussein is, of course, nonsense. The U.S. still need him in the saddle because he gives the U.S. the excuse for presence in the Gulf and maintaining the economic sanctions. READ THIS BOOK!!! And see, among other things, that not only the Iraqi people were informed very subjectively by their media. We were also by ours.

An excellent book, throughly footnoted and straight forward. Don't pay any attention to the previous reviewer who comes of as some sawed off war hack who hasn't even read the book to start with.Since he doesnt agree with Clark, he resorts to character assassination of this great man..shows the mindset of "if you're not with me, you're against me." Clark does an excellent job in exposing the US for its terror campaign in the Middle East, not just the Iraq affair. If you have open mind and a consciousness and persistance for the facts, this book is for you...if not, than keep away from this book as it may cause problems to your "patriotic" brainwashed mindset.

In "The Gulf", Poyer brings back his nominal hero, Dan Lenson, the unluckiest surviving officer in the USN. Lenson went from the horrors of an Arctic cruise, the loss of his ship and full-blown inquiry in just a single book! (the superlative "The Circle"). In "The Gulf", Poyer tries to make Lenson share the focus of the novel with other intriguiging charachters - a grizzled, but tireless helicopter crew; aging UDT skin-divers; and a beautiful, but brilliant and tough female diplomat who calls Washington's shots in the Persian gulf. The notion of sending a woman - no matter how experienced - to relate American policy in the male-dominated Gulf region seems implausible, and once Poyer brings her and Lenson together, with an unconvincing spontaneity that only tears away her diplomat's shell, she's entirely spineless. The other charachters don't connect with Lenson, and Poyer doesn't bring together the story until the novel is almost over. The story revolves around American efforts to enforce stability in the region without using more than enough gunboat diplomacy to get the job done. (too much will at least bankrupt Washington, or perhaps trigger a confrontation with the Soviets). For Lenson, it means, again, facing a morally ambiguous figure in command - Ben Shaker, the commanding officer of a Destroyer sent to the bottom by an Iranian cruise missile. Unfortunately, unlike other books, the confrontation between Lenson and his obscure boss does not proceed as the result of a sustained buildup, but pops up, almost like a cruise missile itself. To compensate, Poyer doesn't bring closure to the confrontation immediately, but waits until the end of the story for a resolution. Unfortunately, closure is too pat and unsatisfying. The charachters go there separate ways when the novel comes to an end, less like one of Poyer's previous epics then some TV series based upon them. A good read, but unworthy of Poyer.

This is a fascinating look inside the essense of command. What makes a commander - someone focused on the next promotion or a warrior intent on being supreme in battle?

Captain Ben Shaker presents that paradox in The Gulf. Some of his actions are reprehensible and others are the kind this country needed the USN sailed into harm's way at Midway.

If you like a story about the gritty toughness at sea, then this is the book for you.

This is the first novel by David Poyer I have read, and I must say I enjoyed it. A great work of military fiction, the stars of this novel are those who serve on the "small ships," the destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers that often do not get into the headlines, ships that perform vital duties in war and in peace for the US Navy. While aircraft carriers (as in the Stephen Coonts novels) or submarines (as in the Tom Clancy novels) are more often the star in works of fiction, the "little guys" finally get their due in this work.

As the title suggests, the novel is set in the Persian Gulf. Published in 1990 - prior to the Gulf War - in the novel the Cold War is still the paradigm in US defense thinking, the Iran-Iraq War still rages, and the "tanker war" continues as well, the US (and British) escort of American, Kuwaiti, and other countries tankers and other merchant vessels through a deadly gamut of island bases, deadly small boats called "boghammers," aircraft, and mines. A narrow, shallow desert sea that winds its way through hostile, often warring countries, not allowing Americans basing rights for ships or aircraft, the seas too shallow for the great aircraft carriers or our mighty submarines, the task to protect one of the busiest and most important shipping lanes in the world falls clearly on the shoulder of destroyers, frigates, and minesweepers. As in real history, with the "accidental" firing of a missle on the USS Stark, the tragic downing of a commercial airline by the USS Vincennes, and most recenlty by the terrorist attack on the USS Cole, these ships are vulnerable, in the front line of what Poyer calls in the dedication "...a strange war, a half-war, shadowy and constrained...in what we call peace - though it isn't."

More accurately, the focus of the book is primarily upon Lieutenant-Commander Dan Lenson, a star of previous Poyer novels, who serves as XO on the USS Turner Van Zandt. Hoping to have command of the ship when the captain is relieved due to illness, he instead finds himself serving a new captain, Benjamin Shaker, a man who lost his last command, the USS Louis Strong, to a missile fired from an unseen enemy. Sunk with the loss of many hands, many of the crew having died from fire damage from the missile strike, Shaker is determined that history will not repeat itself. Ordering changes in how the ship is run and even ordering torn out everything flammable, down to the crew's polyester uniforms, even against Navy regulations, Lenson obeys, but is unsure what is captain's ultimate intentions are, how far he should follow him, and how his past will affect how he operates. As the USS Turner Van Zandt continues to escort new convoys to and from Kuwait, protecting them from accidental and intential attack by Iraqi and much more often Iranian ships and aircraft, will this captain stay within established procedure for dealing with these threats, in a "war" that is waged under tight political constraints, or will he go beyond? What does Lenson really know about this captain, can he trust him? What unknown dangers lie in wait for the vulnerable convoy threadings its way down the deadly Gulf?

Poyer does a great job of illustrating several other charcters in the work, from aging reservist minesweeper divers to the hard-living helicopter aircrew of the ship to the drug-addicted but (mostly, sorta) trying to do well semi-stowaway corpsman, they add depth to the novel, their fates all intertwined in the end. His vivid descriptions of life abord the ship and sailing through the tropical desert sea are excellent.

Good book, I recommend it.

If you a war gamer this work will do just fine. However, if you
are a professional soldier or military scholar you will find a
big topic of information missing. Military order of battle contains detailed information on unit commanders and key (general officer) staff. Dinackus should have provided at least the names - rank - branch of commanders down to battalion and
similar data on all Generals. The one time he looks at General Schwarzkopf in the form of a bio sketch it is very light. All in all this is not a work that should have gotten by the editor.

Order of Battle : Allied Ground Forces of Operation Desert Storm, is a pretty concise order of battle book on the larger units that were deployed during DESERT STORM. Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines and Reserve components are listed here. Additionally there are summaries regarding the conflict and the weapon systems involved. ... The price is very reasonable for this published resource and can be a point of departure for future study.

Most order of battle books merely provide a listing of units participating in a specific war or campaign. Tom Dinackus' Gulf War order of battle study goes far beyond that. He not only covers US Army and Marine Corps combat units, but addresses Allied units. For a conflict so recent it is surprisingly difficult to locate detailed information on the units involved. Even the Army's and Marine Corps' records and campaign participation lists are sometimes in error. Tom Dinackus by far provides the most comprehensive work on this subject. Another area in which this book excells is the analysis of the types of combat units deployed, which allows one to examine the build-up of Allied forces. It also provides the task organization for combat of these units, or how they were cross-attached and reassigned to different commands for the actual conduct of the 100-hour ground war. This makes it a particulary valauble research aid.

plenty of conversational language, but the cassette has to be listened to with the book to make sense (not good for the learn-in-your-car crowd). Also the WHOLE THING is done in phonetics; doesn't the author think we're smart enough to learn a new alphabet?

Some additional caveats to add to the previous reviews: though Holes' book is a respectable text that presents quite a large amount of Arabic grammar well and thoroughly, all material is in transliteration--there is NO Arabic script in this book. (The advantage is that Holes doesn't have to deal with Modern Standard Arabic spellings from which the spoken language deviates; he can also mark stress on all words, a very useful feature of the book.) Also, though each of the 20 units has an Arabic-English vocabulary, there is NO Arabic-English or English-Arabic vocabulary for the entire text at the end of the book--not even an index to the lesson in which a word is first used. (Nor is there a grammatical index.) And despite the length of the text for a Routledge Colloquial, there is only a single cassette--three or four would be better, though it would have pushed the price of the whole into the barely affordable range. All in all, worthwhile only if you have a serious interest in spoken Eastern Arabic AND have other resources for learning Arabic.

I started this book with no knowledge of Arabic whatsoever. It is set up somewhat like a class in that there are lessons and assignments (with answers in the back) but it is at your own pace. After about a month or so of studying, I really began to grasp it. I shocked myself one day when I went into a local Middle Eastern grocery store and was able to understand the conversation between a woman customer and the counter clerk. It was amazing. I disagree with the previous review putting the book down for not teaching us the alphabet. Learning another language is complicated, especially when the alphabet is COMPLETELY different from our own. We learn to speak our native language long before we know how to read or write it-that's part of learning as we grow up. I think it's a natural progression to do the same with another language. If you do want to learn to write it, an excellent companion would be The Arabic Alphabet : How to Read and Write It. But this book was very comprehensive and detailed. I definately would only get this book if you are serious about learning it, because otherwise you will be overwhelmed with information. I highly recommend it.

Okay first up this is great read and many UFO buffs will certainly be shocked by Ed and Francis Walters story of a UFO encounter that they backup with multiple photographs in the book. There are also multiple witness testimonies and the book does its very best to try and describe every event as it unfolded in their daily lives. Wonderful and riveting stuff and the long winded and often complex photo analysis really does its utmost best to show that these photographs could not have been hoaxed. Certainly a compelling argument and the fact that most of the photographic 'experts' seem to be able to conclude that the photographs are not a result of 'double exposure' is a sealing of proof that the photographs are real.

However you do not need to 'double expose' anything to achieve the same results and this is EXACTLY why their analysis is not that credible. I am sorry but the fact that no-one has ever mentioned the following, including the photo experts, really does put me in the position of total skepticism... Even better is the fact that you do not need to 'double-expose' anything or alter the original negative as the camera is capturing exactly what you are seeing. I would however see this as a problem for some complex shots like the UFO hiding behind trees or anything else in the foreground but the photographs 1 and 2 in which Ed said he had captured such a thing where not printed in my edition of the book and I can not find them anywhere else either. I would love to see these but alas have not found them. Either someone ripped them out of my copy of the book or Ed did not publish them. Anyway I want to be the first to point out that this is how a lot of the photographs could have been reproduced without direct 'image altering' or 'double-exposure'. In fact the process dates back to the 18th century where instead of using a camera the audience watched the ghost float across the room as a reflection on a sheet of glass that covered a portion of the stage.

PLEASE give me credit for this if you use it elsewhere because I worked hard to find this out. I do not doubt about the existence of UFO's and I believe that many of the shots/videos of other UFO's are real.... but alas Ed's pictures can be exactly replicated ... without interfering with the original negative or print. I also fail to understand why many of the 'experts' did not notice this. It is pretty obvious from photograph 11 that the image is semi-transparent and can be reproduced this way along with many others. Remember where you read this first and enjoy creating your own set of Gulf Breeze photographs ... but beware.. people like me will be able to spot your hoax a mile away. Have a nice day and do get the book because regardless of the above it is an enjoyable read!

This wonderful book tries to present the simple fact that alien ships really are visiting the earth. Dubunkers have no ground to stand on with this one. The debunkers themselves are relegated to the group of people who have never observed the phenomenon. For this reason they imagine that such a thing could never happen. It's difficult to imagine that level of obtuseness when there is now so much solid supporting evidence for the information and the phenomenon. Grow up. We live in a busy neighbourhood (space) and we get visitors. Many are from our own future, some are interdimensional travellers, others are ETs.They have the technology to make it work. They are tourists, anthropologists and scientists. We live in a galaxy with so much life that they couldn't help but knock at our door. Ed Walters had a real experience.

I live about 95 mles from Gulf Breeze and did not know about all of the UFO sightings until I read the book.Ed Walters is the man along with others that have brought the Gulf Breeze UFO'S to the mainstream. This book has some excellent photographs of the alien spaceships that have been seen over Gulf Breeze.This book reminds me of the X-Files books not because of UFO's but because this book keeps you on the edge of your seat.If you are in to aliens and other X-File type books get this one because it has alot of intresting pictures and diagrams illustrated by the author. Some of the information in this book was also mentioned on the X-Files TV show along time ago.

This work takes what has been the sad loss of an American fighting man, and would have the reader believe that there have been sinister government cover-ups and plotting to keep evidence of his alleged imprisoment concealed from the public.

A nice try at creating a story, but it unfortunately lacks any real evidence to support the tale.

I think all military active and veterans should read this book. Its a shame that the Navy didnt do more to look for Speicher when he went down. AS a Gulf war veteran, this book means alot to me and his name should be kept out there in the public arena until we know what happened to him and what the government failed to do for him. I thought what his wife did was shameless as well. I highly recommend this book. Yarsinske does not speculate, its based on facts, nothing but facts.

This is a masterfully crafted story of the bittersweet story of a Navy pilot lost in the first Gulf War only to become a hot-button story in the second Gulf War action. Today, the American military reports Special Forces assets inside Iraq to help locate this pilot, brought back to the living largely through the work of this author and her meticulous research of his case. The book is brilliantly written narrative nonfiction.

Yes, disappointing is the word. More of an encyclopedic book that one that provides an interesting naarative on the fish or even better, information useful for catching them (habitat, preferred bait).

Houston Chronicle writers raved about this. I disagreed. Would have returned it if it wasn't so much trouble to ship it back. Wish I'd have bought it from a local store, could have returned it right away!

Good text book for classifing any fish found in the Gulf of Mexico by families, but not a quick picture reference book for identifying your catch. ... If the pictures had been better in "Fishes of the Gulf of Mexico". I would have given it a five stars rateing.

This book is literaly THE FISH BIBLE. It is not for a novice but for fishing it is the BEST money can by. I know alot of marine biologist that swear by it. IT IS GREAT FOR TEXAS COAST.

This book is an indispensable documentation of the truth behind the concerted government and media 'processing' of the US/British Persian Gulf war crimes that left even thousands of US troops sick and damaged for life. Even more necessary now on the brink of an abyss that would wrap human progress on this planet in darkness for decades to come. You'll find that another obscene assault on Iraq could pave the way for further 'wars' on independent nations, political assassinations ad lib., witch hunts on US and other citizens in disagreement. Some US citizens may think they're paying to be safe, but may actually be paying to get smashed. When Will They Ever Learn? Everybody should read this. Ask for the new 2002 edition that includes powerful documentation on US war strategy since 9/11.

Absolutely essential for anyone interested in the persian gulf "war". Former US atty general Ramsey Clarke gives a no holds barred account of US war crimes in the Gulf. The book reads like it was written yesterday while nearly a decade of US occupation has lapsed since it was published. Really an argument for humanism framed within the murderous Persian Gulf War Clarke lays out the moral historical and legal(domestic and intl) reasons why US "participation" in the "war was wrong. The story the "media", who observed the war in press pools, will never tell you this is an ongoing human tragedy which sadly Ramsey predicts. It's not hysterical in tone just factual, describing the US rape of Iraq in the wake of the Panama invasion. Absolutely, essential reading.

Since the British lost their grip on the Middle-East, the U.S. have taken over. Mr. Clark very accurately describes how the role of the U.S. during the Gulf war fits into the bigger picture of how the U.S. have tried (and succeeded) for decades to remain the world's number one power. At first, I only wanted to read the book because I had some little doubts about the objectivity of the information that we received via the media. On the whole, I agreed that action was needed, and that the war against Iraq could not be avoided. Until I read this book...It was like shells fell from my eyes. I realise now that not only there was a lot more violence used against Iraq than we were told, and that the purpose of this war was not to get Iraq out of Kuwait (which was indeed the 19th province of Iraq before England "created" Kuwait out of it in 1922), but to cripple an entire nation for decades to come. But also that this war was carefully planned by the U.S. for years. Mr. Clark shows this with countless examples, that make you say to yourself: "yes, I always had doubts about that". One of them is that although the CIA was already aware for sixth months that during the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq used poison gas against the kurds in the North of Iraq, it never revealled this information to the press until after the Iran-Iraq ceasefire in 1988, 3 hours before an Iraqi delegate arrived in the U.S. and gave a press conference. This delegate was rather taken by surprise by the questions he got at this press-conference. I can hardly exagerate the need for everybody to read this book, and learn what price the Iraqi people had to pay to secure U.S. access to cheap oil...that's what bothers me most: this war was not about democracy or human rights, it was about money and power only. And by the way: all this talk about U.S. attempts to eliminate Mr. Hussein is, of course, nonsense. The U.S. still need him in the saddle because he gives the U.S. the excuse for presence in the Gulf and maintaining the economic sanctions. READ THIS BOOK!!! And see, among other things, that not only the Iraqi people were informed very subjectively by their media. We were also by ours.