This CD set is a compilation of articles and photos from the Internet and military web sites during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The web pages have been distilled into PDF documents. Though the idea is good in concept, and the CD is packed with information, it's difficult to navigate for three reasons: 1-) Links to the internet may or may not work and it's not clear which ones will work, 2-) there's just no logic to the organization or lack thereof, and 3-) most CDs offering PDF file format at least setup bookmarks and indexes for each of the documents. Some of the documents are thousands of pages long, but there is no index. So, it's tough to get through. I was disappointed that the editor/creator did not take the time to burn the larger image files to archive with the docs; many of the images are just thumbnails. If you're interested in tons of information you have to sift through, this is it. If you want to use it as a research tool, the time you spend looking for specific information will undoubtedly discourage you.

Well, despite the fact is quite minimally researched and cutely balanced, it is also wrong in the title. Whatever the newly rich petroleum states might want to say, the name of the body of water sorrounded from the south by the Arabian Penninsula, from the north by Iran, and from the west by the Strait of Hormuc is and has always been the PERSIAN Gulf. The Romans called it Sinus Persicus, and all around the world, it is known by that name, the Persian Gulf. It is NOT an ethnic case, it does not have to do with political domination (although that's what Arab States want). It is just A name!

Personal accounts are what history is based on. Desert Voices attempts to do just that - provide readers with the stories of those who served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. As such, it makes for a useful history, as all branches of the service (even the Coast Guard) are represented, each providing a different persepctive on the war, but not an interesting read by any stretch of the imagination.

I am a Gulf War veteran, and many of the tales are similar to what I experienced. What frustrated me, however, was the lack of techincal understanding the author demonstrates of military abbreviations and slang - surprising, as he was a LtCdr in the US Navy. For example, in the glossary he explains "FDC" as "Fire Detection Center" - when in fact it is the "Fire DIRECTION Center" of an artillery battery. Similar mistakes are made when a Marine is quoted saying "FDC", where LaBarge has transcribed it "FTC", defined as "Fleet Training Center" - of which there is none. The book was rife with these errors.

Written to profit from the hype following the ending of hostilites, the book really seems hastily put together. It was hardly riviting (more "ho hum" reading, although that may be more the result of personal experience than anything else) and in the end, was not that good of a book. While I may be nit-picking, I feel that the author has a responsibility to be informed and accurate with the material before the book goes to print.

Mueller calls the Kuwait War "the mother of all polling events," and backs up this contention with hundreds of surveys on the subject. These telephone polls have their limitations, generated as they were for immediate media use, not systematic academic inquiry. Still, their sheer profusion provides insights not usually possible.

Mueller's main conclusion is that "The opinion dynamic that probably helped Bush most was a growing fatalism about the war." The sense of inevitability he says, fueled the feeling that the fighting might as well be gotten over with. Trouble is, the author displays such immaturity (sarcastically using such phrases "our glorious military," "our gallant, and presumably virginal, men and women in the service") that most readers will find themselves unsure how much to trust his judgment. Indeed, Mueller's hostility to the American war effort significantly detracts from the authority of his conclusions.

Nearly every polling organization in the United States contributed to the 289 tables at the back of the book. Having them all in one place permits the reader completely to bypass Mueller's interpretations and ponder the data for himself. One fascinating poll shows that at the exact end of the war, only 38 percent of Americans thought the war was not a victory if Saddam Husayn remained in power; and that this figure steadily increased to 69 percent one and a half years later. This shift in attitudes goes far to explain why the war, far from helping George Bush's reelection effort, probably ended up hurting it.

Middle East Quarterly, September 1994

Summed up in one word, disappointed. I never dreamed that the pictures in this book would be in black and white. So much for fish identification when snorkeling, which is why I bought this book. If you want this book for Identification purposes, forget about it. However, if you don't mind seeing page after page of these beautiful fishes in black and white (What is the point?) then this book is for you.

Don't set aside too much for this one. Calling this report a book is a bit generous, more like a bound two part magazine article. I wrote longer papers in college. With that rant out of the way what about the "book". Lacking would sum it up in one word. Basically the level of detail here would be two good chapters in a larger book, there just was not enough meat. The authors give a high level overview of Special Forces operations in two similar missions in the Vietnam and Gulf War. Really though it covered only one operation from each war. In Vietnam it covered operations on locating transport trucks on the Ho Chi Min trail and in the Gulf War it covered the scud hunt in the desert.

It is not so much that the author did not bite off enough of a subject to write a decent book, but what he did produce was far two high to be anything other than an overview. Again it seamed like this was the opening chapters to a more detailed book on the subjects. Not to be too negative, the author did have a good writing style that was easy to read. It is just that that is the only positive I can come up with. Overall I was very disappointed and would not recommend this book.

This has got to be one of the worst, ostensibly "serious" history books I have ever read. Like the previous reviewer, I noticed that the author had misplaced Port Hudson. And like the previous reviewer I read on. In my case it was to find out what else was wrong. Why? Because there was so much wrong, in so many ways, that for awhile it was enjoyable to simply note the mistakes. Consider the proof reading. On page 54, the minimum number of Union troops required to take and hold New Orleans is listed as 2,000 men in one paragraph, and 20,000 in the next. And on the same page, the minimum acceptable draft of ships in the plan for the attack on New Orleans is listed at 18 inches! (Common sense and descriptions of the Union ships that actually took part make clear that this number must have been 18 feet.)

Consider also, dead ends in the narrative. On page 39 we are informed that the Confederate submarine "Henley" "was tested twice, both times ending in disaster for the vessel and her crew." The author then describes one of these disasters, and leaves it completely up to the reader to guess what the other disaster might have been. On page 47 on which we are informed that the Confederate warship under the command of Raphael Semmes burned a particular Union merchant ship, "setting off bitter repercussions for him." What these repercussions were, the author never reveals.

Consider also, consistency. Or more correctly, lack of consistency. On page 60 the author reports that the danger posed by the planned Union attack on New Orleans "was clear to most [citizens of the city]." But on page 86 he tells us that the forts guarding the approach to the city were thought "impregnable by confident New Orleans citizens and military men."

So, what do I recommend? Well, a good history of the successful Union attack on New Orleans is "The Night the War was Lost" by Charles L. Dufour. As for the other famous and successful naval attack by the Union navy on a Southern seaport on the Gulf of Mexico, the attack on Mobile, I would suggest trying "Damn the Torpedoes: The Story of America's First Admiral, David Glasgow Farragut," by Christopher Martin. Still, if you are the kind of person who occasionally enjoys really bad books, you might check "Gunfire Around the Gulf" out of the library some day. Just for fun that is.

I was delighted when I discovered this book - the naval side of the Civil War has been often ignored or treated as a sideshow, when a compelling case could be made that the blockade plus the gradual reduction of the Confederacy's seaports was decisive. One could even argue that barring total catastrophe on the ground or massive foreign intervention on behalf of the Confederacy, the Union dominance of the seas made eventual victory inevitable.

This book falls far short, sadly. It is spoiled by glaring inconsistencies and sheer wrong information. Ship tonnages and dimensions are reported inconsistently - I suspect that the author is unaware of the different definitions of tonnage, and mixes up displacement and measurement figure. Various drafts and depths are reported - and in the coastal and riverine environment of the naval war in the Gulf, ships' drafts were perhaps the single most important factor in operations. Numbers and calibers of ships' armaments are wrongly reported - the author appears to have no understanding of the differences between shell and shot, rifles and smoothbores, broadside and pivot mountings (CSS Sumter did not carry a "1 inch rifle," and such a ludicrous remark should never had made it past the intital proofs). Personalities' ranks are given inconsistently, often we encounter a character early on identified by the rank he held later in the war.

Minor technical details? Most such details determined the tactics used and operations planned. Further, such sloppiness casts doubt on the integrity of the author's research and his editor's attention to his job.

There are problems other than the technical ones noted above. The author claims that the US Navy destroyed the maxim that wooden ships could not successfully engage shore fortifications. The British and French had already demonstrated the falsity of that belief during the Crimean War, in both the Baltic and the Black Seas. The author claims that Porter's mortar fleet was a major factor in the assault on New Orleans, when in fact they were irrelevant to the Union success.

All in all, a very disappointing performance in writing history. This book does little to advance its stated intent.

Sure this book has a few mistakes but the author more than makes up for it by his enthusiasm for the subject. I found this to be a very entertaining few hours of reading about a little known piece of the civil war. Don't let the previous reviewers poor comments deter you this is a worthy addition to civil war naval history

I can honestly say this is the most boring and pointless book I have ever read.

It depens on what person you are to enjoy it or not. It was not my kind of book, yet I enjoyed the cat, Ringo. I know some people enjoyed it.

And there aren't enough of them to go around.

At least that's what Andrew Hacker suggests in his depressing new book "Mismatch," a glib, didactic book that uses sometimes dubious methodology to ratify women's worst fears about dating and marriage and the opposite sex.

To buttress his conclusions Mr. Hacker - a professor of political science at Queens College in New York - flings around a huge number of statistics, many of them taken from government reports like the census. The problem is he tends to mix up solid facts and figures with more qualified findings, focuses almost exclusively on those statistics that back up his thesis, presents the familiar or obvious with an air of revelatory zeal and glosses everything with speculative hyperbole - a technique he lamely defends by arguing that "hyperbole can serve a purpose: to sharpen our understanding of the murky world in which we live."

To make matters worse, "Mismatch" is liberally seasoned with knee-jerk editorializing on Mr. Hacker's part. He makes gross generalizations about men and women ("in most marriages, he loves her less than she does him"); asks stupid questions ("to what extent," he wonders, is brutality "endemic to men"?); and makes silly assumptions ("let's imagine that all the women who favor greater curbs on guns and less reliance on missiles would prefer to find a man who shares their views").

There are questionable assertions in this book - "few straight men haven't married at least once by the time they reach their 40's" - and even more dubious theories: at one point the author suggests that "a growing unwillingness by white men to become or remain resident fathers to the children they have sired" might be connected with the mainstream popularity of rap and hip-hop music and movies like "Shaft" that "glamorized black potency" and a laissez-faire attitude toward family life.

Echoing the title of his earlier book "Two Nations", on bitter and deeply entrenched white-black racial divide, Mr. Hacker concludes that men and women can be viewed as "two nations," that there is "an emerging mismatch between the sexes" and "not enough men who satisfy the expectations that modern women have for dates and mates."

To use Mr. Hacker's technique "the average single woman" could have told you the same thing without brandishing a single statistic or citing a single survey.

I wanted to like this book, but alas I cannot fully recommend it.

But first, I think much of the criticism of this book has been unfair. The author clearly states in the preface, that he is not presenting material that is completely new. He is merely using the latest statistics to paint a clearer picture of the "conventional wisdom" on this topic. Also by the very nature of the topic he is forced to speculate and make gross generalizations. He readily admits that people are going to disagree and argue with him. So most of the objections that have appeared in most reviews (in New York Times and Salon magazine for example) are directly addressed in the preface.

And yes he does present a lot of statistics. Did you know that there were more female embezzlers than male embezzlers in 2001? Or that 60% of divorces were initiated by women (over the objections of the husbands)? Through these and other statistics you get a clear sense that gender roles have shifted so much that we may be entering an era where marriage becomes less and less the norm, and that this is primarily because of the changing status of women.

And Hacker places ALL the blame for this on "inadequate men who are not meeting women's needs" (this is a paraphrase). Surprisingly enough given the bad reviews this book received from women, Hacker is thoroughly PC in his diagnosis of the problem. Men are not measuring up. As a male I must say I was a bit irritated by this one-sided analysis. He never seemed to even consider that there might be more to it than that, or maybe that women might have to change their expectations of marrying a man who make more money than them given the changed social circumstances.

So why didn't I like this book?

There is too much shallow analysis. Especially in the later chapters, it felt like he was hanging a lot of theory on too few facts. He brings out some fact, and then he goes off on some totally unrelated tangent that is not very convincing. I know he warned about this in the preface, but he should have just cut out those chapters that he didn't have anything to say about.

I think this book is worth a read if you are interested in the latest statistics, but if you want some insightful analysis on the changing nature of gender roles in modern society then this is probably not the book for you.