This is an excellent biography of Gen. Davis. He was a great soldier, who managed to become an officer in the US Army in the face of Jim Crow racism. His career was held back and often endangered by this racism. Yet he never turned his back on serving his country or gave up his career in the face of so many obstacles. It is a truely inspirational story about a great American.

This treatment of F. Scott Fitzgerald's connection to the medieval period opens new territory in Fitzgerald studies and in Chaucer studies as well. With the current attention to early 20th century medievalism and its influence on such authors as Hemingway, Chopin, and Fitzgerald, this book is cutting edge.

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BACK COVER

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Master seaman, shipbuilder and nautical chronicler Charles G. Davis here charts an anecdotal, highly personal course through our rich nautical history. Written in a style both entertaining and informal through which bubbles as genuine love of sailing vessels and sea lore, American Sailing Ships evokes the very feel of salt spray and rolling decks.

In nearly 140 photographs, prints and plans (most drawn by the author, an accomplished marine architect), you'll find a first-rate cross-section of a wide range of sailing ships from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Here too is knowledgeable discussion of ship size, design, proportion, rigging details and more. Included are:

Block Islanders

Quoddy boats

Chebacco Boats

Pinkys

Fishing Schooners

Clippers

Packet Ships

Bugeyes

Oyster Luggers

Frigates

... and others

American Sailing Ships offers lively discourse on shipbuilders such as 18th century American designer Joshua Humphreys, whose frigates had no equal among the sailing men-of-war of any other nation; illuminating insights regarding crews, chains of command and life at sea; an account of how the Gloucester-built chebacco boat Fame earned the right to that name as a privateer during the War of 1812, outsailing and capturing vessels ten times its weight; and much more.

Davis's classic work is sure to intrigue sailing enthusiasts, historians, Americana buffs and model builders. American Sailing Ships, here in its first popularly priced paperback edition, promises the imaginative reader an unforgettable taste of seafaring excitement.

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Reviewers comments:

Charles Davis wrote this book in 1929. He especially loved building models. So much so, that he went to sea and sailed around Cape Horn for the fun of it, and to learn more about these vessels. Davis was a man who knew the sea, knew boats, and loved them both. His knowledge was precious and I'm grateful he passed it on to us.

I would liken this book to a modern book about fighter aircraft written today. At the time he wrote the book, the use of sailing craft for merchant purposes was passing away. The time was ripe for a book of this nature.

This book is 196 fact filled pages. Have you ever wondered how many men were on a gun crew of a frigate? What their positions and responsibilities were in battle? This book will tell you.

I was pleased with the drawings, which were excellent. They had nice detail. I was suprised that I could not find fault with any of them! The photographs of ships in the water, on the hard, and models were excellent and added perspective to the included line drawings. The book includes over 140 drawings and photographs.

Davis included useful descriptions of the deck layout, and many rigging details, weight of anchors, and information on the spars.

What I liked best were his stories about the various ships like the then famous "Black Ball" Line of packet ships, which were the first ever to sail regularly on the 1st and 16 of every month between New York and Liverpool. His descriptions of life aboard fascinating reading, written by a man knew what he was talking about relating his personal experiences. He brought the times back to life!

He also included some fun stuff like sea chanteys. "The words of each line of the song are made up by the chanteyman with no sense whatever, so long as the last word of each couplet harmonizes." says Davis. The Yo-o-o-o-o being drawled out with the "Ho" sharp and crisp.

Solo: Oh the cook he's mixing up his bread!

Chorus: Yo-o-o-o-o-ho, heave the man down!

Solo: An when you it eat it yo'll drop dead!

Chorus: Yo-o-o-o-o-ho, heave the man down!

Solo: Oh the old man's a going for to shoot the sun.

Chorus: Yo-o-o-o-o-ho, heave the man down!

Solo: Ay' this here old topsail it must weigh a ton.

Chorus: Yo-o-o-o-o-ho, heave the man down!

I think anyone would enjoy this book. It has details for the model builder, lots of great pictures, and fun stories for everyone.

If you have ever sailed or wanted to sail on a ship rigged vessel. You owe it to yourself to buy this book. It is one of a handfull of books on the subject with really useful information.

Smooth Sailing!

Bart Senior

Every language learner knows what it feels like to learn thousands of foreign words and phrases for long years only to be incapable to understand what a native speaker is saying in the end. Mostly it results from the changes that take place when words are put together and their pronunciation become quite different from what is learned in a class, when they are pronounced one at a time. This is the only book I have met that shows it clearly, wasting no time with "unnatural" English and guiding you through the strange phonetics of the ordinary speaker.

In this book we can search the more interesting topics on ammonoid paleobiology, which are treated in a deep form. The quality of the papers is without doubt one of the most succesfull books. I want to send my best greetings to the editosr and authors

Ancient Monuments (more familiarly known as "Squire and Davis") is the undisputed primary reference source on Indian mounds in the eastern US till the mid-1800s. While there were a few others (such as Caleb Atwater's book), Squire and Davis offers the grandest illustrations of what remained of the unbelievable civilizations that inhabited this continent. Even as they published in 1848, hundreds of mounds were being plowed into oblivion; so few are still extant that theirs is the only guide to what was lost. The text is enjoyable on many levels, and can be forgiven for any lapses of scientific accuracy. They trekked over Ohio at a time when we weren't even sure who made the mounds, so everything they recorded is gold. The engineering prowess, the sheer magnificence and scale of some of the works, is astounding.

I spent the better part of a couple of years working with a sharp entreprenuer. He continuously sabotaged his efforts to grow the business because of his inability to control his anger. His displays of anger were nothing short of explosive - vile language, throwing objects, turning beat red and stiffening like a board. The staff tension level rose considerably whenever he came into the office, which fortunately was not often. It was always hard to tell when he would blow but money was always a factor.

What he never realized was his displays of anger only resulted in his staff being less productive. They were afraid to bring problems to his attention while they were still fixable. A great deal of time was spent trying to hide things from him. This staff worked very hard to do things right but his rigidity and insistance on doing things the same way as he had always done made it difficult in a rapidly changing industry.

This book gave me a good understanding for what was going on. His explosions were mostly due to his own attributions for the intentions of his staff. His belief that people were trying to cheat him and that they were actively resisting his control only fueled his anger. In the end I was able to help him calm down to some extent. Years with good therapist and stronger motivation may have helped even more. The staff though was a little more receptive to understanding the reasons behind his anger. It may not have made it more tolerable but it did help them learn to hit the triggers a little less often.

Dennis R. Hidalgo

Thomas Bender, ed. The Antislavery Debate

What can a historian do when there is not enough empirical evidence to produce a quantitative and comprehensively thesis for a social historical problem that defies psychological scrutiny? David Brion Davis opted for an answer that satisfies cynic assumptions with circumstantial evidences. Davis argues that the strength of abolitionism in early industrial Britain derived from its susceptibility to the needs of the dominant political elite. It was particularly influenced by this new bourgeoisie capitalist class' modes of industrial discipline. Antislavery main, and unconscious, purpose was to desensitize English society to the newer forms of oppression evident in the increasing wage labor. His context of conceptual reference appears to flow from Marxism and Freudian thought: the rise of an oppressing bourgeoisie driven by its hidden and selfish Id. To Thomas Haskell this idea of unconscious "self-deception" and motivation by class interests is not convincing. For him, it is impossible for the historian to bring concrete evidence to bear, which will distinguish between unconscious intention and unintended consequences. Following what appears to be a more objective goal, Haskell intends to draw a straighter line between the rise of the market economy and the rise of the abolitionist movement in 1750s. In doing so he moves from a quasi-Freudian historical analysis to an Ericsonian: that of a cognitive change of behavior. For Haskell capitalist and market expansion broaden social perception that in turn promoted moral responsibility. The most powerful catalyst in this process of change was the "intensification of market discipline, and the penetration of that discipline into spheres of life previously untouched by it." To this Davis decries Haskell approach for being more economic deterministic than a rationalistic. To this, John Ashworth adds that Haskell is not able to follow up the empirical inclinations of his Davis' critic since he does not supply enough evidence to support his argument. Indeed, his only example of moral switch to Antislavery is the Quaker John Woolman. Without knowing Haskell is caught in one of the most frustrating traps of an empirical driven discipline. His response is that he is not looking for a comprehensive societal change but for a mechanism that might have caused the change. The problems this approach is the usefulness of such "found" mechanism if there is no proof that the mechanism was indeed used sufficiently as to merit its historical validity. Nevertheless, Haskell bottom line is his desire to demonstrate that abolitionists rationally attached the worst evil of their times. Davis and Ashworth's response to Haskell's premise is that wage labor could have been also attacked and was not. Ashworth spend most of his time criticizing Haskell and throwing some bits toward Davis. Yet he is also able to provide an interesting proposition. First, he asserts Davis' starting point as the place to launch the investigation: the emergence of a dominant class. This would lead us to the disregarding of wage labor abuses and protected interests. But instead of moving completely toward Davis, he detours into the cultural notion of family and its effect on productivity. The simple conclusion, thus, is that since slavery, through its detrimental effect on family and society, slowed the pace of economic advance, "it is not surprising that to more people than ever before it seemed an unmitigated evil." Haskell response to this is that these family values could have been in existence long before the abolitionist movement, thus, rendering useless in the debate. Ashworth's last answer is that the production ethos has a long family history, it was the innovation brought by master-wage earner relationship that transformed the view of family into a more entrepreneurial project. Clearly this debate is provocative, but narrowly conceived, as is mainly centered around Marxist concepts of history, evasive evidences and a revival of neo-Whiggists approaches. Very little criticism could be employed against the authors since they exhausted most of it that could be applicable to their line of argument. However, an also important critique to a combine look at the arguments presented may be the dearth of sociological and cultural approaches that may enhance the historical view that as historians we are trying to discover.

Murray S. Davis is a genius. Like Nietzsche, he says in ten sentences what is usually said, or not said, in ten books. He makes you think, gives you much to think about, which is worth so much more than the price of this book. See also his "Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology", the most profound book on sex I have ever seen. I reviewed that one here also a few years ago (no longer using that e-mail address).

i absolutley loved this.... if you are into greek phlosophy this is a must have! it explores al different kinds of points of views every one of them strong. i really recomend this book!