This offering by Barrett Tilllman is one of the more readable accounts of WWII naval aviation. Tillman goes into enough depth to give the reader an appreciation for the technology and engineering involved in the F4U Corsair, but rightly devotes most of the book to the stories of the aviators who flew the "Ensign Eliminator" in combat. Anecdotes related to the author by veteran Corsair drivers, added to Tillman's own knowledge and experience in flying WWII aircraft lend authenticity to the work. Very well researched, this book is a valuable resource for the student of WWII or aviation,but its style also recomends it to the casual reader.

Though not the book I would recommend to my girlfriend, I read it in one session from front to cover. Is it because I was born too late to fly this plane myself? The nice thing for me about this book is that I got the feeling that it took me back in time and let me experience wat it was like -or at least what I thought it would be like-. There are enough photographs to prevent you from drowning in text and evere aspect of the plane gets covered, with the exception of what it was to maintain a Corsair airworthy for its groundcrews.
This book was published in the States by the United States Naval Institute and in Britain by PSL (Patrick Stepens Limited)

Born in 1943, I spent my youth building balsa Corsairs (and Mustangs, Hellcats, Warhawks, Spitfires and Hurricanes) covered with silkspan, and reading of their exploits in WWII and Korea. There must be millions of us Fifty- and Sixty-somethings in America still feeling we were born too late to have a chance to fly the great fighters of WWII. For us, Tillman is a timely author. We buy and read his well-told histories with feelings of respect for the designers, builders, test pilots, pilots and crews who made that great age of the piston-powered warbirds possible.

Avoiding the dreary repetitiveness of some such books, which seem bound to chronicle every squadron's every mission, Tillman's Corsair is an exceptionally good example of its breed. It combines valuable historical detail with first-hand accounts of the plane and its pilots in action.

Laser sailing for the 1990's e' un libro che non puo' mancare nella biblioteca di ogni laserista. Riporta tanti suggerimenti (anche se a volte datati) utilissimi nell setting-up del rig della propria barca. Inoltre, le interviste nella seconda parte del libro, a campioni di Laser, e' perfetta per confrontare i propri metodi e le proprie idee sulla barca. Di valido ausilio al testo le fotografie, alcune delle quali molto spettacolari. Il dettaglio e' buono, tale che si puo' copiare il contenuto. Lo stile di scrittura e' fresco, ma la presenza di svariati termini tecnici, rende spinosa la lettura ai principianti. Un libro da non perdere.

My son Ricardo, 14, and I have started sailing in February 1999 and needed a book to help started, as true beginners we are. We are very happy with our choice. The information provided allows us to take better advantage of the conversations with more experienced sailors. It helped us feel confident enough to enter two regattas already.

There is not a single chapter that we have not found worthwhile, but the chapter on racing is very exciting, as are the interviews at the end of the book, and the information on rigging technique. Since we are native speakers of Portuguese, we had to lookup the dictionary often, and came out with an English-Portuguese vocabulary of the main nautical words found in the book that we'll be pleased to share with anyone interested. Just send a message by e-mail.

Great book for beginning and expert sailors alike. Covers care, rigging, transportation and more. A must have for any Laser sailor.

Barrett Tillman has written another great avaition book. He is a very capable and reliable author. This book really makes the carrier war come alive for me - the great build-up of US power that was eventually to swamp the Japanese empire in the Pacific. I am always left wanting more - so that must be a good sign!

An excellent reference work - well worth the price. This author knows his stuff and makes it come alive ! The Hellcat Aces is fascinating history and a great book for air enthusiasts or modelers !

If you don't know about the Osprey "Aces" series, it is a set of paperback books describing in great (and sometimes arduous) detail just about every sortie and every aviator who ever shot down another in the title aircraft. Lots of little B&W photos in the margins, these books aren't for everyone. In fact, when I picked up my first few, they went unread for many months.

Then, when I tired of the picture books with nothing to say and the "history" mags with their usually-uninspired writing and lack of good stories, and after I had read the same specs and summaries over and over... I re-discovered Osprey! Osprey is the motherlode... where you finally get to when your thirst for the details of the WW-II airwar can no longer be sated by the coffee-table glossies (exception: anything from the late Jeff Ethell) and the $5.00 mags from Borders.

And the Wildcat is a great place to start. This was the first type to see sustained action after Pearl Harbor, mostly in the Pacific, where it performed for literally all of the war.

Tillman has done some excellent research to find often first-hand information on every Wildcat ace and near ace of WW-II. He uses a chronological approach within the major Wildcat deployments: first USN/MC Pacific, then USN Europe and finally British Fleet Air Arm (FAA), with due relevance given each.

Beginning on Dec 7, 1941, we see the newly-deployed Wildcat get its sea legs, through Wake Is., Midway, Guadalcanal... We see all of the major campaigns, (good and bad but mostly focusing on the positive) culminating in VJ day and the poor guy who lost it strafing a Japanese carrier deck 3 hrs before the surrender; then we see how the Wildcats were used in the ETO - knocking out some ships up in Norway, or U-boats in the north Atlantic; and finally the Brits and their "Martlet", from pre-Pearl Harbor to their General Motors-made Martlet Mk VIs near the end of the war(again), when the Wildcat is relegated to the important but ignominious task of "forward observing" for Iwo and Japan-pounding naval artillery... and still knocking bogies out of the sky to and fro the combat area.

However with these Ospreys, the only vantage point is from a single type of aircraft - which you might find peculiar... some would say artificial. You certainly don't get the big picture of the war unless you read the other Ospreys of the major fighting types: Corsair and Hellcat for the Pacific; Mustang, Lightning and Thunderbolt for Europe. But this single aircraft look gives you one important perspective: that of the war as seen by these pilots and their support crew.

And taken with its brethren, you can get the big picture... of the air war anyway, and all the great reading you could want from this series - and I found Tillman's Wildcat issue is right up there with a story as important and interesting as the plane itself. Definately worth 4 stars.

Tillman does his usual superb job. He knows more about naval aviation history than anyone. I bought the book as a reference, but anyone will find it easily readable as well as complete. Superb illustrations as well.

One would think that among three authors at least someone would do some basic editing; fun can be had during a read finding a page that does NOT include a typo, spelling, grammatical, or typesetting error of some sort (even in the major headings you notice things like "6.5 Windows 200[sic] Boot Disks"). Many of the included figures have been moved around but not renumbered in the text itself. In other areas one finds notations like "AUTHOR: SUPPLY FIGURE" apparently from the publisher left in the final print. Perhaps somehow I got a pre-print copy and subsequent ones have been cleaned up.

More disturbing, however, were a number of inconsistencies and inaccuracies between the authors among the various chapters, particularly with regards to descriptions of WINS name resolution with the LMHOSTS file, and use of private (RFC1597) and automatic addressing (169.254/16) in DHCP. While not particularly critical for setup and operation, it's good to have a proper understanding for these services when debugging problems.

Coverage of Active Directory is broad, through much of the network service specifics are given a hand-wave following a cursory, but decent TCP/IP introduction (such as actually setting up redundant DHCP and DNS servers).

Nevertheless, you get the message despite the glaring distractions and without alot of the typical fluff found in other boots. An OK book for a new admin, but anyone with any background (Windows or UNIX for that matter) might prefer something a bit deeper where it counts.

I would not feel comfortable recommending this book to others, except to give away my copy.

-eric

I was some what fimiliar with Win2k before reading this book. Im only about a third of the way through it and I have learned alot. Very well written and easy to follow.

As a NT network administrator who hasn't had a lot of time to look at Windows 2000, I really liked the straightforward style of this book. The authors obviously have real-world experience, and it showed in their examples and explanations. Great book, and one I will keep for a long time!

11/21/99 - Montaigne was prompted to write his great work by the death of his best friend, the only man with whom he felt he could truly commune. Indeed, the death of someone close is a great prompter of memoirs as a way of filling the silence. ''In the Failing Light'' by David Tillman (Creative Arts Book Company, $16.95, paperback) is a husband's memoir of his wife's battle with metastatic breast cancer, diagnosed at an advanced stage when their only child was an infant. Though expected to die within months, she in fact survived for more than six years.

Tillman's memoir of this time is filled with justifiable outrage at a few high-handed doctors, a ruthlessly close-fisted insurance company, and a couple of other officious bodies. But for all this, the book is a sweet and melancholy tale, bracingly lacking in self-pity. Tillman invests the life that goes on around the suffering family with that poignancy that ordinary activity acquires when ordinariness is gone forever. Waiting in a hospital for his wife to emerge from an operation, he observes the cleaning staff: ''The women, their mops abandoned by the doorway, spoke Russian amongst themselves while the little Puerto Rican man stood silent, leaning on his broom, smiling to himself as he watched their large rumps.'' It is Tillman's mixing of humor and sadness that elevates his memoir above the pedestrian.

A beautifully told memoir by a husband who learns on his third wedding anniversary that his wife has advanced breast cancer. Doctors give her just months to live, which stretches to seven years. She's able to watch her only child grow up and balances dance recitals and PTA meetings with one therapy after another, including bone marrow harvesting. While she manages the disease, her husband manages the "zoo" of the medical system: the callous doctors and twisted logic of insurance companies. Through it all, his mantra becomes "you'll live to be 100," while his wife accepts that she will not. Especially good for any couple struggling with terminal cancer.

I was privileged to know David Tillman and to briefly meet his wife Minda as he was writing this book about her seven year battle to survive breast cancer. The story is incredibly moving, delivering all of an almost old fashioned love that flourished under the heavy burden of dying. There is humor, and outrage, and love that survived the battle with cancer--and survives in this book even when the battle is lost. The previous reviewer, a nameless entity "from Ohio", is wrong, and is obviously a person who knows Mr. Tillman and his journey to write a story that bares that most vulnerable part in all of us; that part that holds our deepest loves and fears we rarely let out to see the light of day, that so few of us could hope to be put in such loving and tender words. It is clearly a perversion of one's deepest humanity that someone hiding behind anonomity could use such a poignant moment in the live of any other to express his own jealousy and anger. And sad that another could use the brillant forum provided by Amazon.com for such a nasty and personal vendetta.

At its most basic, Lynn Tillman's "Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeanette Watson" is an oral history of the life cycle of one independent bookstore, in this case Books and Co. in New York. Spanning the mid-'70s to late '90s, the book is a collection of reminscences by booksellers, writers, and patrons of the bookstore intercut with the "memoir" of the store's owner, Jeannette Watson. (In a strange twist, the memoir is written by author Lynn Tillman from interviews held with Ms. Watson, which is a little jarring. Maybe Ms. Watson had an aversion to taking credit for a ghost writer.)

The book chronicles years that marked a decline in independent bookstores around the country. It is fanciful and nostalgic -- anyone who has ever worked in either publishing or a bookstore will appreciate its accuracy and the affectionate tone. It is also full of suggestions for lesser known literary reads; a nice tear out list of 50 of the store's lesser known finds is found at the book's end.

I enjoyed the book without loving it. I'm sure many book lovers will find it a worthy escape from the usual.

As a follower of "bookstore biographies," I felt compelled to read Lynne Tillman's history of Books & Co. and its founder/owner Jeannette Watson. Tillman paints a singular portrait in that she allows us to see the bookstore through the eyes of so many different people. The booksellers, publishers, customers, writers and even those who were involved in the struggle that led to its demise all get their chance to state their case through the use of extensive quotations. There also emerges an interesting portrait of Jeanette Watson, the driving force behind Books & Co. - an enthusiastic bookseller with a few off-beat interests. Unfortunately, while some books of this genre manage to attract a wider audience than one would expect, I suspect that by being so specialized this will be of most interest to bookstore devotees. Another problem was the lack of any sort of division of the text into chapters - even some sort of chronological headings would have helped in this regard. I also found the voice in which it was written somewhat jarring as Lynne Tillman is given credit as author but writes the entire book in Watson's voice - as if it is a first person account. Maybe I'm being too picky, but I found that a little distracting. Still an interesting read for those interested in the day to day world of bookselling.

Bookstore is the story of a woman, Jeannette Watson, who made her dream come true by opening her own bookstore, Books & Co., in New York City in 1978 and kept it alive through thick and thin for 20 years. The economics of the business and a nasty landlord finally drove it out of business, but for its 20 years it was a haven for writers, readers and lovers of literature. With an introduction by customer Woody Allen, Bookstore is filled with stories told in the first person by the people who read there and the people who bought there. It is a poignant and sad story that is ultimately a triumph of one woman and her dream over the crass commerce that is bookselling today. Books & Company lives on in this fantastic volume.

Obvious agenda here by a shallow author looking to capitalize on a recently re-elevated subject. The entire book fails to make any positive remarks about the most popular and elected politician in the history of the state of South Carolina. Most of the research by this "author" is conveniently taken from anti-Tillman press while bypassing all of the many contributions to the state and to the U.S. Senate. Tillman was honored and revelled by many fellow U.S. Senators from opposing parties (and from Northern States). He established Clemson University, Winthrop College and the Charleston Naval Shipyard. There were two U.S. Navy Ships named after him. None of these accomplishments and honors are worthy of mention by this spin artist. He conveniently chose to omit, and obviously failed to research, Tillman's admirable private and personal life as it would destroy the credibility of the subject and agenda.

Kantrowitz fails miserably in the area of accurate and balanced historical journalism. The slant is conspicuous and offensive and breaks the golden rule of interpreting sources and historic events in the context of the times they were written.

Don't waste your time or money.

Professor Kantrowitz, a professional historian, has written a book that is revealing of the man and the times but too long and detailed for the nonprofessional reader of history. He has mined old newspapers from South Carolina and other documents energetically--and it would appear that every one of his index cards, so to speak, has been carried over into the text. Consequently, there is more detail than this reader needed or could possibly absorb. This failing is compounded by the author's inadequate treatment of Tillman's life. Milestone personal and family events are mentioned in a sentence, with no indication that the author is interested in Tillman the person--although, to his credit, he does on several occasions remind us that Tillman was devoted to his wife and wrote her loving, and playful, letters. But Tillman's relations with his children are not covered adequately. Nor do we learn much about his nonpolitical relationships with friends, relatives and neighbors. In other words, Professor Kantrowitz has scanted the biographical aspects of his book in favor of doctrinal analsyis. He has given his readers too many excerpts from Tillman's speeches, letters and interviews--primarily on how he felt about the place of Negroes in a white-dominated society. Kantrowitz shows that Tillman took a hostile view towards Negroes, as African Americans were called (and worse) in the 19th Century, and yet he and other farmers needed them as low-wage laborers. His racism and support of violence, part of his calculated appeal to white "producers," are well established early on. But the point is made over and over. Tip to readers: Kantrowitz, a disciplined writer in some respects, introduces paragraphs with topic sentences. Very often the supporting detail that follows can be skimmed or skipped because the general point already has been made.

The reader from Washington says the book is too long, but he wants more personal detail! How would that happen? Fact is, for a major figure in American political history, Tillman has found biographer whose economy of language is commendable; Kantrowitz only uses 309 pages to do a magnificent job of storytelling and analysis. And it is a great read, especially given the deep and subtle insights that Kantrowitz squeezes from this Dixie demogogue's pernicious but important career. And he does so without turning Tillman into a demon, but rather by revealing that the Senator was not so much a tribute but a trickster of the people, and far from being a populist, served the richest and most powerful of his constituents as he poured salt into the worst of the nation's wounds--the scar of white supremacy. This book is eloquent and profound, and could scarely have been better crafted.

If you want a book to help you help you understand how to sail a laser, this isn't it!

As well as being very dated (it seems all the photos were taken in the 70's) subjects as vital as tacking is explained in four bullet points, with no photos.

After sailing other dinghies for a couple of years, I started sailing Lasers this summer, and picked this book to improve my technique. The book's guidance definitely improved my abilities and helped me to tame this fantastic boat, which I sail almost exclusively now. While acknowledging the benefits of the book, the authors should address the uneven quality of the diagrams and their relation to the text. In fact, after four editions it is high time for a redesign of the graphics.

For example, a basic skill for tacking and jibing is a "behind-the-back" maneuver that would best be explained with a series of pictures. There are several examples of this throughout the book, and when there is a relevant diagram or picture, the quality varies.

While I hope the authors address this criticism, there is nevertheless a wealth of information and advice that can be gleaned, espcially if one has a reasonably vivid imagination. I rate this book a worthwhile buy, especially because of the dearth of books on the Laser.

I am new into Laser sailing but not sailing in general. This book is great! It skips all the begginer stuff and dives right into the good stuff. This book explains it all. This book even has a large section of interviews with top laser sailers. They talk about the in's and out's of high performance laser sailing. This book is a must buy if you want to sail fast and have more fun with your laser!

I have purchased three other Tillman books & they all follow similar format. Tiny bit of detail regarding history & development, a lot of what pilot shot down how many enemy planes on what day. Gives a good flavor for the heroism & valour, the courage of these vets, but it does get dry & redundant after awhile. Few photos, all black & white.

In summary, a good book, nice to have on the bookshelf, but not one you'll be re-reading over and over...unless, of course you are tired of counting sheep...

As a major war history buff, this book was NOT by any stretch of the imagination an authoritative book detailing the exploits of the Hellcat.

The main problem with this book is that the Hellcat was involved in so many engagements in the Pacific and elsewheres during World War II that it is simply not possible to write a decent book about it in only 265 pages. And Tillman/McCampbell did not write a good book about it here.

As a result, the book is basically just a summary, filled with lists and lists of Hellcat fighter jocks, the planes they shot down in certain engagements.... and that was pretty much it!

It got to be sort of like reading the Book of Numbers from the Bible.

Nevertheless, I forced myself to slog on, in the hopes that I would find some pearl of wisdom, some brilliant insight, that I had not encountered in another book about WWII.

But there were none.

I give the book two stars only because the book might be interesting to somebody who has not read a lot about WW II aircraft already.

It seems that everyplace I turn, Barrett Tillman is there. He contributes to The Hook magazine, The Blue Press, and is a fellow member of the Association of Naval Aviation, Flying Beaver squadron.

This book is all about my favorite fighter aircraft of all time, Grumman's F6F "Hellcat." Of all the Japanese aircraft shot down in air-to-air combat during the Second World War, this airplane and its pilots accounted for nearly 8 out of 10 of them.

Yet, it was a "generic" fighter, the big brother to the tubby, feisty little F4F "Wildcat" with which the U.S. Navy started the war, but which was outclassed by the A6M2 "Zero" of Mitsubishi, which could outclimb, outmaneuver and, worse--fly further on a tank of gas. So, they could strike our ships while they were still out of our range.

Leroy Grumman and his "Iron Works" at Bethpage, Long Island, came up with the antidote. The "Hellcat" went from drawing board to test flight in only a year, making her first flight on June 26, 1942, almost exactly a year after the Navy had first requested the aircraft to replace the obsolescent "Wildcat". The first flight of a production F6F-3 was on October 3rd.

The airplane had no bad habits. It was easy to fly, and had good visibility of the flight deck on final, unlike the long-nosed F4U Vought Sikorsky (later, Chance Vought) "Corsair," which was dubbed the "Ensign Eliminator."

Tillman, whose father was a naval aviator in the Second World War, has demonstrated a devotion to naval aviation, and has written a number of books about the aircraft of that war and the men who flew them.

His books bring back memories. You can almost hear the unmuffled roar of the Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp R2800, all 2,000 horsepower belching flame from the exhaust stacks as the airplane strains against her brakes and chocks preparing for takeoff from the carrier deck.

No one writes it better than Barrett Tillman, and he is a fellow Oregonian, to boot!

Joseph Pierre,
Author: Handguns and Freedom...their care and maintenance
and other books