The U.S. command in the pacific theater is one of the most underreported of the war. And yet this command was the most innovative of any command of any power in WWII. They invented a totally new type of warfare and quickly learned to execute it exceptionally well.
And they also made do with so little, winning Midway and holding Guadacanal by the skin of their teeth. The ability to know exactly where to fight and how is an incredible story.
Does this book get that? Yes, some of it. But for a book that revolves around this, it gets suprisingly little. The U.S. submarine fleet sunk half the Japanese ships and basically isolated Japan from it's raw material sourced. Yet it's not mentioned in this book.
Add to that no real mention of how the Navy learned to develop amphibious warfare and to combine that with strong carrier support. And what you are left with is another book that just goes through the main battles of the pacific war, with a bit more emphasis on the admirals in charge.

Excellent detailed review of WW II in the Pacific with all the personalities and "backstabbing" of the commanders that went on.Much of the details were not released to the media at the time. Many of the leaders mentioned went on to become the Chief of Naval Operations later on. I had the privelege of calling on Nimitz and his wife in 1963 and he related the story of his ship grounding detailled in the book. This book was "released" in 1970. Why is it so late (2000) in being published? Would loved to have read it before meeting Nimitz and his son.Could have used more maps of some of the places being discussed.

Outstanding history of the war in the Pacific. Great profiles of Nimitz, Fletcher, Halsey, Spruance, and others. Easy to read. I hated to finish it!

This book is a synopsis for a novel that Chester Himes never wrote with some extended notes about characters and plot rather than a novel. Its prime interest is in the sarcastic portraits Himes provided of fellow exiled African American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

In addition to satirizing Wright, Baldwin (and less known African American exiles Ollie Harrington and William Gardner Smith), Himes was killing off a white woman Elizabeth Hancock, very like Willa Trierweiler, a married/separated woman with whom Himes had a long and tormented relationship (she is also the basis for Kriss in _The End of the Primitive_). This is the woman for whose rape and murder four African Americans have been found guilty by a French court. There was neither a rape nor a murder, though "[wo]manslaughter" seems a verdict that could be justified.

Those convicted of the crimes have carried to Europe the American lesson that "it is always best for any Negro to deny any charge lodged against him, to deny it totally and continuously, rather than try to explain the degree of his guilt." Himes indicts his own character for elf-defeating (hurt) pride, Wright for naiveté (and failure to appreciate the nobility of his relationship with Willa) and worldly success, and Baldwin for volunteering to be an "Uncle Tom."

As a semi-fictionalized document on the attitudes of one major expatriate African American writer, the book has some value, but don't expect much in the way of plausibility or narrative development.

I had heard of Chester Himes's novel "A Case of Rape" by reading Tyler Stovall's fantastic work on African American life in Paris, "Paris Noir". Himes paints a devastating portrait of racist french officials in this tour de force depiction of hypocritically racist French society. A must-read!

This book is a good study on how to build a T-bucket by the old "We used what we had" school of thought.While this may be able to produce a"car" for a really low dollar figure,it certainly does'ent build a car that handles well and above all is safe. I mean how much is your life worth! I have to take issue with the use of used tie-rod ends "welded" to watter pipe as steering components? come on! This kind of unsafe foolishness is what gave T-buckets a bad name in the 60's.

He shows you how to make a car the old fashion way, build all the stuff yourself. He used Bondo for way too many things but he did get the job done.

Indeed, "Chicken Soup's" Jack Canfield has a promotional blurb on this book's front cover. Fans of his work & the "Teen Power" series might be delighted by this volume. I guess I'm not w/in that target audience. This volume is essentially an anthology w/ many "cutesy" mini-essays on various sub-aspects of learning about leadership. But I can't see it appealing to too many student leaders beyond those in Jr. High.

Brilliant book for students in High School, it is an ideal workbook for teachers like me who want to give kids leadership skills. What I like best is it brought together the best of the speakers we have had in our schools -- The Kids Were Blown Away!

A murderous racist cop trying to cover up his drunken mistakes and a black truck driver who's the only surviving witness have a suspense-filled chase through Harlem. Not always believable, but always thrilling. A good introduction to the hard- boiled fiction of Chester Himes, and a piercing look into the sources of racism.

Here's a tough crime novel by Chester Himes without Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones that takes an uncompromising look at American racism in New York City. Though published in 1966, it has a strong '50s feel that comes through in the language and the cultural references both.

Himes' dialogue and language can be occasionally stilted, but there are chase scenes here that will make you sit up and take notice, and the focus on black-white relations is especially good. It's the story of a white cop who accidentally on purpose shoots to death two black 'porters' (workers who unload trucks for a restaurant) and then goes after a third, Jimmy, who manages to survive the cop's onslaught.

The depiction of the cop as sometimes conflicted by his actions is well done and his liaison with Jimmy's black girlfriend is strong stuff indeed. There's a somewhat uneasy mix here, though, of academic and street thinking. Jimmy is studying at Columbia University and shows it in his speech, but when other characters speak, it sometimes sounds like they're struggling to catch up to Jimmy's psychology and often it doesn't feel right.

Nevertheless, what makes this compelling is, as mentioned, the focus on race relations and racism, the chase scenes, and the cop's wacked psychology.

An interesting read.

The topic of this book as stated is highly misleading. Yes, Mr. Hays traces some of his experiences on becoming a Bar Mitzvah at age 66. However, he digresses so much from this theme that it was downright annoying!

I was really looking forward to reading about a 66-year-old man's journey into spirituality and rediscovery of Judaism, rather than a name-dropping autobiography.

What little Mr. Hays did write about his spiritual journey back into Judaism was sparse, and even his way off-topic autobiographical sections didn't include much of his family's, friends',or peers' reactions to his becoming a Bar Mitzvah, which to me would have been very interesting.

He also didn't talk much at all about contemporary Jewish renewal and problems of assimilation and how others might, as he did, find meaning in a religious path they've ignored or rejected.

Why, instead, should I care that he went back for a school reunion and one of his class members won the Nobel Prize? Why should I have to wade through the life stories of some of his uninteresting relatives who are not even marginally part of his spiritual story?

In this catch-all manuscript, Mr. Hays also tangentially subjects the reader to an entire fantasy theatrical piece he has imagined about a grown-up Anne Frank (for which I wouldn't buy a ticket, BTW).

What we also get is too much information and commentary about the 12- and 13-year-olds in his class, including an inappropriate (IMO) dwelling on one of the pubescent girls about whom Mr. Hays admitted over and over he had major sexual fantasies.

This is one of those books that you could borrow from your library, or from a friend, but you will likely need to buy your own copy since there are so many passages that are either so wise, so funny, or so meaningfully touching that you will need to use your pencil in order to happily jot checkmarks, brackets, and asterisks throughout the book. I know that I did.

David Hays has a surfeit of academic, personal, and professional accomplishments. In his sixties, he was semi-retired, kids grown, had good health and a happy family life. His mind is unquestioningly fertile (yet organized) and he seems to embrace new experiences. As a child he gazed into a mud bubble, and glimpsed eternity. As an adult he throws himself into the grass in his back yard, in order to look more closely at the earth. His life was full, and meaningful, but he does not brag, and he is likable from the outset.

Rather than rest on his not inconsiderable laurels, he decides to become a Bar Mitzvah, joining a class of local eleven and twelve-year olds - in order to devote himself to study with his congregation's rabbi, Doug, for more than a year. It is this journey - and there is a steady unfolding, with no outburst of religiosity - that forms the starting point for this wonderful narrative.

Hays has an ability to tell you a lot about himself by telling you about other people. He respects himself, and he respects others. He is never boring. His parents, in-laws, grown children, grandchildren, his wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and his classmates are interesting to him, and worthy of reportage. He lets you in on these people and their lives and their histories with unstinting (and never maudlin) respect, even awe. In doing this you find out a lot about Hays and his subjects. Their privacy is never violated, and their dignity is sustained.

There is uncloying, laugh-out-loud humor throughout. Family lore emerges, and it is often funny. Hays delights in his wife Leonora's knack of elegantly summing up a situation with a trenchant malapropism. Of his new-found fervor for religious study, she says, "He hooked, line and sinker!" Of the Bahamas: "It's a third-war country." He also shares his family history, including a terrific (true) story, "How my family saved Israel." His feelings and observations as a sensitive member of his class (of the kids at recess he marvels, "They always know where to go.") - and his relationship with his wonderful rabbi - are a pleasure to watch unfold.

Hays includes a piece on Anne Frank that is dramatic, thoughtful, and not at all funny. It is appropriately included, given that the concerns of an adult approaching his bar mitzvah are different from those of a child. And at one point, he attends a Harvard reunion - which maybe could have been left out of this book, with no loss of substance to this great story.

In all, a wonderful book.

This was a very dissapointing ending for the ruby throne trilogy. I just loved and enjoyed the cat-fights, hair-pulling, and action in the first book (REIGN OF SHADOWS) but REALM OF LIGHT WAS SOO BORING, there was no conclusion at all. The death and rise of people were bluntly developed, it seemed as though Deborah Chester just sped throught this just to finish the third planned book, so she could work on her next trilogy. Oh, well...just hope another better book comes out in the meantime.

I enjoyed the first two books in the series. I was fascinated by the background of the empire and the characters that made it up. There were several plot developments revolving around characters that I found very intriguing: Hecati, Bixia, Agel, the jinji, the Magria and so on. For instance, we left her half-sister Bixia screaming that she would do everything in her power to bring the empress down. So, here we are in the conclusion and we never even see Bixia again, let alone have her try anything to ruin her life. The author focuses a great deal on minute details, then forgets the big picture. The emperor is mentioned almost as an aside that he is dead. What happened? We get about one sentence that the magria is dead and has been replaced by a former deputy that she had removed from office due to flaws. What happened? We never find out. We spend pages and pages focusing on the empress reaching Albania and her father, and all her attentions are concentrated on saving his life so that he could lead his armies to put her on the throne. Everything is about to come together, and then she's basically arrested and carted off to the capital with her family who have no real part in the rest of the story. No armies. Nothing. She earns the respect of a dragonrider who pretty much seems set to bring her an army of dragonriders, and we never see him or another dragon again. She wanted a jinji from the very first book, and she finally gets one. She even gets one that is unusually colored and matches her topaz colors, then all we get from the jinji is it piping up a couple of times that danger approaches. Well, duh. He never uses his peculiar skills that I wanted to learn more about to sense and draw off magic. We didn't need the jinji to tell us that. Too much detail was focused on petty humiliations and not enough on the real meat of the story. I was very disappointed at the lack of conclusion for this series. I feel as though I wasted my time reading the first two, which were much better than the last. I wish that the author would have extended the series to at least a fourth book to fully develop all the characters, then I would have been one happy reader.

This book was an excellent read. The characters were excellently protrayed. And man there were so many twists and turns in the story it made me pleasently dizzy! Elandra and Caelan's relationship is very vivid and lifelike. I could feel the love they had!

My only problem is that the ending of the climax of the book had Caelan so different from the rest of the book and the series that it seemed a little too far fetched. All in all this was one of the best conclusions to a trilogy I have read in a long while.

Purports to show that sea power didn't have an impact on the power of ancient states, particularly the Roman Empire. The problem as I see it is summed up in the blurb on the dust jacket - "...the unmatched Roman imperial navy...succeeded in momentarily clearing the surrounding waters of pirates, but was useless when barbarians came from the interior and mutilated Roman defenses." By the time the barbarians did this, the Roman navy in effect had ceased to exist. This is such an oversight on the author's part that it's difficult to take the book seriously - and Starr is an historian with a large list of titles to his credit.

Works by Lionel Casson are listed in the bibliography but there are no references in the index. Starr's quotes and anecdotes from ancient times are informative and interesting, though mishandled and misinterpreted. Obviously Starr is a landlubber, or perhaps his mother got sick on a boat ride when she was pregnant with him.

The prolific (though sometimes cranky) Michael Grant has a title in print regarding the near-collapse of the Roman Empire in the 3rd c that may illuminate the problems of the barbarian invasions. Lionel Casson's "Travel in the Ancient World" has chapters about travel by sea and the effectiveness of the Roman navy at eradicating piracy. His "Ancient Mariners" is out in a new edition and that is also recommended.

Although Starr fails to make his case, this short book is worth a read.

Regrettably this is a rather unenlightening essay (and essay it is, because it hardly stretches for more than 100 pages). The author, in what could be quite an interesting trip, seeks to discuss the economic, political and military forces that contribute to a great navy, and, in doing so, to find guiding principles in ancient naval combat. But instead, we really just get a retreatment, lifted from established (and readily accessible) sources, of the Peloponesian, Persian, Punic and Roman Civil wars - and precious, precious little for Imperial Rome. There are some occasionally lucid discussions of the difficulties of raising a fleet from a primarily agrarian economy (e.g. Sparta), as opposed to doing so via a mercantilist one (e.g. Atlanta). But there are plenty of writers in print (e.g. Donald Kagan, Peter Green, Michael Grant) who cover the same ground with considerably more aplomb.

This is a nice, quick read that discusses the importance (and sometimes irrelevance) of thalassocracy in antiquity. In this book, the author detail the ages of Early Greece thru to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Starr details for us how Alexander of Macedon conquered the Persian Navy by taking over the Persian ports (and thus giving the Persian fleet nowhere to land). He also writes of the immense importance that Piraeus held for Athens; it was due to the revenues of her seapower that Athens was able to build such wonders as the Parthenon. Starr then demonstrates why this authority over the seas was so very important for Athens during the early stages of the Peloponnesian war.

We also learn how seapower was one of the primary ingrediants that made Rome a power to reckon with. It was the turning-of-the tables with Carthage as far as seapower was concerned which was the decisive factor of the First Punic War.

Starr continues with the use of seapower by Julius Caesar to both rid the Meditteranean of pirates as well as to further his empire.

While one may disagree with some of the opinions of Starr, this book is well worth reading for any maritime scholars or historians of antiquity.

Though well written, Hearn's book adds nothing new to our understanding of the New Orleans Campaign. His bibliography indicates that he did little research in primary sources, of which hundreds are available. He appears to have "borrowed" citations from the best book on the subject--Charles L. Dufour's _The Night the War Was Lost_. If you are interested in this campaign, read Dufour and don't bother with Hearn.

I beg to differ with the previous reviewer. Chester G. Hearn's writing is concise, interesting, and thorough, not to mention being a great read! I would highly recommend everything he's written, in fact, with the exception of "Rebels and Yankees: Naval Battles of the Civil War" (pub. Thunder Bay Press); that one is so uncharacteristically bad that I can only conclude that a lousy editor was involved. At any rate, this one on New Orleans is a keeper.

Alger writes another of his formulaic stories of a poor country poor boy named Chester Rand. Chester and his widowed mother live on Chester's small wages from the country store. When Chester is laid off for someone who'll work for less money, Chester must find a new way to earn money.

Through his kindness, generosity, honesty and goodwill, Chester makes friends who urge him to go to New York. Soon he is working for $5 a week in a real estate office as an office boy. He also finds that he has a talent drawing comics, which earns him far more money. His drawing skills eventually earn him a high paying job and Chester finds himself becoming more independent.

Rand is an enviable character: his is meticulously honest, hard-working loyal and abstains from drinking, gambling, and tobacco. Alger's stories always imparts the wisdom that hard work and honesty pay off and those that wander from the straight and narrow eventually pay a price.

Alger writes another of his formulaic stories of a poor country poor boy named Chester Rand. Chester and his widowed mother live on Chester's small wages from the country store. When Chester is laid off for someone who'll work for less money, Chester must find a new way to earn money.

Through his kindness, generosity, honesty and goodwill, Chester makes friends who urge him to go to New York. Soon he is working for $5 a week in a real estate office as an office boy. He also finds that he has a talent drawing comics, which earns him far more money. His drawing skills eventually earn him a high paying job and Chester finds himself becoming more independent.

Rand is an enviable character: his is meticulously honest, hard-working loyal and abstains from drinking, gambling, and tobacco. Alger's stories always imparts the wisdom that hard work and honesty pay off and those that wander from the straight and narrow eventually pay a price.