Book Description
A thoroughly updated revision of the first comprehensive overview of intelligence designed for both the student and the general reader, Silent Warfare is an insider’s guide to a shadowy, often misunderstood world. Leading intelligence scholars Abram N. Shulsky and Gary J. Schmitt clearly explain such topics as the principles of collection, analysis, counterintelligence, and covert action, and their interrelationship with policymakers and democratic values. This new edition takes account of the expanding literature in the field of intelligence and deals with the consequences for intelligence of vast recent changes in telecommunication and computer technology—the new “information age.” It also reflects the world’s strategic changes since the end of the Cold War. This landmark book provides a valuable framework for understanding today’s headlines, as well as the many developments likely to come in the real world of the spy.
Customer Reviews:
Great work!.......2007-02-02
The book came right on time and in EXCELLENT condition. I will definately buy with this seller again!
Solid introduction into the world of intelligence.......2006-06-13
I would say that this book would be a good first read for anyone interested in learning more about the intelligence community. It covers a wide variety of information without getting to in-depth into any one subject, so it feels like a pretty well-rounded experience. I also felt that the use of some historical examples really helped not only to make the book more interesting to read but to make some of the concepts easier to understand.
My biggest problem with this book is that at points it reads like a college textbook, which isn't always a particularly good thing. I also found some of the sections that talked about the relations between policy and intelligence to be pretty dull. Overall this book is a pretty informative and a mostly enjoyable read.
good introductory book ..........2006-04-01
A good introduction book to the Intelligence subject. In this book the author browse all the elements and methods of intelligence in a mix with history examples, that helps you understand all the facts of this world and the importance for a goverment to use it in order to be updated and alert of international events.
Thinking About Intelligence.......2005-10-24
This book was first published in 1991, but is as current today as it was 14 years ago. This is because the authors have succeeded in conceptualizing intelligence functions and activities in an abstract, but very accurate manner. Although the authors provide a conceptualized view of intelligence, they also provide concrete historical examples to illustrate specific concepts. As a result the reader is given an understanding of intelligence that transcends current trends and practices within the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). The book is an excellent introduction to the discipline of intelligence independent of specific agencies or practices of the IC. For this reason the book should be of interest not only to folks with no background in intelligence, but also to experienced intelligence professionals. One of the biggest obstacles to real intelligence reform in the IC is the inability of reformers to formulate broad concepts of the purposes and functions of intelligence. Reading this book could go a long way in helping them to develop such concepts. As the final chapter of the book suggests, it shows the way to a theory of intelligence.
"Silent Warfare" is the best introduction I have found to the arcane world of intelligence and is an excellent textbook for an introductory course. However, in a utopian world that course would be taught over a year and in its second semester students would read another excellent intelligence text, "Intelligence From Secrets to Policy" by Mark Lowenthal, which moves from the abstract to general, but specific practices and operations of the U.S. IC. The two books compliment each other very well.
Solid Introduction to Intelligence Activity.......2005-09-19
Both the authors, Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt, are respected intelligence organization professionals who have taken up university-level teaching and writing. The book is focused on intelligence theory and organization - not on tradecraft. As such, the principal audience of this book would likely be future intelligence policymakers or foreign intelligence organizations trying to gain an insight into US intelligence systems.
The book does a solid job of identifying what intelligence is, how it is collected (humint vs. techint), how it is processed, how it is systematically protected, and what counter-intelligence includes. In addition, it addresses the gray areas of covert action (Is it intelligence or military activity?) and plausible denial. Although much of this discussion could apply to most nations' intelligence bureaus, the authors only explicity describe the American intelligence system.
Perhaps the most outstanding feature of the book is the wealth of sources it contains. Many of these are freely and immediately available on the web for all to read. All the footnotes are very thoroughly explained and usually refer to a specific source. The source list itself adds tremendous value to the book by guiding the reader to so many numerous definitive works on intelligence operations.
All in all, this is a solid introduction to intelligence and a great book for pursuing its addition sources.
Amazon.com
In this fast-paced memoir, Ken Alibek combines cutting-edge science with the narrative techniques of a thriller to describe some of the most awful weapons imaginable. The result will remind readers of The Hot Zone, Richard Preston's smart bestseller about the Ebola virus. That book focuses on the dangers of a freak accident; Biohazard shows how disease can become a deliberate tool of war. Alibek, once a top scientist in the Soviet Union's biological weapons program, describes putting anthrax on a warhead and targeting a city on the other side of the world. "A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States," he writes. "A single SS-18 [missile] could wipe out the population of a city as large as New York."
Chilling passages like these, plus discussions of proliferation and terrorism, make Biohazard a harrowing book, but it also has a human side. Alibek, who defected to the United States, describes the routine danger of his work: "A bioweapons lab leaves its mark on a person forever." An unending stream of vaccinations has destroyed his sense of smell, afflicted him with allergies, made it impossible to eat certain kinds of food, and "weakened my resistance to disease and probably shortened my life." But it didn't take away his ability to tell an astonishing story. --John J. Miller
Book Description
Anthrax. Smallpox. Incurable and horrifying Ebola-related fevers. For two decades, while a fearful world prepared for nuclear winter, an elite team of Russian bioweaponeers began to till a new killing field: a bleak tract sown with powerful seeds of mass destruction--by doctors who had committed themselves to creating a biological Armageddon.
Biohazard is the never-before-told story of Russia's darkest, deadliest, and most closely guarded Cold War secret.
No one knows more about Russia's astounding experiments with biowarfare than Ken Alibek. Now the mastermind behind Russia's germ warfare effort reveals two decades of shocking breakthroughs...how Moscow's leading scientists actually reengineered hazardous microbes to make them even more virulent...the secrets behind the discovery of an invisible, untraceable new class of biological agents just right for use in political assassinations...the startling story behind Russia's attempt to turn a sample of the AIDS virus into the ultimate bioweapon. And in a chilling work of real-world intrigue,
Biohazard offers us all a rare glimpse into a shadowy scientific underworld where doctors manufacture mass destruction, where witnesses to errors are silenced forever, and where ground zero is closer than we ever dared believe.
Customer Reviews:
Awakening Terror.......2007-07-17
I bought and read this book years ago and was astounded with the information that was revealed. It's a dangerous world we live in knowing what various governemnts have created in order to destroy humans etc... This story is coming from the Author who was behind some of the most deadly biological, chemical weapons created in Cold War Soviet Union. he defected from the Soviet Union and then went to work for the U.S. governemnt applying his knowledge of weaponized biological agents and how to combat them etc... It's a true story with lots of information. It's a Great Book.
A factual but not fun read........2007-01-14
It many ways this is necessary reading in today's world. Lots of facts, but not a particularly passionate story. It's not a fun page turner. And the author's regret for the demons he created seems too late and too little. The book also ends in 1999 and is due for an update or adddendum. After reading this, one could make the arguement that if there was only a 10% chance that the Soviet bioweapons technology made it to Iraq, then the Iraq invasion was justified. The book is not an exciting or particularly good read; but it may be a necessary read.
Hard To Sleep After Reading This Eight Stars .......2006-10-28
The author for once and for all exterminates the propaganda that the USSR was not involved in the large scale production of biological weapons. He also reminds us that our college campuses are filled with what Stalin termed , " Useful Idiots", those who want to think the US is the eternal villan.
The scale of the USSR bioweapons program was almost beyond what we could imagine both in the quantities produced and the variety of agents exploited. The author leaves little doubt as to the consequences of the use of these materials.
Written before 9-11 the book helps to understand the threat bio-weapons pose when in the hands of unstable nations or terrorist groups. The ease of production and of deployment ( expecially if the humans are willing to die for the cause) is the foundation for restless nights.
The book is also enlightening in how a huge program was shielded from US penetration through conventional Soviet security measures and our scientists unwillingness to consider the possiblity that the Soviets were developing and deploying such weapons.
As terrorist organizations race to be the first to use chemical, bio or nuclear weapons against the US homeland the lessons of the book take on more importance.
Highly recommended .
I love this book!.......2006-07-25
This is one of my top 3 favorite books. It is so addicting you cannot put it down! Most of the statments in this book have do evidence to back them up contrary to what another reveiwer said. I learned a lot from this excellent book!
Dark side of microbiology.......2006-06-16
This book covers the production and development of bioweapons in the Soviet Union. Reading the book is an unique chance to have a peek in the paranoid bureocratic society, in which production of mass murder technologies becomes a norm. In a way, the book is another example how ideological (in this case state sponsored) propaganda can subvert humans to do incredible, inhuman actions.
The book is equally important as a warning for humanity of the self destructive potential of scientific knowledge when harnessed into usage as weapons of mass destruction.
The book is written in readable, professional (from microbiologists viewpoint)and what appears a sincere way. It even seems that the book could be a part of a personal salvation process in which the author wants to deal with his past. I recommend the book for those intrested in soviet history/society, and especially for microbiologists and politicians who should get a deeper understanding of the issues covered in the book.
Average customer rating:
- Great World War II Book
- A Great Story Poorly Told
- The Mortarmen
- a reader from Louisiana
- A really greaat subject told very badly
|
The Mortarmen
Michael Connelly
Manufacturer: Trafford Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Military & Spies
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Military
| Leaders & Notable People
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Weapons & Warfare
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
| Biological & Chemical
| Control
| Conventional
| Nuclear
General
| World War II
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Normandy
| World War II
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Biographies
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Look Inside History Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
Similar Items:
-
Echo Park (Harry Bosch)
-
The Overlook (Harry Bosch)
-
Murder in Vegas: New Crime Tales of Gambling and Desperation
-
Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers
-
Void Moon
ASIN: 1412049024
Release Date: 2006-07-06 |
Product Description
The Mortarmen is an untold story of world War II. The book details the fighting history of the men of the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion. The battalion was armed with the powerful 4.2 mortars and following its landing on Utah Beach on D-Day fought in every major engagement in France, Belgium, and Germany.
The 4.2 mortar battalions were the most sought after fire support units in Europe. The 87th was in combat for 326 days and the book follows each of the four companies as they participate in the Battle for Normandy, the fight for Cherbourg, the battles of Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and finally the crossing of the Rhine and the final victory in Germany.
The book contains excepts of diaries and quotations from the men who fought in the unit and from some of the German soldiers who opposed them. It is a story of heroism, tragedy, and the triumph of soldiers fighting for freedom.
Customer Reviews:
Great World War II Book.......2007-09-27
This is one of the best World War II books I have ever read. It mixes the well written history of the battles with the personal stories of the men who fought them. It does a great job of bringing the heroism of the greatest generation to life.
A Great Story Poorly Told.......2007-05-14
This book tells an interesting story. One of my college classmates was a member of the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion - the subject of this book - and found the information to be accurate. However, it is a self-published book and suffers from the major shortcoming of that genre: a lack of copyediting and proofreading. The very first paragraph of Chapter 1 contains a typographical error, a punctuation error, and a grammatical error. Because of errors like these, the book is sometimes difficult for a person like me -- a retired editor -- to read. Nevertheless, I found it worth the effort.
The Mortarmen.......2006-12-22
For years I have always wanted to study the basics of World War II, but just never found the time. In reading this book, I have received such a personal, up front view of World War II - more than I think I could have gotten elsewhere, and in much less time!!! It seems to be a "magnifying glass" of that spot in history. Thanks, Michael Connelly!!!!
Wanda K. Perry
a reader from Louisiana.......2006-09-07
This is a fantastic book about World War II. At times I felt like I was right there with the men of the 87th who fought their way across Europe. The book is full of history, but more importantly it is full of the stories of the men who fought the war. It tells you their story and you can't help but get caught up in this great tale. Michael Connelly is a master story teller.
A really greaat subject told very badly.......2006-09-06
I was looking forward to this book to arrive. Having read several other books about the Battle of the Bulge and related topics. This is a great story about very heroic men just doing their job. Unfortunately it is written so poorly that I must caution you here. If you have not reward any other WWII book, I suggest reading any of the following first
- Anything by Donald R. Burgett, Especially 7 Roads to Hell
- Band of Brothers (although 7 roads I felt was even better)
- Black Devil Brigade
The thing about these books mentioned is that they deal with the battles and they let you meet, and get to know, the men that fought. When reading Mortarmen I felt like it went like this, " Then the major ran up to the bunker and gave his orders to the leader in the bunker. Then the bunker leader fired his mortar and killed a bunch of Nazi's". I am not kidding. In the 7 Roads to Hell, there was the description of a black mortar team and how well they worked. I got more out of those 3-4 pages than I did with this book.
I love this topic, to the author I offer the following:
1. Please let us know about the soldiers personally
2. Describe in depth how these mortars, and the other weapon work. People that buy these books really want to know this.
I wish you all the best in the next revision
Book Description
Armageddon is the epic story of the last eight months of World War II in Europe by Max Hastings–one of Britain’s most highly regarded military historians, whose accounts of past battles John Keegan has described as worthy “to stand with that of the best journalists and writers” (New York Times Book Review).
In September 1944, the Allies believed that Hitler’s army was beaten, and expected that the war would be over by Christmas. But the disastrous Allied airborne landing in Holland, American setbacks on the German border and in the Hürtgen Forest, together with the bitter Battle of the Bulge, drastically altered that timetable. Hastings tells the story of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, and paints a vivid portrait of the Red Army’s onslaught on Hitler’s empire. He has searched the archives of the major combatants and interviewed 170 survivors to give us an unprecedented understanding of how the great battles were fought, and of their human impact on American, British, German, and Russian soldiers and civilians.
Hastings raises provocative questions: Were the Western Allied cause and campaign compromised by a desire to get the Soviets to do most of the fighting? Why were the Russians and Germans more effective soldiers than the Americans and British? Why did the bombing of Germany’s cities continue until the last weeks of the war, when it could no longer influence the outcome? Why did the Germans prove more fanatical foes than the Japanese, fighting to the bitter end? This book also contains vivid portraits of Stalin, Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and the other giants of the struggle.
The crucial final months of the twentieth century’s greatest global conflict come alive in this rousing and revelatory chronicle.
Customer Reviews:
Very Good.......2007-09-05
Insightful, thought provoking overview of the horror of the last nine months of WWII in Europe. While I couldn't put this book down and the assessment and theories of this time were excellent, I did find the work somewhat disjointed and awkwardly written at times. Overall, however, it is a very rewarding history that offers new perceptions and challenges old conceptions. Well worth your time.
Falling apart as I read..........2007-08-11
This book has a profound view of the 2nd WW from Normandy eastward, I am enjoying it alot and it is easy to understand and follow (even though it jumps about in time). I love books and often re-read them at later dates. I have bought many books from Amazon, and have been very pleased. But this is the 1st book that has the problem of clumps of pages falling off as I read. They separate from the binding every dozen pages or so... Guess I won't be able to re-read this one! Anyone else with this defect? This book would get 5 stars from me were it not for this problem...
Hastings does the end of World War II.......2007-07-08
There are two main theories with regards to the American/Allied victory in World War II in the West. One holds that the Germans were brilliant soldiers, overwhelmed by a torrent of shells from artillery, airplanes, and tanks, and the other holds that the American army, starting out very green, gained experience and fortitude as the campaign extended in 1944-45. The first version is one that has held sway, for the most part, since the 1950s. It's based, in part, on the interrogations done by the U.S. Army at the end of the war, where they talked with German officers about the course of the war they had just lost. Most of the Germans, to hear them tell it, didn't really think they'd lost the war. If anything, they'd won, and been thwarted by Hitler, the Soviets, and American factories. The latter view, that the American army improved during the war, and wasn't as bad as these defeated German officers thought, is more modern, and has been put forward by a group of scholars, many of them U.S. Army officers.
Max Hastings is a British historian, and he holds with the older, more German viewpoint. One nuance is that he holds the British army in similar contempt, for the most part. Instead, he believes that the Soviets were the only ones who exhibited a proper amount of aggressiveness, though he does also mention repeatedly that the Soviet method of war resulted in their army suffering many more casualties than the American/British method.
This attitude colors pretty much the whole of Armageddon, Hastings' book recounting the campaigns in France, Poland, and Germany during the last winter and spring of World War II. Hastings is more nuanced than most historians when he speaks in this vein: he spends a lot of time telling you how good of a coalition-manager Eisenhower was, while denigrating his skill as a strategist. He also is refreshingly aware of Montgomery's shortcomings, personality-wise, and his inability to diplomatically get along with his American counterparts. Patton doesn't come in for the praise he often gets: the author notes the Hammelburg tragedy and denounces him pretty thoroughly for it, among other things, and winds up saying that he showed "flashes of brilliance" but wasn't an exceptional commander.
Hastings is a good writer, and for the general reader interested in World War II this is a worthwhile book. For the specialist be aware: the author quotes Martin van Creveld and other historians you've probably already read, and his interpretations, to say the least, are sometimes controversial. While I agree with his assessment of the Arnhem battle (he says that if Browning did say they'd gone "a bridge too far", then he didn't understand the concept of the battle: without the last bridge, the whole thing was worthless) his verdict on Zhukov (the best general of the war) is eccentric at best, especially since he then proceeds to tell you that his crossing of the Oder in 1945 was a disaster.
I've always been dubious of authors who use the German view of the war more than is appropriate, and I think Hastings is a bit guilty of this. It's why the book doesn't get five stars from me, because otherwise this is a good book, and I enjoyed it.
Imrpessive! A sober reminder of what war is about........2007-06-12
Max Hastings is a renowned author on World War II subjects, and especially on the campaigns of the Western Front. This book is a rich and valuable account of the last year of the war, startimg from September 1944, directly after the Falaise Gap actions and continuing until the end of the war in May 1945. He achieves a splendid mix of great battles and hundreds of personal stories, being academic and popular history at the same time which is something really difficult. Many personal accounts from civilians to soldiers are sprinkled throughout the chapters, and thus effectively remind the reader of the human tragedy taking place as the Third Reich falls around them. From the concentration camp prisoners to the Dutch suffering from hunger and cold, to the bomber crews flying on dangerous missions, to the inhabitants of bombed-out German cities to the East Prussians being brutalized by the advancing Red Army seeking revenge, Hastings has included everything possible in this monumental account.
The readers who want to learn more about the titanic battles of that period will get some fresh perspectives and some hard to find statistics, but Hastings' aim is not simply to tell the military history of that era. He focuses rather on some interesting and straightforward questions, like why did it take almost a year after D-Day for the allies to finally defeat Nazi Germany. Hastings' criticism on the Allied side is sincere and sometimes harsh. He accuses the Western Allies for lack of aggressive leadership despite overwhelming superiority of resources, for a nasty relationship between the U.S. and the Brits, for significant waste of materials, for waging the wrong battles (like that in Huertgen Forrest) and for an absolute reliance upon artillery which very often slowed advance to a crowl. He praises the German Army for its operational and tactical skills and for the superior weapons it employed, but also acknowledges the advantages that the Soviets enjoyed due to their brutal methods and complete disregard for human and material losses.
Of course this is a history about a war and the vast scale of suffering makes the narrative powerful and grim. The text is supported by some good but general maps and many black and white photographs, some of them very dramatic indeed. I would say that although this book is massive in appearance and may seem too much detailed for some readers, it doesn't offer really new conclusions for anyone who has studied this subject thoroughly. It just concentrates every available (and interesting) piece of information in a sinlge large account which it reads quickly and smoothly because it is generally very engrossing.
Loved reading this book!.......2007-05-29
This sensational book is full of details, both personal and military, and does not get bogged down in too much of the latter. It was an addictive reading experience for me and I must admit I have never read a book about war before.
Amazon.com
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire is an impeccably written analysis of the last months of the Pacific War and the unfolding of the American air campaign over Japan. The story opens with a searing description of the fire-bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, which caused more deaths than the atom bomb in Hiroshima. Within five months, Japan's economy was collapsing and the country faced catastrophic starvation. Richard B. Frank coolly analyzes different scenarios for ending the war (Russia waited in the wings). Frank concludes that the emperor and the Japanese military were far from ready to surrender, and that the decision to use the atom bomb probably saved millions of lives, not only Allied but Japanese and other Asian lives, also--perhaps a hundred thousand Chinese were dying each month under Japanese occupation. The effects of the bomb worked on many levels, even lending faces to the Japanese militarists, who could convince themselves that they were defeated not by a lack of spiritual power but by superior science. Densely documented, intelligently argued, Downfall recreates the end of the war from the viewpoints of the principals, giving the book an unusual immediacy. A highly valuable insight into the disintegration of the Japanese Empire, one of the most dramatic episodes of World War II. --John Stevenson
Book Description
In a riveting narrative that includes information from newly declassified documents, acclaimed historian Richard B. Frank gives a scrupulously detailed explanation of the critical months leading up to the dropping of the atomic bomb. Frank explains how American leaders learned in the summer of 1945 that their alternate strategy to end the war by invasion had been shattered by the massive Japanese buildup on Kyushu, and that intercepted diplomatic documents also revealed the dismal prospects of negotiation. Here also, for the first time, is a comprehensive account of how Japan's leaders were willing to risk complete annihilation to preserve the nation's existing order. Frank's comprehensive account demolishes long-standing myths with the stark realities of this great historical controversy.
Customer Reviews:
Exceptionally well researched.......2007-10-02
Frank has done an excellent job of dispassionately presenting the facts about the endgame of the Pacific War. I appreciate that Frank laid out the evidence and left it to the reader to judge where it pointed.
What is clear from the evidence is that neither the Japanese nor American leadership had adequate information to judge the other's intentions during 1945. In fact, there is some evidence that the Japaneese High Command was being mislead by underlings regarding the state of American morale. Thus the War Council believed that they were just one decisive battle away from being able to negotiate with the Americans for softer terms than Unconditional Surrender. On the other hand, American intelligence community were not adept enough to draw out from the vast array of intercepted cable traffic a clear picture. Thus they did not provide Truman information that was 'actionable'.
As for the bomb, the preponderance of evidence amassed by Frank points to the conclusion that once the decision to build the atomic bomb was made, the Manhattan project took on its own momentum and thus made the bombs use inevitable.
All-in-all a terrific book. Since I finished it on September 30th, it makes it onto my Summer Reading Favorites of 2007 :-)
Excellent in-depth defense of why the atomic bomb was needed.......2007-07-03
Richard Frank conclusively shatters a number of myths about the end of the Pacific side of World War II.
First, Japan was NOT ready to accept unconditional surrender, even with the caveat of the preservation of the Japanese throne, until after both bombs were dropped. Frank uses extensive declassified transcripts of Ultra (military) and Magic (diplomatic) U.S. codebreaking to get members of the Japanese war cabinet's own words, or lack thereof, on this issue. Within that is the fact that Japan's attempt to use Russia as an intermediary-ally in negotiations was totally out of tune with reality, so much out of tune that Tokyo actually expected Moscow to honor the full one year's "down time" after abrogating the two countries' neutrality agreement.
Second, the Japanese Army was ramping UP the plans for Keisu-Go, the all-out defense of the Japanese homeland, after the spring firebombings of Tokyo and elsewhere. Top Army brass considered that the U.S. might well try blockade, and thought it had enough kamikazes, midget submarines, etc., to make the U.S pay enough a price for even the blockade that it would settle for a negotiated peace. Again, Frank looks in-depth at Magic and Ultra transcripts to show how much support there was for this.
Third, Frank demonstrates that U.S. casualty fears of an invasion of Kyushu were well-warranted and may even have been understated in some cases.
The determination of the Japanese Empire to resist was well-known by American troops in the Pacific who had seen the Japanese, on average, take 97 percent casualties in many of their defensive actions. A militaristic government was ready to exploit this to the death.
The atomic bomb was therefore used for reasons of the highest seriousness. It was NOT dropped on Hiroshima as a demonstration for Stalin. And, speaking of demonstrations, the fact that it took two atomic bombs on Japan to get it to surrender puts the lie to the idea that a "demonstration" bomb would have been enough to get the Japanese to a non-negotiated surrender with them attempting to hold on to territory.
Yet more praise.......2007-04-10
I was so fascinated by this book that I read all the previous reviews. I only want to add my unlimited praise and to add a few thoughts and stories...
I was as unaware as anybody of the details of the end of the Pacific war until I met a fellow (Bill Lear, son of "the" Bill Lear) who was on a troop ship to Olympic. He said the officers told them that they all were going to die. After that the book was a natural, and I couldn`t have chosen better.
In my present line, I am in Japan a lot. If there is any one thing that makes Frank`s book fascinating, it is the detailed look at the inner workings of that eastern mind in the government and military leaders, and the resulting confusion for their hapless diplomats. In some cases it is not so radical - we Americans still get huffy about Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese were following a pretty basic tenet of war. Frank didn`t really go to a lot of trouble to remind us that the "unfathonable" Asian way of seeing things is normal to them. Perhaps it isn`t necessary. Any Japanese soldier who sees dying for his emperor/country as his highest honor will tend to see anyone who surrenders or is beaten before he can sacrifice himself, as the lowest sort of worm, not worthy of bayonet practice let alone a bowl of rice. Just an example, but with a point. Frank managed to state facts, back them up with numbers and intel documents and let it go at that. The case builds easily in the reader`s mind that this was a terrible war and that the allies/Americans were in a real conundrum about how to end it. Which brings up the sadly fascinating fact that the very thing that the allies demanded, as a way of keeping "these fascist and militarist governments from starting a world war every few years", was unconditional surrender, the very thing the Japanese couldn`t accept.
One thing which makes a really great book is that it opens discussion on the topic rather than, say, on the writer`s vocabulary. By that measure, this is one of the best. Please indulge me...
I have been to the peace museum in Hiroshima. It is very moving and also very evenhanded. It shows the little uniforms of the school kids killed - they were in town that day to help build firebreaks. It also has the army order on the wall which commanded that when the invasion came, all subjects were to show up on the beaches with pitchforks, sticks or any other weapon that came to hand. Hiroshima, by the way (to answer a previous comment) was the headquarters of the 5th Japanese Army, in charge of Japan and Korea (where they'd been since 1920, only getting to Manchuria in 1931, re another comment)It was also a recruit center, and a navy shipyard, in other words not exactly non-military.
My Dad flew in B-29s. He was a tough old farm boy, but once he met an army buddy who had also `been there` That`s the only time I saw him cry. I don`t think it`s wrong to lament the terrible things humans are capable of doing to each other and to make them stop; a basic about war, by the way. The fact that millions of innocents had died and were likely to keep dying in this war would make any way of stopping it look pretty good, ie, "moral". I personally would say, you can`t argue with success. The Japanese had been fighting since at least 1920. Days after the bomb, it was over. I`m in the camp of "the Russians had nothing to do with it." I want to thank Mr. Frank for explaning readably and in detail, how that came about.
Finally a note from my Mom... The war council was correct in believing that Americans were sick of the war (Incorrect in their eastern way in seeing Potsdam as weakness). They were beaten but wouldn`t quit. If you had a family member in the service, you put a red star in your window, and if they were killed, you changed it to a gold star. There were plenty of houses with two gold stars in the window. People in 1945 wanted the war to end and wanted the boys home. Imagine you are Truman, and a wife/mother says to you, "You mean to tell me you had the means to end this war the day before my boy was killed, and you didn`t do it?"
Read this book.
This book should be required reading for all Americans and Japanese.......2007-03-26
It is easy today, with so much information out there about the horrors of atomic warfare, and so little remembrance of the actual history of the final stages of WWII, to be critical of the U.S. decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan.
Sadly, as a result, most Japanese are taught today that they were merely the victims of overwhelming American might, rather than the aggressors and instigators of war, and even more sadly, we are confronted with the shameful specter of anti-nuke, anti-war, anti-history Americans pathetically apologizing to the Japanese, misquoting history, and blindly ignoring the real facts behind the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan.
In this book, Richard Franks sets about methodically re-creating the historical context of the end stages of WWII. He addresses virtually every controversial claim, every possible scenario, in the decision process that led to the atomic bombing. Other reviewers have mentioned several points already, and so I present only a summary of the major controversies dealt with in this book:
1. Why was it necessary to drop two atomic bombs or to use them on civilians? - The U.S. was afraid that Japan would think that its supply of atomic bombs was limited (and in fact, production was limited, but was steadily growing), and wanted to demonstrate to Japan that it had the ability and willpower to completely annihilate Japan with a series of atomic bombs. As it turns out, the U.S. calculations were correct. After Hiroshima was bombed, Franks points out that there was a faction in the Japanese military that had enough knowledge of the difficulty of uranium separation to deny the possibility that the U.S. could have developed such a bomb or claimed that the U.S. would not be able to keep up the atomic bombing, and used these arguments to continue to hold out against surrender. Other Japanese military leaders hoped that world opinion would bar the U.S. from further use of the atomic bombs on civilians. That the Japanese military doubted the willpower of the U.S. to use atomic bombs against civilians is proof that a mere demonstration on some unpopulated target would have been useless. Dropping two atomic bombs thus served to vaporize all of the final delusions of these fanatic military leaders.
2. Wasn't Japan close to surrender already because of the massive firebombing of its cities? The U.S. had destroyed over 60 Japanese cities already, killing over 100,000 in one raid on Tokyo alone. However, while this caused enormous suffering for Japanese civilians, the military elite ruling Japan couldn't care less, and continued to hold out for a final land battle, intending to inflict enormous casualties on any U.S. invasion. Their calculation was that the U.S., a democracy with freedom of the press and freedom of speech that even then was extremely sensitive to casualties, could be forced to offer a negotiated surrender with better terms (see no. 5 below for more on this) instead of unconditional surrender. One thing that Franks does not emphasize enough is that subsequent firebombings after Tokyo killed far fewer people per raid, as the Japanese learned how to deal with the firebombing better. A significant factor in the success of the firebombing was the nature of the highly flammable wooden cities of Japan. However, neither firebombing nor the inaccurate conventional bombing of that era would have had much impact on the dispersed and hidden armed forces of the Ketsu-Go operation (the Japanese plan for a massive suicidal countering of an American invasion on the island of Kyushu). Ketsu-Go versus the atomic bomb would have been a completely different story. The general in charge of Ketsu-Go happened to have his headquarters in Hiroshima, and after surviving the atomic bombing and seeing its effects, he bluntly told Hirohito that he could not be sure anymore that his forces would be able to fend off an invasion. IMHO, it was this realization by the military that Ketsu-Go would fail in the face of the atomic bomb that was the key in forcing the military to accept defeat without an invasion. And it was this realization by Hirohito that the military would accept his "command" to accept unconditional surrender that encouraged this timid personality to finally step in and "command" surrender (Franks gives some more convoluted reasons that I think are less convincing. He does not emphasize enough that Hirohito had no legal authority at the time to force the military to do anything - Hirohito's power was entirely based on tradition, respect, and superstitious symbolism - and in fact the military fanatics had a history of assassinating advisors to Hirohito whenever it seemed that he was favoring a course of action that they did not like).
3. Weren't the estimated potential U.S. casualties in an invasion grossly inflated? Perhaps they were, but first of all, if you are an American and think that ANY number of dead American soldiers in an invasion of Japan would have been worth trading in return for not using the atomic bomb, then you need to have your citizenship revoked. And if you are Japanese, and believe that a U.S. invasion would have been preferable to atomic bombing, then you really don't understand the fanaticism of the military elite that was in control at the end of the war. At Saipan and Okinawa, the local Japanese citizenry had been recruited into the battles and had suffered enormous casualties. Even worse was being planned for an invasion of the Japanese homeland, with the entire civilian population given bamboo sticks and suicide bombs which they were expected to use against U.S. soldiers. Franks calculates that the civilian casualties in an invasion of Japan would have far exceeded what was suffered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, U.S. intelligence eventually revealed that preparations for Ketsu-Go were so extensive that chances for a successful invasion were becoming increasingly uncertain. American casualties would have almost certainly been enormous. While General MacArthur blithely swept all of that intelligence under the rug, and continued to insist on the original invasion plans, Admiral Nimitz was on the verge of going on the record opposing the invasion when the atomic bombs were dropped. This book makes clear that a U.S. invasion of Kyushu, led by the over-confident MacArthur, could have well been a complete disaster.
4. Wouldn't a blockade and continued bombing of Japan have forced a surrender? - Yes, but it would have taken a much longer period of time, at a minimum of several more months, and resulted in enormously greater loss of life to others besides U.S. soldiers. Franks points out that by attacking Japan's railway systems and vital coastal shipping, the U.S. could have easily shut down all food distribution in the country. However, again, because the Japanese warlords did not care about the suffering of the civilian population, it is likely in such a scenario that they would have held out for so long that Japanese deaths from starvation would have easily exceeded the deaths from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Plus there were also the vastly greater numbers of deaths that would have occurred in the countries that had been invaded by Japan, people who would have continued to die under a brutal occupation. There would also have been much greater numbers of deaths amongst Allied POWs. The numbers calculated by Franks are truly staggering, and make clear that atomic bombing to force a surrender was by far the least of all evils in terms of total numbers of dead people. Franks also recounts the massive atrocities committed by the Japanese in WWII. Yep, after you read these sections (the atrocities mentioned included dissecting and drilling holes into the brains of captured, living American airmen, among other niceties), you might also look more favorably upon atomic bombing Japan. Let's face it, this was a war without mercy, and the Japanese, who were merciless in their treatment of their enemies, had no right to expect any. Nevertheless, after the surrender, Japan did receive mercy, in the form of massive shipments of food from America to their starving civilians.
5. Wouldn't a negotiated surrender, as demanded by the military warlords, have been preferable to atomic bombing? No, first and foremost, up until the atomic bombings, the Japanese militarist faction simply refused to consider surrender under any conditions. They wanted an invasion and a chance at redemption of national honor with their Ketsu-Go operation. The peace faction's best efforts consisted of delusional hopes that Russia could somehow broker a negotiated settlement. Even AFTER both atomic bombs had been dropped, and Russia had declared war on Japan, the militarist faction continued to hold out briefly for a negotiated surrender with three additional terms besides maintenance of the emperor (which the peace faction also wanted): a short occupation by a minimal force, demobilization of Japanese troops by Japanese officers, and trying of war criminals by Japanese courts (Franks does not mention these details in his book - they are contained in another book "The Day Man Lost Hiroshima"). Acceptance of such conditions would have resulted in only a temporary cease-fire, much like the treaty of Versailles had been for WWI. It would not have removed the basic root causes that led Japan to attack East Asia and America - the institutions and ideology of an intensely nationalistic and fanatic military elite that put national honor and pride above everything else, including common sense. This bitter lesson from WWI, that the military elites and institutions of Germany and Japan needed to be completely eradicated in order to ensure lasting peace with those nations, was what caused Roosevelt to demand unconditional surrender. Roosevelt did not want the sacrifice of the lives of so many soldiers to be in vain, as it had been for WWI.
In summary, people critical of the atomic bombing of Japan simply fail to grasp just how difficult it was at that time for the U.S. and the peace faction in Japan to force an increasingly delusional military elite that was fanatically committed to national honor and pride to give up all of their institutions of power without first completely immolating their country. Read this book, read it carefully, and you WILL understand.
The Definitive Account!.......2007-01-21
With regards to the dropping of the atomic bombs, this is the finest book I have ever read. Frank uncovers new evidence to illustrate that initial casualty figures given to Truman were based on a handful of Japanese defenders on the island of Kyushu. In reality, there were twice the amount of defenders willing to die for their emperor. Thus, Frank proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the bombs WERE needed in order to save THOUSANDS of American lives. Additionally, he proves with great clarity that the decision to drop the bombs ultimately saved thousands of Japanese lives as well. With this wonderfully well-researched piece of scholarship, Frank destroys Gar Alperovitz's arguement that Truman dropped the bombs in order to quell the emerging threat of Soviet communism. A must-read for anyone seriously researching the decision to drop the atomic bombs!!
Book Description
While cultural and scholarly traditions have led us to believe that war and control of nature are separate, there are many more similarities than most people might suspect. Tracing the history of chemical warfare and pest control, Edmund Russell shows how war and control of nature coevolved. Ideologically, institutionally, and technologically, the paths of chemical warfare and pest control intersected repeatedly in the twentieth century. War and Nature helps us to understand the impact of war on nature and vice versa, as well as the development of total war, and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Edmund Russell is an assistant professor in the Division of Technology, Culture, and Communication in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. This is his first book.
Customer Reviews:
creative synthesis.......2003-05-01
In War and Nature Edmund Russell, Associate Professor of Technology, Culture, and Communication at the University of Virginia, cleverly traces the interaction between chemical warfare and pest control from World War I to the Vietnam War. His central thesis is that war and control of nature have coevolved: "the control of nature expanded the scale of war, and war expanded the scale on which people controlled nature" (p. 2). Following up on his dissertation (University of Michigan, 1993), which won the Rachel Carson Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, Russell culled a wide variety of recently declassified U.S. government documents, business publications, and contemporary books and articles. Russell finds that World Wars I and II and the Cold War forged close ties between military and scientific institutions, and efforts to maintain such links became hallmarks of the post-World War II era. Scientifically and technologically, pest control and chemical warfare each created knowledge and tools that reinforced the other (p. 4) For example, on the eve of World War I, there were few U.S. chemical companies. They manufactured primarily low-profit bulk chemicals. In contrast, Germany had the best chemical factories and schools and had the largest output of sophisticated products. Eight German companies made up almost 80 percent of the world's dyes (p. 18). However, the increased use of mustard and chlorine gas in the war boosted the demand by European allies for these chemicals from the United States. The "Chemical Warfare Service" was created within the U.S. Army to employ civilian chemists to conduct research on war gases. This research also stimulated the invention of new insecticides to deal with such menaces as the boll weevil (attacking cotton crops), house fly (spreading typhus), the San Jose scale (damaging fruit trees), and mosquitoes (spreading malaria).
The use of chemicals in warfare is not new. Interestingly, Russell points out that the first recorded use of poison gas was in 428 BC, when Spartans besieging Plataea attempted to kill its defenders by burning wood soaked in pitch and sulfur under city walls (p. 4). However, chemical warfare increased throughout the twentieth century. According to Russell, at least 90,000 people were killed in World War I by gas, and estimated 350,000 were killed by gas in World War II, not including all the victims in Hitler's gas chambers. Even these figures seem low. Russell skillfully shows through cartoons how federal entomologists and chemists used insects in their propaganda as metaphors for human enemies. One cartoon depicts a conversation between two worms, one of them exclaiming: "What! Me sabotage that guy's victory garden? What do you take me for-a Jap? (p. 100)."
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 sought to exclude gas from warfare and define the rights of combatants. Public outrage at the use of chemicals as weapons of war continued to mount. After World War II, the Chemical Warfare Service and other chemical companies lobbied Congress vigorously, stressing the need to develop war gases as insecticides, for which increased funding was required. Noted chemists testified before Congress, claiming also that chemical and biological warfare was "more humane" than conventional warfare. According to Russell, who interviewed several of these chemists, Chief Chemical Officer William Creasy inanely argued in 1958 that 25,000 American casualties on Iwo Jima could have been avoided had the U.S. military employed chemical weapons (p. 208). Miracle "psychochemicals" were promoted, such as LSD-25 that could temporarily incapacitate troops but not permanently harm them. Russell cites a US Army propaganda film produced in 1958 in which a cat chased and caught a mouse, inhaled an unnamed gas, and then cowered from another mouse (p. 208). This publicity campaign persuaded Pentagon authorities to increase the U.S. Army's budget to $80,000,000 for chemical research.
Research to fight insects increased simultaneously with the development of chemicals to fight humans. As thousands of families moved to the suburbs in the 1950s, gardening became a popular hobby and stimulated the desire for pest control. Pesticide manufacturers such as Du Pont and Dow increased their marketing to this group of consumers, while federal crop dusting programs using DDT were initiated.
Russell shows how Rachel Carson's publication of Silent Spring in 1962 galvanized the American environmental movement, leading eventually to the ban on DDT in 1972. This immediate bestseller detailed the noxious effects of DDT on plants and animals and characterized pest control as a self-defeating form of warfare (p. 229).
Reading this book, one is struck by the immense irony of the twentieth century and the causal interaction of peace and war. Never before have so many human lives been saved (thanks to pesticides killing disease-carrying insects and increasing crop yields) and so many destroyed (mostly due to incendiaries, but also chemical weapons). Americans got better at saving lives partly because they got better at taking them, and vice versa. While War and Nature is almost too dazzling in its rich detail and sometimes a bit careless in its logic (e.g. implying that human beings should not be considered part of nature), the book breaks new ground in its connection of two traditionally disparate fields of inquiry, environmental and military history. It should be required reading in college courses in both security studies and environmental science.---Johanna Granville, Ph.D. (Stanford University)
angels and insects.......2002-10-01
World War I was just the beginning of an ongoing cultural and scientific process in which chemical based weapons were created and marketed for use against human and insect enemies. Russell reminds us that the cultural, institutional, and political evolution of twentieth century science and warfare in the United States began not with the J. Robert Oppenheimer and the physicists of Los Alamos but with chemists like James B. Conant and his colleagues at Harvard and American University, emergent corporations like Dupont and the Hooker Company, and government agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and the United States Chemical Warfare Service. With an eye for detail and a witty and readable narrative style, the author assembles scientific papers, declassified governmental and military planning documents, trade journals, and propaganda and advertising literature to reshape our understanding not only of the role of chemistry in warfare, but more importantly the reflexive nature of our understanding and relation to both technology and nature during times of peace.
Book Description
In the sixteenth century, one of the world's most precious commodities was cochineal, a legendary red dye treasured by the ancient Mexicans and sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. As the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans joined the chase for cochineal -- a chase that lasted for more than three centuries -- a tale of pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies unfolds. A Perfect Red evokes with style and verve this history of a grand obsession, of intrigue, empire, and adventure in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth.
Customer Reviews:
more than I ever expected.......2007-09-26
This was one of two books a friend traveled across the country to share with me. I am so glad she did. I would never have picked up this book on my own. I have a terrible time finding non-fiction works that are interesting - unless they are recommended. I look at the table of books and decide something looks good. Then when I get it home, I have a hard time getting to my 100 page allowed stopping point.
Greenfield does a wonderful job of describing the importance of the color red throughout history and the different compounds used to create it. With a focus on the cochineal originating in Mexico, this book covers the fortunes of Spain and the industry itself. Weaving the domestication of cochineal with the efforts of other countries to destroy Spain's monopoly, the book moves quickly. there were very few sections of the book where I was willing to put it down. Yes, I could stop at the chapters, but I only once put it down while in the middle of a chapter.
I highly recommend this book - and if I didn't have to send it back to its owner, I would keep it in the library. I will be recommending it to my mother for her book club. With their focus on women authors and a mix of fiction and non-fiction, this book will give them much to discuss.
Red trail through history.......2007-06-03
Some of the best stories are the histories of everyday objects that few ever consider. This book is an example of such a story. It traces the history of the color red; specifically, it examines the sources of red dye sought by humans over the past 700 years. Something as simple as a color can actually be quite difficult to obtain without the marvels of modern technology. This book starts of at the Venetian textile guilds of the late Middle Ages and shows the reader the state of the world's textile industry. Of all the colors, bright red is hardest to produce on clothing, and individuals and governments devote a lot of time and effort to procure new sources. Many are found, but the best one is carminic acid found in the insect cochineal, native to the Americas, and cultivated in Mexico specifically to obtain the color red. Starting with the Spanish conquest, red dye from Mexico is exported to the rest of the world, and four centuries of trade wars and political intrigue follow. The book lays all this out in chronological order, citing places, people, governments and institutions. But eventually, man's technology caught up with nature's bounty, and by 1900, synthetic red dyes destroy the cochineal cultivation industry. All the ensuing technical advances, scientific discoveries, and commercial contests are detailed clearly by the author. The book ends with a survey of the dye industry at the end of the 20th century, and a review of how red dye has influenced, and been influenced by fashion tastes throughout the centuries. This book touches many countries, and ties in history, economics, fashion, politics and science into a wonderful tale of man's obsession for a specific color.
Terrific study of the history of cochineal trafficking.......2006-09-16
This book is one of the very best I have seen in a long time. The author has taken great care to present historically correct and detailed information about the long history of cochineal farming, and sale of this commodity (dried beetles that can be processed to create a brilliant hue of red).
She reveals all of the intrigue of Spain's royalty, as they sought to keep this much prized product of New Spain exclusively for the Spanish empire. Even Perkin's discovery of the color "mauve" is discussed. This book will find broad interest among scholars and the general public. It is certainly a book worth owning, if you love the history of textiles.
Patricia Cummings
Colorful History.......2006-08-11
A Perfect Red is history at its best: examine something seemingly insignificant, let it take you down its byways and tangents to myriad interconnections, and soon you have a world history in miniature.
A Perfect Red is primarily concerned with the age old desire for bright colors, especially red. In the 16th century Europeans discovered a new source from the Americas which would provide a beautiful shade of dark crimson: cochineal. Over the next several centuries cochineal became one of the most prized imports from the New World until chemical dyes became commonplace in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Amy Butler Greenfield writes well, not just about cochineal and its uses, but about the economics and politics behind the search for the perfect red. She also does a good job examining the cultural changes which made red highly desireable, then a color to be avoided as a symbol of sin and decadence. Furthermore, she is a skilled depictor of personalities and draws shrewd portraits of the many fascinating characters involved in the story of cochineal. Highly recommended.
Facts are usually stranger than fiction..........2006-06-22
Facts are usually stranger than fiction, and this book supplies one more proof. The sheer ineptitude of some of the government ministers, the luck of some of the explorers, and the same mistakes being repeated over and over again, would be unbelievable if written as fiction, but this is history.
This book primarily covers the exploration, and exploitation of Cochineal (a small bug from South America that produces one of the best of all natural red dyes). There is mention of the earlier trade in Kermes (a similar red dye producing insect from the mediterranean) and other red dyes such as Madder, but it is primarily covering the rise and fall of the Spanish Empire and its monopoly on Cochineal. The book also covers uses of Cochineal in the post chemical dye age.
A note to members of the SCA and other re-enactors, this book, while worth buying, and very interesting, does more heavily emphasize the time period *after* Queen Elizabeth the first.
Average customer rating:
- Excellent book
- Michael's Death
- Enlightening
- Please read Falcon's Cry and remember that he was not alone.
- A message for millions of Americans
|
Falcon's Cry: A Desert Storm Memoir
Denise Donnelly
Manufacturer: Praeger Trade
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Military & Spies
| Professionals & Academics
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Specific Groups
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Military
| Leaders & Notable People
| Biographies & Memoirs
| Subjects
| Books
Asia
| History
| Subjects
| Books
| Afghanistan
| Armenia
| Bangladesh
| Belarus
| Bhutan
| Brunei
| Cambodia
| Central Asia
| China
| Far East
| General
| Georgia
| Hong Kong
| India
| Indonesia
| Japan
| Korea
| Laos
| Malaysia
| Maldives
| Mauritius
| Mongolia
| Myanmar
| Nepal
| Pakistan
| Philippines
| Russia
| Seychelles
| Singapore
| South Asia
| Southeast Asia
| Sri Lanka
| Taiwan
| Thailand
| Tibet
| Turkey
| Vietnam
General
| Middle East
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Iraq
| Middle East
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Strategy
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Operation Desert Storm
| United States
| Military
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| World
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Politics
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
ASIN: 0275964620 |
Amazon.com
Michael Donnelly's diary entries offer a matter-of-fact account of his 44 combat missions during the Gulf War, but his descriptions of dealing with doctors after coming home are more frightening. Diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, Donnelly is convinced what he has is "Gulf War syndrome"--brought on by exposure to low levels of nerve and poison gases during the war. "I don't know what to believe, where to turn for help," he writes. "All the while my body continues to deteriorate, heedless of the possible causes of its slow degeneration." Although he had served in the military for 15 years, Donnelly had to hire a lawyer and appeal to the Air Force Medical Evaluation Board to force the air force to pay him full disability benefits. And though the government denied any responsibility for his illness, we learn that U.S. officials both in Washington and at the front were aware of Iraq's chemical-weapons capability--and continued with their plans regardless: "Troops came upon camels lying dead and decaying in the desert ... dogs and rodents and other small animals died, suddenly, inexplicably, shortly after those tens of thousands of 'false' chemical weapons alarms rang out. The alarms were so common, some commanders even ordered their troops to disable or disregard them." Falcon's Cry is a story of courage and betrayal, a war story in which the casualty doesn't occur until after the fighting stops. --Linda Killian
Book Description
When Major Michael Donnelly was instructing his U.S. Air Force student pilots, he used to tell them three things: "Timing is everything; it's nice to be lucky; and there is no justice." Highly decorated fighter pilot, proud young patriot, loyal friend with a mischievous sense of humor, loving husband and father of two, he could not have imagined the tragic meaning those words would assume just a few years after his tour of duty in Desert Storm. In 1996 Major Donnelly was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig's Disease, at the unusually young age of 35; the onset of this illness marked the beginning of a kind of torture beyond the scope of even the most rigorous military survival training. Betrayed by his body, eventually paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, he experienced another betrayal perhaps even more difficult to comprehend--betrayal by his country. For despite the fact that over 110,000 Desert Storm veterans are sick, many dying of mysterious cancers and neurological diseases, including more than ten times the normal incidence of ALS--and despite all evidence pointing to U.S. troops having been dosed by low levels of Iraqi nerve agents and exposed to chemical weapons' fallout--the Pentagon adamantly denies any connection between their illnesses and their service in the Gulf War. Falcon's Cry: A Desert Storm Memoir, Michael Donnelly's unforgettable story, is his courageous attempt to unearth the truth and force an acknowledgment of that truth by the government he and his fellow veterans defended with their lives. Flying 44 fighter jet combat missions in a war fought on an all-or-nothing scale was thrilling for Michael Donnelly. When the war was won, he and his country rejoiced in the knowledge that, unlike in Vietnam, America had "gotten it right" in the Persian Gulf. Less than a decade later, the world is learning what veterans and their families have known since Desert Storm--we did not get it right at all. Saddam Hussein is still terrorizing a large portion of the globe. Moreover, we did not learn the lesson of Agent Orange which the Department of Defense denied for decades was the cause of early deaths and birth defects among Vietnam veterans and their families. Yet, thanks largely to the testimony of the author before the House of Representatives in 1997, a first step has been taken toward justice for the tens of thousands of Desert Storm veterans who are suffering virtually in isolation, many without any medical or disability benefits. Major Donnelly believes the truth about Gulf War Illnesses will be uncovered by studies funded in the recently passed Omnibus Appropriations bill, as well as through stories like his own, and he fervently hopes that America can, at last, "get it right."
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book.......2005-08-30
I bought and read the book when it first came out, and I bought a second so I can loan it to others to read and not worry about my first book getting lost. Besides the Donnellys, some of the people and events in the book were apart of our life as well. Very well written!
Michael's Death.......2005-07-02
I just found out about Michael's death through the Gulflink website. My sympathy goes out to his family. His story, with the help of his sister Denise, will be with us all always. He could have chose to sit back and just kept his disease and facts to himself, but he chose to share it with all in the hopes it might make a difference to someone. What a legacy to leave. And thanks Michael, for helping my family live through our anger we had at my brother's death, and dealing with Gulf War illness. My prayers are with your family....
Kelly Seibert
Hillsborough, NC
Enlightening.......2004-06-23
I obtained a tape of this book from the library of the blind , on tape.
I was fascinated with the whole process of his student days as well as the way they worked in the present time illness.
My heart goes out to him and his family and ALL other Soldiers who became ill with no apparent cause after the war.
I would like to know what his present status is, and would like to help in any way that is possible.
In thinking that our present war situation probably is as tentative, to hold this VITAL information back from those who serve makes a mockery of the Ideals our Country was founded on.
I used to participate in Living History, and the good thing about that is that we seem to LEARN from the past.
War does NOT change minds or hearts.
I would hope and pray that this present generation does not have to pay the price of this brave Soldier, Officer, and Gentleman.
Please read Falcon's Cry and remember that he was not alone........2001-12-12
I first came across the book in the fall of '99. It was at a critical time in my air force career. Soon, the mandate to submit to the anthrax vaccine would require a decision that would obviously affect the rest of my life. Take a vaccine that has been proven to cause terrible reactions and has been whispered to be a root cause of Gulf War Illness or refuse and be subject to military justice and the end of my career.
In my squadron, the most asked question to management was "If we become ill following the vaccine, will the Air Force take care of us?" As I saw in this book, the answer to the question is NO.
As pilots, our most treasured asset is our health. Without it, we can no longer perform the mission that we love. The manner in which Michael and Denise describe the physical and mental anguish he endured was truly overwhelming. I could imagine myself in his position and the way I would react; how I would feel.
In my months of research, this book proved to be one of the many determining factors in my decsion. When I talked to former commanders who reminded me of their experiences with Agent Orange or when I spoke with members at my own base that had testified to Congress about their illnesses following the anthrax vaccine, in the back of my mind was Michael Donnelly.
I ultimately made my decision to resign in lieu of taking the vaccine which has led to the end of my aviation career. The only salvation I have is the knowledge that I will never need to worry about unexplained illness in the future.
My most heartfelt sympathy and gratitude go out to Michael and Denise's families. Michael's story is one that I will never forget. Thank you for helping me make my decision.
A message for millions of Americans.......2001-09-03
In this story there is a message for millions of Americans. In this story the reader will learn about the "wheels of justice."
Average customer rating:
- Mandatory Reading and Reference for Complex Problem Solving
|
Analytical Troubleshooting of Process Machinery and Pressure Vessels: Including Real-World Case Studies
Anthony Sofronas
Manufacturer: Wiley-Interscience
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Industrial & Technical
| Chemistry
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
Safety
| Chemistry
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
Safety & Health
| Technology
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
General
| Chemical
| Engineering
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Machinery
| Industrial, Manufacturing & Operational Systems
| Engineering
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Machinery
| Mechanical
| Engineering
| Professional & Technical
| Subjects
| Books
Look Inside Science Books
| Trip
| Specialty Stores
| Books
All Titles
| Qualifying Textbooks - Fall 2007
| Stores
| Books
ASIN: 0471732117 |
Book Description
A highly practical troubleshooting tool for today's complex processing industry
Evolving industrial technology-driven by the need to increase safety while reducing production losses-along with environmental factors and legal concerns has resulted in an increased emphasis on sound troubleshooting techniques and documentation. Analytical Troubleshooting of Process Machinery and Pressure Vessels provides both students and engineering professionals with the tools necessary for understanding and solving equipment problems in today's complex processing environment.
Drawing on forty years of industrial experience in the petrochemical, transportation, and component manufacturing industries, the author introduces analytical models that utilize simple mathematics to provide engineers with the information needed to understand equipment operation and failure modes. This will allow engineering professionals to talk intelligibly with manufacturers, implement modifications required for continued operation, and ultimately help them save millions of dollars in lost production or warranty claims.
Readers will find in-depth coverage of factors that can cause equipment failure, including:
* Component wear and fretting
* Vibration of machines and piping
* Instabilities and sizing of pumps and compressors
* Thermal loads and stresses
* Gear, bearing, shafting, and coupling loading
* Corrosion and materials of construction
By striking a balance between analytical and practical considerations, each potential problem area is illustrated with case studies taken from the author's own extensive experience and accompanied by methods that can be used to address a variety of related challenges.
Download Description
A highly practical troubleshooting tool for today's complex processing industry Evolving industrial technology-driven by the need to increase safety while reducing production losses-along with environmental factors and legal concerns has resulted in an increased emphasis on sound troubleshooting techniques and documentation. Analytical Troubleshooting of Process Machinery and Pressure Vessels provides both students and engineering professionals with the tools necessary for understanding and solving equipment problems in today's complex processing environment. Drawing on forty years of industrial experience in the petrochemical, transportation, and component manufacturing industries, the author introduces analytical models that utilize simple mathematics to provide engineers with the information needed to understand equipment operation and failure modes. This will allow engineering professionals to talk intelligibly with manufacturers, implement modifications required for continued operation, and ultimately help them save millions of dollars in lost production or warranty claims. Readers will find in-depth coverage of factors that can cause equipment failure, including: Component wear and fretting Vibration of machines and piping Instabilities and sizing of pumps and compressors Thermal loads and stresses Gear, bearing, shafting, and coupling loading Corrosion and materials of construction By striking a balance between analytical and practical considerations, each potential problem area is illustrated with case studies taken from the author's own extensive experience and accompanied by methods that can be used to address a variety of related challenges.
Customer Reviews:
Mandatory Reading and Reference for Complex Problem Solving.......2007-07-17
Warning . . . books like this tend to go out of print (OOP). Not since Bob Eisenmann's OOP "Machinery Malfunction Diagnosis and Correction" has anyone put so many practical (dare I say "easy?") calculations in one place that allow the sincere problem solver to do his or her job. What's even better about this book is its seemingly unlimited range of applications. Was the force created by your rotor spinning, alone, enough to loosen those bolts or break that bearing housing? Sofronas helps you understand. Did that collar's interference fit overstress a critical component - enough to cause a failure? Check the book. Think you have water hammer? Prove it fast. Not a compilation of charts and tables - but truly something rare and to be coveted for its ability to arm you with the secrets of extreme failure analysis (lots at risk but little to go by).
Book Description
From veteran author Jack Kelly, a tour through the turbulent history of one of mankind's most critical inventions-the fiery substance that transformed everything from fireworks in China to warfare in Renaissance Europe and beyond.
When Chinese alchemists fashioned the first manmade explosion sometime during the tenth century, no one could have foreseen its full revolutionary potential. Invented to frighten evil spirits rather than fuel guns or bombs-neither of which had been thought of yet-their simple mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal went on to make the modern world possible. As word of its explosive properties spread from Asia to Europe, from pyrotechnics to battleships, it paved the way for Western exploration, hastened the end of feudalism and the rise of the nation state, and greased the wheels of the Industrial Revolution.
With dramatic immediacy, novelist and journalist Jack Kelly conveys both the distant time in which the "devil's distillate" rose to conquer the world, and brings to rousing life the eclectic cast of characters who played a role in its epic story, including Michelangelo, Edward III, Vasco da Gama, Cortez, Guy Fawkes, Alfred Nobel, and E.I. DuPont. A must-read for history fans and military buffs alike, Gunpowder brings together a rich terrain of cultures and technological innovations with authoritative research and swashbuckling style.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent book!.......2007-05-03
Finely written, plenty of interesting details, it's a masterpiece not only for those somehow devoted to the field of military history, but also to chemists dealing with the surprising field of energetic materials. Thank you, Jack Kelly!
It Entertains and Instructs... who could want for more?.......2007-01-26
1/25/2007
Jack Kelly, 1949-
Gunpowder -- Alchemy, Bombards, & Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World. / Jack Kelly.
New York: Basic Books, 2005. ISBN 0-465-03722-4 (paperback).
Fire speaks to us, says Jack Kelly. Considering that fire is in all liklihood one of the oldest -- if not the oldest -- of mankind's technological inventions, that's not surprising. Mr. Kelly succeeds admirably in keeping the fire metaphor close at hand throughout all 242 pages of his text, from the explosions of burning bamboo -- intended to frighten away the Chinese semi-human shan -- to our present-day nuclear fire.
Along the way, we're treated to a much larger panorama than most of us ever consider. The Chinese, most people are aware, came up with what we term "gunpowder" in the ninth century. They didn't call it gunpowder, of course -- no such thing as a gun -- but it was used as an elixer designed to render the user immortal; the stuff was made of sulfur, saltpeter, and dried honey. Developments were not quick in the orient, but by the early 1400's, China's military was equipped with cannon and individual firearms of a sort.
Gunpowder was to be widely used in Europe, though. While the "cannon" at Crecy and Agincourt may not have been terribly effective, they sounded the death knell for the armored knight / moated castle feudal system. (True, arrows could penetrate plate armor, but an accomplished archer required a lot of training; a soldier could be taught to use a simple firearm -- a matchlock, say -- relatively quickly.) Most of us have some familiarity with the military changes wrought by gunpowder ant its associated firearms, but how many of us know that:
* Christiaan Huygens attempted to devise an internal-combustion 'moteur a explosion' using gunpowder as the fuel. Only an inability to come up with a way to deliver successive charges to the cylinder prevented the actual fabrication of Huygen's engine.
* The proximate cause of the American Revolution could be considered British General Gates' determination to seize all gunpowder in and near Boston. The fights at Lexington and Concord in 1775 were simply the last of a series of raids. (Hmmm... "gun control" through ammunition control... nothing much seems to have changed, has it? One is permitted to cynically hope that the modern-day controllers are no more successful than General Gates.)
* Fulimates and nitrated hydrocarbons (nitrocelulose -- guncotten, and nitroglycerine) were at first developed as substitutes for gunpowder. Their applications were greatly modified, of course: fulminates into the "primers", and the nitro- compounds as components of so-called smokeless powder.
There's a lot to like in this book, and not much to dislike. The proofreading appears to have been exemplary: there are no glaring spelling arrors, misplaced paragraphs, orphaned sentences, or similar horrors to be found. The illustrations, a mixture of photgraphs, line drawings, and reproductions of what appear to be woodcuts, nicely compliment the text. One point which is at most, a minor annoyance: projectile speeds given in miles per hour jar a bit when one is used to thinking in terms of feet per second. (Yes, it's easy enough to multiply MPH by 1.47 to get FPS; even 1.5 is pretty close.)
The major strength of this volume is, however, the mixture: it's not a technical treatise, nor a chemical text, nor a tactical manual, nor a governmental history, nor yet a philosophical tract. It's all of these; literally, how gunpowder changed the world... the whole world. Jack Kelly has succeeded in fulfilling the promise of his title, and carries us along quite merrily, all the way through to the end. In our present day, he observes that gunpwder, its thousand-year history notwithstanding, has been largely relegated to two of its earliest uses: celebrations and entertainment.
Mr. Kelly thoughtfully supplies an informal "sources consulted" style bibliography, organized by chapter, and a working index, both of which are very welcome, indeed.
Dane.......2005-10-11
The book is informative but lacks foot notes. The author says it is because it is a popular history not a scholarly work. However foot notes would have made this a great book as is it is simply a good starting place.
Excellent overview.......2005-09-01
Jack Kelly has written an easy-to-read overview of the evolution of gunpowder development and use from its invention at the turn of the first millennium until it was replaced by synthetics in the 19th century. In fact, synthetics so thoroughly replaced gunpowder that what was once gunpowder is differentiated from its replacements by the term "black powder" while synthetics have taken over the germ gunpowder.
Beginning with its invention and use by the Chinese, who first used gunpowder in an early version of (ineffective) hand grenades, through its first effective use in bombards in Europe, until it became the staple for small arms in the early modern period of history Kelly presents an interesting narrative history on how gunpowder impacted the world. Although there is a technological deterministic aspect to the book (a natural result of the subject) the book does do a good job of putting gunpowder into context - in some cases gunpowder drives further military developments, in others the refinement of gunpowder is driven by other needs. This book is especially interesting if you have any interest in the concept of "military revolution." It focuses on one type of tool over a 900 year period, which allows you to see how one technology evolved, and was integrated into the transformation of war, over a significant period of time.
Great intro to history, science and technology.......2005-01-22
Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, & Pyrotechnics: The History of the Explosive that Changed the World, by Jack Kelly, Basic Books, NY, 2004. Kelly had done a very nice job with this crisp, well written history of gunpowder. He covers the subject nicely, in survey fashion, but with some detailed stories. There's history, technology, and science-all in fine factual detail but for the general audience. The chemistry, mathematics, metallurgy, and physics are there, but not in rigorous detail. Just enough to whet the appetite for further study. References are included for each chapter, though footnotes are lacking.
A detailed study of the history of gunpowder and related technologies could have gone on for thousands of pages. The author has selected certain stories for focus. He begins in China, and tells especially the European story, and the use of firearms in battle, on land and at sea. He includes some stories from America including the Revolutionary War, the story of Samuel Colt, and the Dupont story of gunpowder. He ends with development of the A-bomb, but really coverage ends at the beginning of the Twentieth Century with smokeless powder. There is no mention of lead mining or the famous shot towers. Kelly covers the abundance of saltpeter in the warm climate of China, its general shortage in Europe, and the extensive efforts to collect and extract it in Britain and France. But there is no mention of the Nobel Prize winning Borne-Haber process, invented in World War I in Germany, that resolved the nitrate shortage by making synthetic nitric acid from air and fossil fuels (natural gas, naphtha, coal), as is still practiced today.
The book is highly readable and will be appreciated by those interested in history, science, and technology. Index.
Books:
- Simplified TRIZ: New Problem-Solving Applications for Engineers & Manufacturing Professionals
- Soil and Aquifer Pollution: Non-Aqueous Phase Liquids - Contamination and Reclamation
- Solid State Chemistry and Its Applications
- Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds
- Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds
- Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds
- Structure and Mechanism in Protein Science: A Guide to Enzyme Catalysis and Protein Folding
- Synthesis and Applications of Isotopically Labelled Compounds, Volume 7
- Textile Processing with Enzymes
- The Biodiesel Handbook
Books Index
Books Home
Recommended Books
- That Devil Forrest: Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest
- Silenced: The Wrath of God Descends
- Goodnight Nobody: A Novel
- How to Raise a Cat: When Nobody's Home
- Mortal Fear
- Microbiology: An Introduction
- Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Euro
- The Story of Vermont: A Natural and Cultural History
- Letters to His Son, 1759-71
- Lone Star Blue and Gray: Essays on Texas in the Civil War
Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy(3rd Edition)
Intelligence Analysis: A Target-centric Approach
The Craft of Intelligence: America's Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
Strategic Intelligence: Windows into a Secret World
