No comments about ALL TIGERS, NO DONKEYS: A Citizen Soldier in Croatia, 1994-1995.

5 comments about A Hundred Miles of Bad Road.

1. I've been a big fan of Keith William Nolan for quite some time. I read The Battle For Saigon with interest because I was a member of the 377th Security Police Squadron USAF that was given the task of defending Tan Son Nhut Airbase. I took part in the defense of the airbase during Tet 68. I read One Hundred Miles of Bad Road, after reading The Battle For Saigon, and finally realized just what Troop B, 3/4 CAV endured out on Highway One outside the west perimeter. The tenacity of the 25th INF and the leadership Lt. Col. Otis and Captain Virant was instrumental in thwarting the sustained ground attack by seven NVA/VC Regiments. This is an accurate account of the battle in and around Tan Son Nhut Airbase. I highly recommend this book.



2. I had no contact with Dwight Birdwell or the 3/4 Cav for 33 years, but the book took me back to Highway 1 last week. Accurate and truthful are the events and people (not the case in too many war memoirs). The photos are real troopers who got bloody. Even the dates were interesting for sorting memories.

   One of my most vivid memories of the war had been Birdwell on a burning tank firing a .50 caliber machine gun until it glowed in the night, and his silhouette carrying out the badly wounded. That memory is in the book (Chapter 19) and accurate to the number of RPG's fired.

   The lifers, loafers, heros, and base camp warriors are there also, warts and all. Read Tennyson for the glory of the cavalry, read Birdwell for the real thing.




3. This Is a story of truth from the men who were In vietnam.Nolan served in the vietnam war.And from reading this book he takes you there.And tells us the american people what we never knew that happened during this war.An amazing truthful book to read.I would give it ten stars."Truth In justice for all of our vets" They are the back bone of this country.The goverment should know. When our vets came home sick and dying from agent orange.Our goverment denied everything.Even the one who gave the orders to drop It. Killed his own son.When his son died he knew it was from agent orange. He later killed himself because of his guilt.Since he was a high ranking officer he was sworn to silence.Like all the other military officers. Our goverment does not care about the men who not only died for this country.Also the ones they killed and never admitted to.The cost to the goverment would be to great.So deny ,deny, at all cost. As the govement has always lied about our vets.When they came home sick from Vietnam also Saudi Arabia.The goverment denied all of this again.Deformed babies,cancer,of all kinds.The goverment again denied our men came in contact with any chemicals to make them sick.When it has been proven that the air they breathed and the contact with tanks were contaminated from Iraq weapons used on our military soldiers.WHY''



4. Dwight and his comrades fought the NVA on the west side of Tan Son Nhut Air Base and stopped them in their tracks. If they had not stopped them, the NVA would have overrun the base. I was just outside the west side of the base next to the Vietnamese Joint General Staff compound. We had VC taking down the wall around the compound with RPGs. We had no weapons and the Vietnamese guards had only personal arms. If the NVA had gotten past Dwight, we would have been goners. Luckily, a company of Vietnamese Marines arrived and quickly put the VC unit out of action. Afterwards, we found the remains of many brave 716th MPs and other individual American military attacking the VC from the other side. I wrote a letter to Dwight and thanked him for his bravery and determination not to give up to overwhelming odds. I hope he got my letter. Howard A. Daniel III, Master Sergeant, US Army Retired



5. I looked forward to a description of this little talked about segment of the Vietnam war. I was disappointed that there was little of the daily life of a tanker and the flow of the book made it a hard read. I would not recommend it although there is little else out there on the subject.

No comments about The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow (Civil War America).

2 comments about The Preacher's Tale: The Civil War Journal of Rev. Francis Springer, Chaplain, U.S. Army of the Frontier (The Civil War in the West).

1. The Preacher's Tale: The Civil War Journal Of Rev. Francis Springer, Chaplain, U.S. Army Of The Frontier is an intimate, candid, revealing, deeply personal record of the Civil War which reveals 51-year-old Francis Springer's thoughts and experiences on the nature of war, the meaning of violence, and the role of religion. Enlisting with the Union Army in the fall of 1861, Reverend Spring was with the 10th Illinois Calvary and witnessed the Battle of Prairie Grove in December 1862. Springer was later named post chaplain at Fort Smith where, in addition to preaching and ministering to the troops, he was placed in charge of refugees and displaced victims of the virulent guerrilla warfare which took place in northwest Arkansas. He also wrote articles and columns in the "Fort Smith New Era" under the pseudonym "Thrifton". Springer's appraisals of life in the Army of the Frontier are honest, insightful, and informative. Enhanced with several never-before published photographs, and appendices featuring accounts of six military executions that Springer participated in as a Union Army chaplain, including of previously unpublished last letters home of two rebel soldiers condemned and executed at Fort Smith, as well as a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln, make The Preacher's Tale a very highly recommended and valued addition to the growing body of Civil War accessible memoirs and biographies.



2. Rev. Springer, a former neighbor of Abraham Lincoln's, was a sensitive observer and careful recorder. His accounts of the men he ministers to are exceptionally moving. This book is an excellent resource for the Civil War scholar, with a highly readable and intelligent introduction. The source notes alone are worth the price.

5 comments about As Always, Jack: A Wartime Love Story.

1. The book i chose to read was "As always Jack" by Emma Sweeney". The book was reprinted not so long ago in April 2003. Written in the 1940's.
   There are not many characters in the book, just Jack and Beebe and their daughter. This book is mostly written in letter form by Jack who is a 26 year old navy pilot. After about only two weeks of being together their relationship gets stronger and the eventually fall in love.
   
   The theme of the book is a middle aged women ( daughter of Beebe and Jack) discovers her father past and relationship with her
   dead mother. Its a very sad and sympathetic novel. Also it leaves you feeling curious. To me it was curious because you never find out what ever happen to Jack. After his plane being reported as missing and him being lost in the Bermuda triangle his wife assumes he is dead. But no one really knows how he died, for example if he drowned or died of hunger. There was a little bit of foreshadowing also. Such as when Jack wrote a letter saying that if he passed away during his journey to never forget who he was and that is all he wanted..To be remembered. To me this was foreshadowing because in reality he did pass away but at least Beebe new what he wanted after he had passed away.
   
   My favorite character is Jack. He is miles away from Beebe but still keeps in touch with her by written to her continuously. He can be an inspiration or role model for middle age men, for his caring and loving even thought he won't be able to see his loved ones within months. It made me feel so sad reading those letters because he would inform to Beatrice that he has reached a different country and what he did their and who he met. But Beebe only wrote to him a few letters and to me that is not fair, because he took time to write those letters and she only replied to about 5 of them.
   
   Their daughter never even got to meet her father or even get a chance to see what he looked like. There's was a small picture
   she had but his face was so blurry in the picture she couldn't see her resemblance to him.
   My favorite part of the book was when she finally found out that her father new she was going to be born and at least had a thought of her and how she would grow up to be. This brought a smile to my face because the daughter was always worried that her father didn't even know she existed or was going to exist. So now she didn't feel lost anymore she knew what her past was.
   I strongly do recommend this novel because it puts you in an uncomfortable place you don't want to be in but it also lets you know how it was so many years ago and how it is not to grow up with a father and not even have a clue to who he was.



2. Did you ever wish you could meet the perfect man, the kind of man who has a sense of humour, who is intelligent, who talks about his feelings, and who writes you the kind of love letters that not only make you feel gooier than a marshmallow but also restore your faith in all mankind? Well, Jack IS that man! As I read his letters, I couldn't help but fall wholeheartedly in love with him. In fact, I don't think any woman could read this and not fall in love with Jack. He's even dreamier than a year's worth of the R.E.M. stage of sleep.
   
   Jack should have been a writer, if only he'd lived long enough. He had the gift of the gab in spades. His letters, written off the cuff, are better than the writing you find in books that writers have spent years refining and rewriting.
   
   But most of all, Jack is a true romantic. Seriously, I think this is about the best love story I have ever read. If you have a soft spot in your heart for true romance, if you like nothing more than a love story, then all I can say is READ THIS BOOK! And the best thing about it is, Jack's not fictitious. He really lived. Knowing that there really are men like this in the world, who aren't just invented by some writer of fiction, will really gladden your heart, just as it did mine.
   
   I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is definitely in my list of top ten books of all time.



3. Sometimes I crave a simple, old-fashioned book. With nice people I'd like to meet. With only one plot, so I don't have to remember who's who in the cast. And with a moral that makes me feel good to be alive.
   
   Not an easy book to find.
   
   So I was happy to be alerted to the simple goodness of a short --- 179-page --- book of letters. The author of the book is Emma Sweeney, who is, of all things, a literary agent. The author of the letters is Jack Sweeney, the father she never knew.
   
   The 45 letters tell of Jack's courtship of Beebe Mathewson. He is "Episcopalian, Democrat, Texan, Irish, bat right-handed, throw right-handed, detest cauliflower and sweet potatoes, and took an oath when I was five years old to devote my life to making blondes happy." Beebe is a blonde, from Coronado, California. They met shortly after the end of World War II, just 11 days before the Navy ships Jack off to Hawaii.
   
   What we know at the beginning of the book: Beebe and Jack will marry. They will have four sons. A decade later, when Jack is a Navy pilot stationed in Bermuda, he will fly off one day and disappear. His plane will never be found. Months later, Beebe will give birth to one more child --- Emma.
   
   It is one thing to know your father as a dim memory. It is quite another never to know him at all, to wonder what he was like, to be haunted by the possibility that he was never aware he was going to have a daughter. Emma Sweeney lived with those questions for decades. Then her mother died --- and in the back of a drawer, Emma found the letters her father wrote during their first separation.
   
   These are letters of courtship, unlike any others collected from military men who have died. Jack starts slow and shy and carefully ironic: "I've never seen a more beautiful sight than you sitting across that table in candlelight, surrounded by filet mignons and profiteroles. Why couldn't I have met you when you were young?" (Beebe was then 23.) He is encouraged by her response: "This letter of yours was the biggest thing that's happened in my life since I left the USA." (Sadly, Beebe's letters have been lost.) He starts to let her into his life: golf, cards, reading, work, movies, silly jokes. And we, in turn, start to imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end of these letters --- you cannot help but think that this is a damn nice guy.
   
   Within five months, he's closing hard: "I was brought up by the same kind of people you were, Beebe --- people who believe that when two people are married, they're the same as one person, and everybody else is on the outside." Well, if that isn't laying it on the line. Reading that, did your heart pound? Mine did.
   
   The letters pile up, then stop abruptly --- for on the next page is a wedding announcement. There was no time for invitations; the wedding was held just three weeks after Jack's return from Hawaii. Because they knew. They just did. And Beebe and Jack were right; they were happy together. Right up to that moment in 1956 when he died.
   
   Emma reads through the letters, and does some digging, and finds out one fact that her mother had never revealed to her. It will make you cry --- sudden, hot, brief tears. And you'll cry again when you read Jack's "last letter", written just a few days before his death. Which is just as it should be. A love story with a sad ending, and then a new chapter with a little girl....that's classic material.
   
   I read such stylish, sophisticated, brilliant books. I stretch to understand them, to be worthy of them. And here is this slim volume, so simple, so tender. The point couldn't be more obvious. And yet it too is a stretch. Maybe a bigger one. Maybe a much bigger one.



4. I purchased this book for a friend of mine whose husband was also named Jack Sweeney. She is also his widow and the mother of his five sons. With so many similarities I couldn't resist getting this for her. After the book arrived I had time to glance through it myself and found myself reading it from cover to cover! It puts you back in time.
   CL Pratt



5. When I first heard of As Always, Jack, I came here to learn more about it. Upon discovering it to be a slender volume of love letters, I knew immediately that I wanted to read it, and I couldn't wait. I opened the book to the first page sample page, and before I finished the third, I was already choked up and had tears in my eyes.
   
   It was Emma Sweeney's sense of loss and longing that evoked my sympathy. Bereavement is difficult enough for adults to live with, but Emma was only ten years old when she was finally able to grieve for the father she would never know. I could empathize with her need to find any little scrap of information about him, to have any little thing to cling to, and how that desire became a driving force in her life. I commiserated with her proneness to idealize him, and her eventual adult awareness that he was the one person who would never, could never, hurt or disappoint her. He would always be perfect. His image would never tarnish. I suspect that sharing her father with the world helped to bring a measure of completeness to her life. I knew it would be a wonderful book because it was easy to see it was a labor of love.
   
   While reading Emma's poignant introduction to the love letters her father wrote to her mother, Beebe, while they were separated during WWII, I expected the book to be bittersweet and full of longing. Instead, his letters are filled with the joyous certainty of a young man head over heels in love with a beautiful blonde he met at a dance just days before he shipped out. I probably noticed different things about Jack than others did because I saw him through an astrologer's eyes: he was an Aquarian whose life was archetypical of the sign. He made a career of aviation, liked to read his horoscope, had a quirky sense of humor, and an uncanny ability to see into the future. Even in death he was enigmatic, having disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. His last letter to Beebe stunned and left me tearful, full of wondering. Fortunately for us, and thanks to their daughter's love, Jack and Beebe Sweeney will live on forever.

No comments about A Horseman for the Emperor: a Cavalryman of Napoleon's Army on Campaign Throughout the Napoleonic Wars.

5 comments about An Irregular Girlhood In Hitler's Shadow: A Memoir.

1. This surprising memoir has all the ingredients for a Merchant Ivory multi-episode TV production. A sensitive and acutely aware child, the daughter of an autocratic Nazi ambassador who secretly opposes the Hitler regime, vividly remembers her earliest experiences growing up in China and Vladovostsic in lucid prose which often crosses the border into poetry. The venure proceeds to America via horrific sea voyages, to an idyllic interlude in Kentucky, reminiscent of "National Velvet" with just a soupcon of (gasp) depraved sex. Another sea voyage to Cuba then back to New York,a now thoroughly rebellious egalitarian young lady, tries to defy the upper-class pretensions of her aristocratic father, who has been (double gasp) carrying on an extended love affair with his wife's sister. Her family, having no income, other than what her loving, long-suffering mother earns doing domestic work, struggles at the edge of poverty throughout these tumultuous years. Despite this, the author's father still has the connections to arrange for her and to overpower her vigorous objections, to appear as Miss Germany in a coming out society ball. Then, once again, against her will she is shipped over to Germany to live with a venerable noble family while completing her education. More reluctant appearances at glittering Austrian society balls; being courted (unsuccessfully) by the scion of an aristocratic family: thence back to America, and not yet twenty years of age! (Whew!)
   
   This synopsis seems almost too fantastic to be believed. However the story as it unfolds in compelling, lucid detail, has the unmistabable aura of authenticity. I look forward to (if there is any literary justice in this world), Volume Two.



2. "A book......that wishes to mount the canvas on which a family portrait is painted." Haldy Regier indeed succeeds to do just that and in the process takes us through upheaval, tension and stoic resolution not to let life crush those who travel the road. She paints a picture with tenderness as well as resolution of a family who, like countless others, was dealt a difficult hand and found its unique and creative way of dealing both with challenges that were personal to this group of people as well as those that many German families faced in some shape or form.
   
   The remarkable aspect of this story is in the way it is told. Throughout the narrative it is clear to the reader what a path the author has travelled herself not only in sheer geographical miles but in understanding and coming to terms with her own circumstances over which she had no influence throughout her girlhood. It shows the searching questions the author has posed herself and holds the reader in thrall as s/he learns of the events and the meaning she makes of these events. A book showing the personal development of a human being shining through the fast paced narrative.



3. An Irregular Girlhood in Hitler's Shadow by Vera Haldy-Regier is a very touching, deeply honest book about coming of age during and after World War II. However, its appeal is universal, reaching beyond its historical context to describe a painful, anxious childhood in a complex, cruel world. Throughout her youth, the author bravely kept her pain and humiliation to herself and one can only imagine how much she longed for a sympathetic family who understood what she endured. Her father, a complex, despotic man, was shown also to be vulnerable through carefully chosen, insightful words and a forgiving daughter's heart. Haldy-Regier writes well and brings insight and balance to the picture she paints of the Nazi years, lived in China, the family's early years of hardship in America and her subsequent banishment by her parents to Germany.
   Lisbeth W., Woodstock, NY



4. This is an important book in at least four areas:
   
   1. It belongs in collections of books about World War II. One of the perennial themes in the history of WW II was the search for Hitler enemies. Here was one. There was a limited amount that he could do, but in spite of death threats he did that.
   
   2. It is a coming of age story in a time and in a situation where the young lady was dealt a pretty bad hand. Her life was a lot rougher than what we read in other stories of life in our times. Of course her life was a lot better than others in say Dresden, Nagasaki, or Auschwitz.
   
   3. This is beautifully written memoir. Just the prose itself creates word pictures that bring a different world to life.
   
   4. In the Afterward she remarks on the attitude in this country in 1948 when she arrived and today with our country's attitudes towards those of the Muslim faith, and the comments being made by the current flock of politicians regarding Latin immigration.
   
   My only regret is that the author has found it nessary to self-publish this book. It should have been published by one of the big publishers so that a full blown marketing program could have been carried out and more people would become aware of it. It is very difficult for an unknown author to get her book on the shelves at Borders, Barnes and Noble where a large number of people would find it.
   
   My hope is that while this is her first book, that it not become her only. It is a gem of rare quality.



5. An uplifting memoir, An Irregular Girlhood in Hitler's Shadow reveals the spirit of a very determined young girl. Raised by a selfish father and a sweet-natured mother during World War II, the author faces many challenges along her path to adulthood. The book is brutally honest, revealing her most intimate feelings, experiences and memories.
   
   Written with warmth and humor, the book has an engaging style that draws you in from page 1 and holds your interest until the last page.
   
   The author's long journey to America begins in Tsingtao, China and ends in Riverdale, New York. Whether Ms. Haldy-Regier reminisces about nature, her pets, friendships or hardships, the reader is thoroughly entertained.

2 comments about Destroyer: An Anthology of First-Hand Accounts by Those Who Served on the B- and C-Class Destroyers in the Second World War.

1. by another name. Redundancy makes for tedium in this book. Far from being "a book which matches and complements that bestseller of the postwar years, The Cruel Sea," as the usually meticulous Len Deighton claims, the book rises to that level only when selections from that book are presented. The stories are interesting, mostly. They demonstrate, again, that England, not the United States, won the battle of the Atlantic, and they show how brave men suffered. But the book's strategy, following the career of one class of destroyers, limits its scope and pool of potential readers. Also ideosyncratic are its appendices--nautical terms, histories for ships mentioned, and obituaries of key figures. But these are welcome; I could do without verses, though, as none can be confused with poetry. It's well that the profits from the book sale will be used to restore "the sole remaining Second World War British destroyer."



2. What historian Ian Hawkins has done previously for the air war, he has now done for the war on the Atlantic--put together a first-rate collection of eye-witness accounts by the men who fought and risked their lives on the Atlantic in the Second World War. Mr. Hawkins is known for his riveting use of eyewitnesses to put together books that bring the Second World War to life. His greatest book, in my opinion, "Munster: Before and After", follows the Eighth Air Force on one raid to Munster, Germany. In that book, he tells the story not just from the point of view of the men in the heavy bombers, but also went to great lengths to interview Germans who lived through the attack on the ground. Mr. Hawkins brings the same kind of meticulous research and interviewing skill to his newest book. I found the new book fascinating in the insights it gives into the destroyer war. It is obvious this was a labor of love for Hawkins, whose father was lost on a destroyer during the war. First-person history has become a common and highly effective way to tell history. Ambrose did it, so did Cornelius Ryan and Gerald Astor. It gives the reader a personalized view of the great events. I believe the previous reviewer failed to grasp the concept of the importance of first-person narrative, and that is unfortunate. Mr. Hawkins does an excellent job of tying the stories together with text on the historical background. He covers the war chronologically, from its first desperate hours, to the horrifying early years when German U-Boats ruled the high seas, right through to the end. Anyone who reads this book for what it is, a painstakingly gleaned collection of eyewitness narratives on every aspect of the destroyer war, will not be disappointed. I recommend it highly.

2 comments about A Soldier's Life: Inside the Israeli Army.

1. The book is excellent. The photographs are stunning. I think it really captured a unique point of view of this army that we don't ever see in the three minute sound bites on the news. I think it is refreshing to see a photo journalist focus on important issues in the world that are not depressing. It makes a thoughtful gift for any occassion.



2. The book has nice black and white photographs which capture many aspects of the typical Israeli soldier's life but the text is very poor and absolutely not engaging, to the point of being a major disappointment. If the photographs are not your main motive to buy a book, avoid this title and read the old but still good book "A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier" by Reuven Gal or any of the Israeli sodliers' memoirs published recently.

No comments about Battleship Sailors.