2 comments about A Glimpse of Hell: The World War II Years: The True Memories of James "Jim" E. Brooks.

1. I have one word to describe James Brooks. Hero. This book is an excellant portrayal of what our soldiers went through in the second World War. The words on the page are gripping and they can't even start to tell us what these men went through. It is amazing to see the bonds these men had for one another. Throughout the book, I pictured myself right beside Mr. Brooks. There is no other person that I would rather be next to if I was in this situation. He is an American Hero!



2. I've known James for years and can guarantee every word is true. A witness to the history that overtook many men, James illuminates the day-to-day world that annealed character and brought out the strength of mind to carry on in spite of danger and hardship.

1 comments about Tragedy To Triumph: A Terrorist Attack Survivor Story.

1. May this serve as solace..& encouragement for those caught in terrorist attacks on NYC,Pentagon...Hopefully, this tale of courage, perserverance will help maintain morale & faith,may Peace prevail...amen

No comments about For Comrade and Country: Oral Histories of World War II Veterans.

2 comments about Looking Out From Under the Hat.

1. Great insight to what goes on with a Drill Sergeant in the day to day operations while training young civilians to become soldiers. Reading this one can see how this Drill Sergeant (and others) think about the job, mission, and others around him. I recommend this book for all former Drill Sergeants, soon to be Drill Sergeants, and soon to be recruits.



2. This is a great book with a lot of good insight into the day to day life of a drill sergeant.

2 comments about Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng Hui and Democracy in Asia.

1. Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia
   Richard C. Kagan
   Naval Institute Press, 2007, 231p
   
   In an oft-quoted passage, the ancient Roman biographer, Plutarch once explained his philosophy thus: "in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities." Richard Kagan's rich new work, Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia, which examines the life of one of the great statesmen of the 20th century, Taiwan's Lee Teng-hui, elevates Plutarch's approach to a entire framework for understanding the life and thought of Taiwan's first democratically elected President. Kagan illuminates Lee's often cryptic and elusive use of words, and supplies a robust account of the origins and development of his personal approach to life and politics.
   
   Kagan opens with Lee's moment of triumph: the 1996 Presidential election, Taiwan's first direct presidential election. A native Taiwanese, Lee had successfully risen through the ranks of a Kuomingtang (KMT) party dominated by post-1949 exiles from China, out-maneuvered a rear-guard fight to preserve the authoritarian dominance of the KMT, and defeated the rising pro-democracy party at the polls. How did the son of a humble Taiwanese policeman accomplish these feats?
   
   The answer, according to Kagan, lies in the experiences and values that have shaped Lee Teng-hui's personality: his sojourns in Japan and the US, his study of Zen, his conversion of Christianity in 1961, and his study of agricultural economics. These influences have created in Lee a character and understanding of great depth and flexibility. "If one painted Lee's idea of democracy, it would not hang in a picture frame," describes Kagan. "Rather, it would be splashed all over the neighborhood in expressions of creativity, chaos, and unpredictability with strings of entanglements and loose threads."
   
   Kagan begins his discussion of Lee's education, dismissing the pro-China criticisms that Lee is half-Japanese for the far more elegant and fruitful exploration of what being Japanese means for Lee. This meant education in a Japanese high school at a time when few Taiwanese were permitted to enter Japanese educational institutions; then a year at Kyoto Technical School (later Kyoto University) before entering the Japanese Army in 1944. In Japan he was deeply influenced by the writings of Nitobe Inazo and Nishida Kitaro. Nitobe was a philosopher and statesman who was also an agricultural specialist - a career that "could be a template for Lee's own." Lee also found the Zen thinker D.T. Suzuki to be a refuge from the militarism that was then sweeping the empire. In addition to encountering Japanese thinkers, Lee read voluminously among western classics in translation, developing an especial fondness for Thomas Carlyle. According to Kagan, Carlyle put words to Lee's feeling that true heroism created a new world order, driven by the energetic, questing spirit. Finally, Lee's Christianity is also treated as an important shaper of Lee's social action (for years, whenever possible, he gave humble sermons in local churches on Sundays even as a high ranking politician). Kagan returns to these resources again and again in explaining Lee's cryptic, contradictory, utterances and his freewheeling, apparently aimless, yet purposeful behavior.
   
   Thus, this is not a critical biography in the sense that it attempts to separate itself from the moral world of the subject it treats and to exhaustively examine what many might argue are key controversies or episodes in Lee's career. Kagan's reading of Lee's life is extremely sympathetic, and may be open to charges of hagiography. He is seldom directly critical of Lee's actions, often explaining what some might see mere political horse-trading as evidence of Lee's greatness. For example, Lee's support of mainlander Ma Ying-jeou for Taipei mayor in 1998 is presented as a demonstration of Lee's success in "breaking through the ethnic, geographical, and political division between mainlanders and Taiwanese" - yet Kagan never discusses Lee's controversial removal of that same Ma Ying-jeou from his post as Minister of Justice, a move that critics have slammed ever since as a sop to the political corruption on which they allege Lee depended. However, as Kagan points out, many of these controversies have been treated elsewhere in great detail.
   
   Despite its weaknesses and its resolutely pro-Lee point of view -unlike many commentators on Lee Kagan is commendably up front in staking out his position on the historical importance of Lee's life and career - this is a rich, entertaining, and educational work. The sections on Lee's upbringing and early life are absolutely fascinating - Lee's service in the Japanese army took him to both Taiwan, where he fired anti-aircraft guns against US attackers, and to Japan, where he helped clean up after the horrific Tokyo firebombing of March, 1945. Kagan hits his stride in his portrayal of Lee's foreign and domestic policy in the 1990s, a period offering many of the same themes that we see today: the President of Taiwan being labeled "provocative" and "a troublemaker" for attempting to break out of the constrictions placed on Taiwan by the US and China. It was Lee himself carried out the first phases of the removal of the Chiang family cult from public life, a fact often lost in the current debates. Kagan also faithfully reconstructs both the headiness of the post martial law period, with its future full of promise, and its fragility, under threat by hardliners in the KMT bent on suppressing the rising democratic feeling. Finally, Kagan sheds much light on the combination of relationships, luck, and achievement that brought Lee safely through the ranks of the KMT to deliver him to the Presidency at a critical moment in the nation's history, and on his relationship with President Chiang Ching-kuo, who in certain respects was much like Lee.
   
   Looking back on Lee's career, it seems incredible that Lee, who hung with a cabal of independence firebrands at Cornell, including Peter Huang, would-be assassin of Chiang Ching-kuo during his 1970 visit to the US, and David Tsai, prominent in US-based Taiwanese exile group World United Formosans for Independence, escaped imprisonment and execution. It also seems incredible, at least to this reader, that anyone who bothered to look into Lee's background could ever imagine that Lee would be an obedient servant of the KMT fantasy that Taiwan belongs to China. Yet during the early 1990s rumors swirled at home and abroad on precisely these points, a major tribute to the master politician that is Lee Teng-hui: Lee had sold out to black gold, Lee was a secret independence supporter, Lee was a Machiavellian power-monger, Lee was a KMT spy. As Kagan's biography of one of the greatest statesmen of the twentieth century so firmly demonstrates, they were all true, and they were not true at all.



2. In 1988 a man who had studied Zen and lived in the U.S and Japan came to power in Taiwan and began to shake up the island's politics. Lee Teng Hui was a master politician of the first class. His understanding of democracy led him to victory over the Koumintang, which had preserved Taiwan's independence but had also become dicatorial. The surprising thoguths of this world class leader should be studied by many. A true man of the people who understood the importance of democracy and the security of Taiwan. This obscure subject is a fascinating read.
   
   Seth J. Frantzman

3 comments about The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer.

1. This was a carefully thought out, well researched biography of a person whom I had heard only a few facts about. While I grew up in India, history in India is not well taught and one reads basic facts without the details. This book shows the details behind the person from his childhood to his adulthood that lead to the culmination of the major dead he did, ordering the firing on the crowd without reason. It was prompted by the attack on one English woman before. It shows that colonialism is never simple, it is always accompanied by such atrocities. The crawling order that followed was also terrible. What is worse is that so many English felt that Dyer was justified in doing what he did and supported him, both in India and in England. To people who have not read the history, this will be a painful remainder that the positives that India got from the British came with terrible negatives. He felt that there should be a eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not revolt". He felt Indian to the core as long as every Indian knew his place and served every Englishman. What is not covered in the book is the reaction to Dyer by the Indian freedom fighters. The author marginalizes the work done by people like Gandhi. However, having known what the British did in India and how they debated Dyer's actions, I for one am glad that they are not in India anymore. India may have limitations in its democracy, it may have deficiencies, but it is improving. When part of the colonial empire, the literacy of India moved from 6% to 11% from 1900 to 1945. The British spent more in the city of Manchester in city system than one whole province. Now, India's literacy is more than 60% in 50 years and economy is improving. Anyone would take that to a colonial power. What General Dyer did was epitomize the worst of what was in the British at that time.



2. The summary over here reads over 200 dead. This isn't anywhere close to the 1500 plus people who died on this day.
   
   1 star is more of a neutral view, having not read the book.



3. There are several events that are seared into Indian memory. One was the massacre at Delhi by Nadir Shah's troops in 1739. The second is the one ordered by General Dyer at Jallianwala Bagh in 180 years later. This book, by a British scholar, is a sort of soul-searching biography of the General.
   
   The story starts with General's family history, and covers his education, his military training, and subsequent career. His career is described in great detail, in nearly 200 closely typed pages. The rest of the 200 odd pages are devoted to the massacre, the investigation and trial, and General Dyer's natural death.
   
   There is a great deal of detail. There are extensive notes as well. There are 28 photographs, apart from some maps. The photographs bring out the horrors of colonial rule clearly - one showing an elderly man having to crawl in the street to get to his own house, because of the dehumanising crawling order. Mr. Collett has done a painstaking job. To my knowledge, this is the most detailed and authentic work on this tragic event.
   
   The British were at the zenith of their power and glory, and this was getting reflected in their behaviour and thinking. This comes through very nicely in Mr. Collett's work. He shows how British opinion about the massacre was divided. There were a large number of people who were horrified, but there was also a determined group which defended his actions. General Dyer himself remained defiant, unrepentant to the end.
   
   Mr. Collett's book is also timely - the curtains have not been drawn on such excesses. They were repeated across Europe during the second world war. They continue to take place today in Iraq. Today's military may have become more accountable, but it has certainly not become more responsible in its use of force than General Dyer was.
   
   There was a post-script to this, which Mr. Collett has not mentioned. On 13-March-1940, an Indian named Udham Singh, who had seen the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, searched out and shot dead Sir Michael O'Dwyer (the then Governor of Punjab, and an untiring defender of General Dyer) at Caxton Hall in London. He surrendered to the Police, giving his name as Ram Mohammed Singh D'Souza, signifying brotherhood among Indians of different faiths. He was hanged by the British on 12-June-1940.
   
   All in all an excellent book for scholars, and those interested in this period of Indian history or in colonialism.
   
   If you read Hindi, you may also be interested in a shorter book 'Jallianwala Kaand ka Sach', Major General Sooraj Bhatia, published by Prabhat Prakashan, Delhi.

2 comments about A Good Idea of Hell: Letters from a Chasseur a Pied (Texas a & M University Military History Series).

1. These letters written to his family by a foot soldier serving in France during World War I graphically remind us that war can not only be hell, it is hell.

   American raised and professionally a scholar at Stanford University Robert Pellissier nonetheless felt the pull of his native country, France. This may well have been his reason for enlisting in the French army in 1914. He was sent to the front where he fought in the Alsace mountains.

   Masterfully written these documents relate in gripping detail life and death in the dank, frigid trenches where French soldiers are bombarded every day by thousands of German shells. Pellissier tells his family of the horrific sights he encounters almost hourly, and of the ill treatment of civilians by the Germans. His professorial eye misses nothing of the bravery or the cowardice.

   He was wounded on August 29, 1916, and died soon after. His letters were penned from officer training school, from the front lines, and from the hospital. All are testimony to a man who loved and died for his native land.

   - Gail Cooke




2. Ably edited for contemporary readers by Joshua Brown, A Good Idea Of Hell: Letters From A Chasseur A Pied presents the diary and letters of Robert Pellissier, a man who served his country of France in the infamous trench warfare of World War I. Vivid descriptions of shelling, the long inactive waits in the cold and the wet, the limited tactics, the news of the battlefields, insights on how changing technology affected the nature of war itself, and a great deal more comprise this literate and highly recommended eyewitness testimony of the unfolding military battlefield history of World War I. Of special interest is the inclusion of three letters from a Protestant army chaplain at the end, explaining just how Pellissier "heroically and selflessly" died during battle -- which resulted in his being posthumously awarded the Medaillie Militaire and the Croix de Guerre avec Palme.

No comments about A Secret Place in My Heart: A Diary of a World War II Wac.

3 comments about Wingmen: Two Friends, Four Wars, Flying and Fighting Through the 20th Century.

1. This is a VERY interesting book! These boys lead full and interesting lives. Shows us parts of history that you would find nowhere else. Also shows a friendship that lasts a lifetime. I recommend it highly.



2. Wingmen is much more than a memoir or an oral history. It's the story of a great friendship that spans the decades from World War II to the present day. In turns it's touching, humorous, harrowing, and inspiring. In the end you feel that you've not so much read a book as spent time listening to entertaining stories told by two good friends you've known for years. The chapter dealing with the "Forgotten War" in Korea is especially insightful, offering readers a chance to see a part of this little-discussed conflict from the inside. All in all a great read.



3. Pete Wurts and I wrote this book with the help and guidance of a succesful author of a number of fine books, Jay Wurts, Pete's Son. Jay is also a former military pilot and still flies for pleasure.
   
   Pete and I told our story from our first meeting as aviation cadets in the Army Air Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor through WW II and Korea and many adventures in flying, business, and many others up until the year 006. Pete made his last flight to the heavens shortly after the turn of the year 06 to 07.
   
   I also included 27 years as a test pilot for North American Aviation.
   
   The story has many pictures covering all segments of this story of over 300 pages and 64 years.
   
   I have had many fine compliments from people of all walks of life.
   
   Bill Yoakley

5 comments about Che: The Photobiography of Che Guevara.

1. Che Guevara was one of the greatest man to hit this earth. His influence has touched millons of people worldwide. This photobiography shows the respect due to a man that of his statute,"the Jesus Christ of his time" only in a guerrilla costume. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, well this is book is worth a lifetime and a half worth of words. Without photography it would be impossible to know how idles such as CHE himself would have lived. Words only begin to describe a person and his personal lifestyle, but when you see it throu pictures is like you live that life. Till this day Che is the only man that makes me get goosebumps everytime i see the picture of him lying there, dead, with his eyes open.



2. Absolutely Fantastic! The quality of the photographs and their subject matter are first class. Not only was I able to find out more about Che's life as a revolutionary, but to read about his childhood aswell was fascinating. I was especially intrigued to discover that the Cuban Secret Service actually disguised Che as a middle aged man so as to ensure his passage to Bolivia. Pure Brilliance! A powerful piece of work which gives a detailled insight into the life of one of the world's greatest men. Well worth a look!



3. Tired of reactionary propaganda? Want to see the Che that we know? The Che that cared in a world dominated by corporate interests that didn't care whatsoever? Than this book is for you. This looks at Che the human, not just the legend we have come to know and love. Che working in the fields with the common man, (Can't picture good ol Dubya doing that, can you?) These pictures exemplifies what El Che cared about: US! The people ignored by governments and their corporate backers. The people in Latin America where a MAJORITY of which were poor. In many countries even today in Latin America, that is still the case. A great look at those that know and love Che Guevera and those that still need to be introduced to the legend that cared.



4. What about the dozens of people that Guevara put to death? Where is the mention of Guevara's wife and toddler who were left to fend for themselves whie "El Che" adventured in the mountains? Guevara is worthy of study but not of unctricized adoration. This is a book of exceptional photography but by no means is it a complete, accurate portrayal of Che Guevara.



5. This is a beautiful book of never seen before photos of Che Guevara. There are many of his childhood, and some historical gems inside here. There is an example of his first writing as a child, and also a copy of part of the infamous letter written to Fidel, and even the photo that appeared in the newspaper about the two "Leprosy Experts" during the Motorcycle Diaries period.
   This is all very tastefully presented, but is done as a memorial to Che so does omit darker aspects to his character. A beautiful item for Che fans...