5 comments about One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story.

1. She gives a believable insight to the nonchalant attitude of the higher military leaders that continue to this day. Many of us have fell victim to leader's incompetence and quest for promotion and the details she gives are accurate.
   
   Her background is impressive and that alone should have been enough to get her through this deployment without incident. She knew what had to be done but could not get the male commanders to care about the situation. She broke testosterone barriers throughout her career but still took the hit when the male officers bailed after everything hit the fan.
   
   Her book explains her elaborate and extensive background without gloating. Any commander in her position would have a difficult time and she describes in detail the walls and curtains put before her while she maintained her unit the best she could.
   
   Beautiful insight to military leadership during an American occupation.



2. First the book reads smoothly and quickly, providing a sense of the grit, determination, and personal integrity required to move up the chain of command as a woman in the army. Second, Janis reveals a peak behind the curtain of what is really going on on the ground in Iraq, and the decisions that were made which led us into our current intractable position in the Middle East. It's a sad commentary on our current administration that a woman who led with integrity was set up to take the fall for decisions that were made by General Sanchez and Donald Rumsfeld. Several of the men who made the decisions that led to the torture at Abu Ghraib were given medals for their service while she was stripped of her Commission. Janis Karpinski represents exactly the kind of person we want in our Army (I've actually met her in person and found her to be strong, intelligent, and concerned about the direction our country is heading). This book should be required reading for every citizen who cares about the future credibility of the United States on the world stage. The truth doesn't change and eventually we will come to understand how badly we have treated this brave woman who served her country with honor. More importantly we will understand how badly we have fumbled our responsibilites to the world in our mishandling of Iraq and the problems in the Middle east.



3. ONE WOMAN'S ARMY: THE COMMANDING GENERAL OF ABU GHRAIB TELLS HER STORY considers the events of 2004, offering General Karpinski's first-hand account of not only her command of troops in a combat zone, but her experience of being a commanding female leader in the modern army. From how the scandal destroyed her career to her rise in the ranks, ONE WOMAN'S ARMY is a recommended pick for any female who would understand - or enter - the military.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch



4. As far as an entertaining read, it was great! I loved the large font, color photos, and of course, the interesting anecdotes. What everyone is forgetting is that we are reviewing the BOOK, not her, or her message. Though personally, I find her to be extraordinary. If you are looking for a light, interesting read, pick this book up. If you started off hating her, you might be blindsighted by your emotions anyway so no amount of information is going to help you. Just don't bother reading it. If, however, you feel neutral about her role in the scandal, by all means, read it, listen to her message, pay attention that she mentions several times her faults in the scandal, and enjoy the fast paced read.



5. General Janis Karpinski, commander of the U.S. military prison in Iraq, provides her personal account of the corruption and failures in the chain of command that permitted prisoner abuse to occur. She discusses her inexperience in running a prison, lack of disciplined guards, and use of private firms.
   
   Though she spends a bit of the book on the army's preference for male soldiers in combat related arms, the book rings true. You can see how Karpinski and her people had too many responsibilities and too few people. The cover-up lasted for three months and then she contends that the blame was shifted to her. She feels she was the sacrificial lamb because of the fact that she was not regular army and an expendable woman. Yet the army did think she earned a star, so how expandable was she before this incident happened. The book is a fast read.

No comments about Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction.

No comments about American Attache In The Moscow Maelstrom.

5 comments about Life and Death of Adolf Hitler.

1. Although this book showed the reader that Payne knew the topic of Adolf Hitler well, the reader begins to wonder where Payne acquires all of this information, for he rarely credited his sources.



2. This was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks when it was released in 1973. I read it as a child and enjoyed it, but I didn't realize as a 10-year-old that it was laden with ridiculous errors. Payne writes well, but entire chapters are completely fabricated, thus making the book worthless. A salient example is chapter 6 where Hitler makes a year-long visit to Liverpool to visit his brother. This is the most embarrassing idiocy to ever appear in a Hitler biography (and there's loads of competition for this dubious distinction).
   Hitler was never in England, as his apartment records clearly show from Vienna. Payne relies upon discredited sources again and again, such as William Patrick Hitler and Kurt Krueger, invented Hitler psychiatrist.

   The book is good for a few laughs, nothing more. It's aged dreadfully and its errors become more ludicrous as the years past. If you want a solid, reliable and definitive biography of Hitler, consult John Toland's 1977 masterpiece.




3. I agree with some of the reviews: the book IS outdated, and I jumped when I read about his trip to Liverpool. We know almost from day to day his movements in Vienna, and that he never was so down and out as Hitler himself and the author want us to believe. But as I read on, the book started to fascinate me. I understood the atmosphere in Germany in the 20's and 30's better than in any other book I've read about Hitler and the Nazi Germany. So I give the book a 5 star for that reason.



4. I was surprised and a bit disappointed to see all the negative reactions here to Robert Payne's fine work on Hitler - in my opinion the most readable and enjoyable of the English-language biographies on that infamous tyrant. I respectfully submit that some of my fellow readers were too busy taking issue with its flaws to see its intrinsic genius.
   
   It is of course undeniably true that there are several glaring errors in Payne's research on Hitler which were exposed by subsequent biographers; it is equally true that he relied very heavily on source material of dubious authenticity to fill in various gaps in Hitler's life. Payne devotes an entire chapter to Hitler's visit to England in the early 1900s, a visit which apparently never happened; he also writes extensively on secret negotiations between Germany and the USSR which supposedly took place in 1943 and which also may never have occurred. These mistakes (and others) are glaring and embarrassing, but readers would do well to remember that Payne was writing in 1968, long before the collapse of East Germany and the Soviet Union, and had much more restricted access to documents than did, for example, Ian Kershaw. He was also trying much harder to paint a picture of Adolf Hitler, the human being, than was Kershaw, Bullock, or Toland, who were more concerned with trying to weave Hitler's life into the fabric of his times - i.e. to tell the "whole story" of the Nazi era.
   
   It is in this last category - Hitler the person - that Payne succeeds where the others often falter. If his details occasionally stray into the erroneous, his reconstruction of Hitler's youth in Braunau and Linz, his self-imposed misery in Vienna, his life as a soldier during the Great War, and the tumultuous early days of the National Socialist movement are all brought to life with the vividness of a novel. Payne may only be a second-tier historian, but he has the gift, as does John Keegan, of using prose to elevate facts, figures, dates and events into the realms the dramatic. He brings to life in vivid terms the beer-hall brawls, the back-room deals, the raucous political rallies, and the frequent moments of despair which often gripped the movement as it struggled for power, never letting us lose sight of the man who was behind it all. Kershaw is a masterful researcher, but like many historians he lags in the writing department, and his massive two-volume work on Hitler (which has become the standard in English-speaking countries) while exhaustive, never really put me in Hitler's shoes. Bullock had advanced writing and researching skills, but he was more interested in mapping out the era than in understanding the man. And Toland offered nothing more than a detailed timeline that never once attempted to penetrate Hitler's soul.
   
   The defects in Payne's work are indeed serious, but so long as one doesn't use THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER as the sole source of his knowledge on the subject, I would recommend it highly for people who are interested in achieving a personal understanding one of the most enigmatic and terrible men in history.



5. I read this book because someone recommended it as the biography that best dealt with Hitler's early life, which I was interested in learning about. I had read about his political career and the years as Fuhrer, but, beyond a broad outline, I had no idea about his childhood and early manhood. Indeed, in that regard, this book did not disappoint; I felt that the portrait of his early life was detailed, well-written and fascinating. However, the same cannot be said for the rest of the book, which leads me to question the accuracy of the first part.
   
   I don't know if Mr. Payne (actual name Pierre Stephen Robert Payne) actually did any original research for the chapters on Hitler's early life, but it is painfully obvious that he simply cribbed his material for the rest of the book from previously published works, WWII propaganda and Hollywood films. In addition to ranging from historically dubious to outright false on a thousand points, the chapters on Hitler's post WWI career is characterized by sloppy writing, undignified asides, a hysterical tone and a generally rushed and unprofessional approach to his subject. It gave the impression of a schoolboy who slapped together a term paper under the pressure of an approaching deadline. He would have done better to have concentrated exclusively on Hitler's early years rather than rush through World War II in 200 pages. How can one claim to have written a professional biography of Hitler and only devote 1 paragraph to Kristallnacht?
   
   Among some of Mr. Payne's more ludicrous historical assertions are that Hitler lived for a time in England before WWI and that a secret peace conference was held between Ribbentrop and Molotov in German-occupied Russia in_1943_! When I read these revelations for the first time, I sat up and took notice, because I had never heard of them anywhere before. However, upon further investigation, I discovered that pretty much all historians find them completely without validity. Similarly, in his hysterical hatred of Hitler and aversion to primary source research, Mr. Payne repeats many assertions which I understand to have been debunked long ago. For instance, Mr. Payne tells us that Horst Wessel was killed by another Nazi, that Hitler was responsible for the Reichstag fire, that the SA under Roehm was not planning a putsch, that the Nazis made soap and lampshades out of Jewish remains and that the famous photo of the dead Hitler look-alike in the ruins of the Reichschancellery was actually Hitler. These, and many, many other similar examples make me seriously question Mr. Payne's reliability, even for the portions of the book which I found to be informative. Therefore, I cannot recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.

1 comments about Yamamoto: The Man Who Planned the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

1. Hoyt does a alright job detailing the life of Admiral Yamamoto.
   I felt the book dragged at points, but the author does a satisfactory job detailing the life of the person who planned the Pearl Harbor attack. Hoyt kept strictly to the professional life of the Admiral, and only made passing references to the Admiral's family, passion for geishas, and gambling. I think you don't get the full story of Yamamoto's success, unless you delve into the personal life. Hoyt doesn't do this, he strictly keeps to the military aspect of the Admiral's life, like his biography of Tojo. I think you miss something here.
   Another aspect missing from the Admiral's life in his killing by American flyers. The killing is briefly detailed in a chapter, so again an interesting aspect of Yamamoto's life is left out. As I stated, the book could have been more interesting if it included more on his life, rather than the focus on the military aspect.

No comments about Agustin De Iturbide.

2 comments about The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America.

1. I really enjoyed this work. I felt it could have been more in-depth, but only so much can be expected from its relatively short length. It is a good resource and point of departure for the Lincoln historian or enthusiast, but I would recommend additional reading to fill in the gaps.



2. The Title of Professor Neely's biography of Lincoln is taken from Lincoln's second Message to Congress dated December 1, 1862. It is an inspiring phrase and an apt title for a Lincoln biography. Professor Neely's biography is good and solid in its analysis of Lincoln's life. It lacks, however, something of the eloquence and vision of the title and of Lincoln's words. We never learn why Lincoln considered the United States "the Last Best Hope of Earth" or what that can mean for our country today.

   That said, this book is a good introduction to Lincoln and his Presidency. The book skims briefly over Lincoln's life before he became the 16th President. There are advantages to this, but the treatment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which led to them is too brief to help understand sucession and the Civil War which followed.

   The book's treatment of Lincoln's relationship with his Generals and of the strategy of the War is probably the best single chapter. It has something to teach even those who are familiar with the military history of the war. The chapter on Lincoln as a pragmatic politician and on the 1864 campaign is also well done. The book treats the Emancipation Proclamation at length but to me anyway left something to be desired. (The text and some explicit treatment of it would help) and discusses the fate of Civil Liberties during the War and domestic development during the war in good but not dispositive detail.

   If you are looking for an understanding of Lincoln and of the Civil War this is a good place to start but not to end. I suggest reading the book together with the complilation of Lincoln's own speeches and writings in the Library of America series.

No comments about Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon's America.

3 comments about Ghosts of Thua Thien: An American Soldier's Memoir of Vietnam.

1. John Nessser takes the reader on a journey through hell as he tells of his personal experience as a soldier in the infamous 101st Airborne Division which suffered the 3rd highest mortality rates during the Vietnam War. Nesser brings his mid-Western upbringing to Vietnam... duty, Country and values that were instilled in him as a young boy growing up in Wisconisn. He loses part of himself in Vietnam as he faces the harsh realities of this War. This is a remarkable journey to hell and back told with honesty and great courage. Nesser is a hero but probably would not look at himself this way. This is a struggle for the soul of the Author and is a must read if you want to experience daily life in Vietnam during that terrible war. I could not put this book down.



2. I have known John for over 30 years, as a good friend and neighbor. After reading this excellent book i realized that i didn't really know John and what he went through in Vietnam. Once i started reading The Ghosts of Thua Thien i found it hard to put down. It is one of the best written books about a soldier's experience from growing up in Central Wisconsin,college,a new family man and being drafted in the Army. His experiences in basic training,to combat in Vietnam and his returning home to live a normal life. John is a very quiet person I know it must have been difficult to relive these good and bad experiences. He brings them to life in this book for you to relive with him. Thanks John for writing this book! Terry



3. I served in another battalion of the 101st Airborne at the same time and area as John Nesser, and I can testify to the realistic picture he describes of the daily life of a grunt. The A Shau Valley and DMZ were particularly rough and dangerous areas, and John captures the feeling of these places. His description of the day-to-day details of a grunt's life is one of the best I've read.

1 comments about Admiral Halsey's Story.

1. This book is a great book because it encases all the true purities of a book written by the person it's about from what I found it contained no historical inacuracies and listed the key players on his staff during his command as COMSPAC,3rd U.S. Pacfic Fleet. Its very humble in his writings which I believe reflects his pesonality for instance he discredits this newsman by giving him the Bull nickname and said that wrong with letting damn slip out here and there and an ocansional Oh sht he once said "I don't trust a fighting man who doesn't drink and smoke" ,but that right there is the Halsey personality which can't be changed or fixed fro the modern world which my opion is the pits .