BillP's Book\Miniature\Wargame Blog

One more down.

This week I finished The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci. The book recounts the roller coaster story of Torre’s years resurrecting the World Series dominance of the storied Yankees. A good, although poorly written, book, it describes the chemistry in the clubhouse between players like Jeter, Williams, Mussina and Cone that lead to eight World Series appearances and four World Championships in 8 years. Even more interesting was watching the deterioration of the team through loss of key personal by free agency, trades and retirement.

Finally, the book describes Torre’s ouster by the front office men who replaced Steinbrenner in his dotage. I’ll give Torre credit for being very professional and even handed, even in his description of how Cashman et al screwed him over.

I mentioned that the book was poorly written, and it is. It is kind of wild and all over the place. It will talk about events across multiple seasons at the same page, then go back to one particular season. It also took a lengthy expository break to describe the current state of the art in Baseball statistics which wasn’t really necessary. I blame the SI guy who co-wrote it.

All in all, it is a great book for a baseball fan, especially a Yankee fan.

35 for the year.

Uno mas!

Just finished U-boat Killer: Fighting The U-boats In The Battle Of The Atlantic by Donald G. F. W. MacIntyre. Macintyre was England’s top U-boat destroyer during World War II, bagging seven German subs. This is his firsthand account of safeguarding convoys in the North Atlantic. Interestingly, the atrocious North Atlantic winter weather appeared to be at least as much of a problem as the actual U-boats.

The book was only “okay”. MacIntyre writes well enough, but he is a bit vague about the technology employed, and unfortunately, the miseries of day to day life and the terror and frustration of the actual attacks have been described better in works of fiction like The Cruel Sea and The Good Shepard.

Not a bad book, but no reason to keep it.

34 for the year.

Two more down. First was Steichen at War: The Navy’s Pacific Air Battles by Christopher Phillips. After having commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, during WWI, Edward Steichen became one of the foremost fashion and advertising photographers in the world.

In 1942, at the age of 63 he volunteered for the US Navy. Fortunately, some really smart Navy guy grabbed him and made him Director of the Naval Photographic Institute. He and hand-picked team of outstanding photographers spent their war travelling with the fleet and recording life and war at sea. He ultimately won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary for his film The Fighting Lady about USS Yorktown.

Anyway, this “coffee-table” book is a collection of photographs taken aboard US warships showing pretty much all facets of life onboard during the war. The photos are amazing images. Interspersed throughout the photos are anecdotes and commentary on the photos themselves and the role of Steichen’s unit. A really good book, very easy to get lost in for a couple of hours.

The second book I finished was The Line Upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793-1815 by Noel Mostert. This is a very detailed history of the Napoleonic Wars at sea. The book starts with a brief history of Naval warfare from the ancient galley’s through the beginning of ship based ordinance to the state of the art in the late eighteenth century.

It then proceeds to discuss each of the wars of the French revolution from the perspective of British naval power and its influence on the outcome of the war. As might be expected the lion’s share of the book addresses British naval operations in the Mediterranean, in fact, roughly 500 of the book’s 750 pages are spent on Trafalger and the events preceeding it. The last third of the book, covers the final 10 years on Naval conflict as well as a fairly detailed description of the Anglo-American War of 1812.

The book is an excellent combination of overview and detail, and exactly what I was looking for in a one volume history of Naval operations in this period. In short, it was everything I was looking for, but didn’t find in Adkin’s The War for All the Oceans: From Nelson at the Nile to Napoleon at Waterloo.

33 for the year

Finished another couple this week.

First was Paul Newman: A Life by Shawn Levy. This is the most recently published biography of Newman, and I found it a bit disappointing. First it is a bit of a hagiography, Newman comes across in this as just short of a saint. While I agree that his philanthropy was extraordinary, and I’m sure his curmudgeonly attitude toward fans was overstated, the guy did have flaws. Flaws that Levy either overlooks entirely to mentions only in a perfunctory manner. For example, one has to read very carefully to figure Newman took up with Joanne Woodward and got her pregnant well before he separated, never mind divorcing, his first wife.

The book also had some narrative flow issues, it’s organization is neither chronological nor thematic, but some weird combination of both. But the dating in the book is almost entirely by the movies Newman was making at the time, so a reader must be fairly familiar with Newman’s body of work to make sense it the sequence of events.

There were some good bits, the anecdotes from his friends were entertaining, and there was a fair amount of coverage of Newman’s racing career and philanthropic activities. But all in all, it was just kind of “so-so”

Second, and much better, was Battle for the Mediterranean by Donald Macintyre. Macintyre is the famed “U-Boat Killer” from WWII who led one of the Hunter-Killer groups which helped win the Battle Of the Atlantic in WWII. After the war, Macintyre retired from the RN and started writing popular history books about naval warfare.

This is an excellent book, kind of the flip side of Bragadin’s Italian Navy in WWII. Macintyre isn’t as much of an apologist as Bragadin, but then the RN won, and had less to apologize for. The book provides a clear, well-written narrative of naval operations from the Summer of 1940 until the Axis surrender of Tunisia. highly recommended.

31 for the year