Puttering in the Study

At the Edge of Honor (Honor Series) - Robert N. Macomber

I should just quit trying.  I'm never going to enjoy a nautical historical fiction series as much as I do C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series so I should just quit looking.  The latest attempt is the story of Union sloop captain Peter Wake knocking around Key West during the Civil War. it is the first book in a series that sees him in the world of naval intelligence all the way through the Spanish-American war and after.

Forester aficionados have to get over our assumption that every naval officer is an angst-ridden genius, and I promise that is not the reason I didn't love this book.  The guy has his problems, but near – paralyzing self-doubt is not one of them. I actually moderately enjoyed the book, and if some of the favorable outcomes of his various stratagems were a little forced, and the deus ex machina at the end creaked atrociously, I actually had nothing bad to say about the book until the ending – where clearly the author held up a sign telling the characters to wrap things up.  Obediently, they did, but it was terribly clumsy.  

I am still on the fence about whether to get the next book in the series.  What I should actually do is get out the first Patrick O'Brien Aubrey novel and read it again and see if I like it compared to Hornblower.  I didn't when I first read it, but that's on me - there's no way the book should come off unfavorably against anything.  That I thought it did is probably a good indication that I am officially a terrible judge of nautical historical fiction. 

But I can't help it.  Commiserating with Horatio about his feelings for Lady Barbara is one of my favorite pastimes.  You can keep your Jack Aubreys and Peter Wakes.   

 

 

 

Essex Class Aircraft Carriers, 1943–1991: Rare Photographs from Naval Archives (Images of War) - Leo Marriott

When your workbench is a double-build of the same Essex-class carrier as it appeared in 1945 and 1968, and the project before that was an Essex class carrier in 1968 (and 1943), and so was the one before that (1950), and you're updating another and being tempted to start on yet another - it's a pretty foregone conclusion that you're going to buy any book that comes out about the Essex class.

Which is pretty much the only reason you should buy this one.  While many, if not most, of the photos are not ones that I have seen published previously, many are, and in fact there are numerous photos that I included in my book on the class 25 years ago.  But the bigger problem is that the type of paper used – not glossy – means that the reproduction of these black-and-white photos is poor.  I consult numerous photos of the class on a daily basis, and this book is a very poor resource for studying the details of the class because of the format and paper.

Nor do the problems end there.  Apparently the publishing business has reached the point that no one is editing what is sent in for publication because the content suffers from numerous grammatical and formatting errors, as well as significant factual mistakes.  The second sentence of the book places the battle of the Coral Sea in the wrong month of 1942, and while substantive errors like this are not common, they are common enough that I don't trust the factual assertions presented without checking them in another source.

The book does not have much substantive text, but it does have extensive detailed photo captions that explain the photos, and this is one of its high points.  The captions provide analysis that I have not seen elsewhere, as well as explanations of certain activities that are not covered in other publications.  So while the photos are of marginal quality, they are clear enough to understand what is being portrayed, and the captions do provide useful background.

All in all, if I saw a really good picture in this book I would run it down online if I needed it for reference, but what is in the book is probably good enough unless you are trying to nail down a very specific detail.  And there is useful information, mostly in the photo credits.  But the bibliography is short and puzzling - how can you not list Norman Friedman?  

Student, Sailor, Skipper, Survivor: How WWII Transformed the Lives of Ordinary Americans - Julia Gimbel

This book arose out of something Julia Gimbel didn’t know she had until after her father Robert T. McCurdy passed away.  She knew her father had left a scrapbook with mementos from his time in the Navy during World War II, but what she didn’t find out until she pulled it out for her daughter to use as a homework assignment, was that inside was also a 60 page handwritten journal that neither she nor her siblings had known existed.

After transcribing the journal, she used it as a starting point for this book explaining how ordinary Americans were affected by World War II.  It began with telling the story of her father, who went from college student to captain of a small landing craft in the Pacific and back again.  His story provides the framework for a number of short essays on everything from food, smoking, and alcohol to mail, laundry, and numerous other topics.  His observations served as a jumping off point for Julia’s research into the lives of other serviceman who could provide additional perspectives into what her father was saying.

I was completely enthralled by the book – it presented a pragmatic view of how the war actually affected the lives of ordinary Americans, drilling down to the subjects and objects that service members and their family actually encountered during the war.  I’ve read a number of books that deal with the lived experience of World War II recently, and this is the best introduction to the subject from the American side that I have read.  It provides a grounding – in the form of McCurdy’s quotes in the journal – that most scholarly accounts don’t have.  Of course each of the subjects can be gone into in far more detail, but this one book provides a breadth of experience that I found very helpful in understanding the relative importance of the different subjects.