This is a recounting of the campaign of 1940 which culminated in the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk. The author spends about a third of the book setting the stage for the battle, beginning with the crash-landing of the Me108 in Belgium that leaked to the Allies the original German plan to invade that country and Holland. He then goes on to tell the story of the battle itself, both at the level of the common soldier and that of the national and military leadership.

My criticism of the book is two-fold. One half of it is that there are some minor errors (the most notable being the Hitler jig, which was debunked by John Toland 25 years ago) and other interpretations with which I differed somewhat, anyway. As an aside, the business of the British killing POWs is interesting. The author doesn't actually say the British did kill any POWs, but he tells you that they captured about 400 soldiers from SS Totenkopf, then tells you that their fate has never been determined, then recounts to you one account in which a British officer admitted to stopping his men from killing some of the SS prisoners. Lastly he tells you that the SS *believed* that the British had killed those POWs, and says this at least partly explains why the same division killed British POWs later in the campaign.

The other difficulty is more one of the overall concept of the book. It's hard to see what the author thought he was adding to the accounts of the battle that have already been written. This is a campaign and battle about which tons of ink have already been spilled,and another concise reasonably well-written account isn't really neccessary, in my view. It's not a bad book, but there are others out there which cover pretty much the same ground, are more accessible, more scholarly, or more revolutionary.

I don't know anything about horseracing. I saw the movie, and then this book fell into my hands, and I began it wondering if it would live up to the hype. Of course, it did, and then some. Laura Hillenbrand is a wonderful writer, full of anecdotes and information about the '30s, the depression, and the world of horseracing in those days. The author spends a great deal of time (a quarter or a third of the book) setting the stage, but she does such a wonderful job that you don't mind. When she gets to the spot where things begin to take off, the book is frankly wonderful.

I won't tell you anything more about the book, other than to mention that Seabiscuit was the typical underdog (underhorse?) that Americans love to see win, and he didn't dissappoint. I enjoyed this book immensely, and would recommend it to anyone.

Patrick O'Donnell has now written three of these books. Each is a collection of oral histories from World War 2, the first following elite units in Europe, the second covering the same ground in the Pacific. This third volume is a collection of oral histories covering the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, in Europe.

The format is simple. The author collects the histories into a coherent narrative, provides some context, and pads the narrative with some text. The result is a recounting of various campaigns or actions from the ground level, right at the tip of the bayonet.

The difficulty, such as it is, comes from the context. There's nowhere near enough of it. The author (as noted elsewhere) speaks in this book as if the OSS did all or most of the infiltration into France and Germany during WW2, only briefly mentioning the French and British infiltrations that were more prevalent. The author focuses on the American forces, as he did in the previous two books, but here it's a bit more egregious. For one thing, the intelligence world is somewhat murky and indistinct, and its effect on the larger campaigns in the war is, to say the least, controversial. Given that we're not sure how much effect these actions had on the campaigns, the author's presentation is problematic. He tends to take whatever a spy says about the effect of an intelligence coup at face value, and expects the reader to do likewise. This is a bit much, at times.

Other than that, the book does feel a bit incomplete. One reviewer made an unfavorable comparison with M.R.D. Foot's SOE in France (which by the way should never have been allowed to go out of print); this comparison is unfair, as Foot's book was written in the Sixties, and the author had unprecedented access to classified documents and was allowed to interview a great number of people who were then alive. Though it was a great success, Foot's book cause such a controversy that critics succeeded in blocking publications of any further books by Foot or anyone else. O'Donnell's book is nowhere near as comprehensive, and couldn't be, given the differences in the way they were written.

This is a good book, if you understand it's limitations and gee-whiz-look-what-we-did attitude. I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

This is one of those novels that leaves you wondering why the guy hasn't been writing books since he was sixteen or something. It's a detective story, yes, a private eye novel with all of the atmosphere and intellegence that the genre requires to be well done. It's also a wonderful period piece and a decent picture of Hollywood's past.

John Ray Horn is a former rodeo bronc-rider turned B-Western star who tanked his career when he decked the son of the head of his studio, putting the guy in the hospital with a broken jaw. He did two years in prison for that, and when he returned, he discovered that his old boss had blacklisted him and his acting career was over. His faithful Indian sidekick, though, had invested his earnings from the movies and bought a poker parlor/casino on the edge of L.A., and he offers Horn a job collecting bad debts from gamblers. Horn reluctantly takes it, though he hates the work.

When a friend approaches him with some intriguing information about Horn's former step-daughter (the wife divorced him while he was in jail), he decides to look into things. Then the friend is apparently a suicide, and of course Horn doesn't believe it and looks into that too.

The action is interesting, with not too much violence, but enough to keep things exciting, and the characters are wonderfully drawn and intelligently portrayed. Los Angeles has never been more authentically depicted (to my mind the author easily outdoes Ellroy) with the settings, from restaurants to studio lots to the developing San Fernando Valley all wonderfully toured.

I loved this book, and I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in old movies, detective stories, or Los Angeles.

These two authors came out with a book titled Fox on the Rhine, an alternative history thing that pitted the Germans without Hitler (and better off for their lack), but with Rommel in command of their forces, they make things rather hot for the Allies in France as the Winter of 1944 approaches.

As the book ends, Rommel has launched a modified version of the Battle of the Bulge, and gets surrounded, deciding to surrender. The present book begins with Rommel having surrendered, and Patton meeting him. The two eventually decide to join forces, so to speak, and the result is interesting, as they journey across Germany to save Berlin from the Russians. The cast includes various soldiers on both sides, both historical and imaginary, and has various scenes of action at the front and behind the lines.

I enjoyed this book, though the premise is a bit kooky, and you do get the idea that the authors worked hard to get Rommel and Patton on the same side in the war

You would think that there has been so much written about the Civil War that no one would be able to come up with a fresh topic, but that is apparently untrue. Recent works (which I haven't read, (un)fortunately, include studies of sex, songs, and even food during the war. The present book studies something more fundamental to the operations of the armies, the machinery of a Civil War Staff. While staffs could be crucial to an army's operations, they could also be marginal or even detrimental to them, and this study attempts to discover how they worked, or didn't.

Rather than discuss staffs for all generals in all theaters, the author decided to study those of four generals in the Civil War. Those four generals are Robert E. Lee, George McClellan, William T. Sherman, and Ulysses S. Grant. Each of the first three has a chapter devoted to him, while Grant gets three chapters to himself, as the author discerns an evolution of his staff and what he concieved of the staff's functions.

The idea here is to study how staff officers were used in the army in this war, and this is the first problem. Most men of the era, soldiers or not, regarded staff work as very unmanly, compared with fighting for the cause, whatever it might be. As a result, staff officers often wrote books where they told about their experiences in the war, typically serving with a famous general, but they tended to gloss over or just ignore their own duties in favor of speaking of whichever general they served with. As a result, there's little material that's useful for a study like this, and the book suffers for it.

So, when we get to the first three generals, the staffers are really obscure. You don't get a feel for them and their individual functions much. Often, there's an accompanying photograph identified as "staff officers" of some general or other, with a caption telling you that none of the names of the individuals are known. As a result, this part of the book is somewhat dissappointing, vague and ill-formed.

When the author gets to Grant, however, there's more material for him to work with, and the book improves markedly as a result. Grant had a number of staff officers who served with him during the war, several of whom left enough material for us to look at what they were doing and make sense of their functions. At the same time, Grant, ever the pragmatist, evolved his staff from a typical one (copying orders and acting as couriers) to a more modern one, advising subordinates on what the general would want and interpreting orders from him, also. This is the better part of the book, frankly, because the author has more to work with.

I enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to Civil War buffs. It's a rather scholarly subject, but the author does a good job making it interesting and informative, and given the paucity of material, this is a very good book on a neglected subject.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bernard Lewis released a book titled What Went Wrong. Many panned it as superficial and disjointed, largely because it was the text of several seminar speeches and articles he had written in the past, and therefor not a whole book, so to speak. Now he's released The Crisis of Islam, which attacks the same problem but was written more coherently, directed at this particular issue. The result is a much better book.

Lewis is a classicist, and he clearly enjoys and admires Middle Eastern culture. One of his books is a study of Muslim culture, poetry and art and that sort of thing. On the other hand, he has a serious knowledge of the religion of Islam, and he's not afraid to talk about interpretations of parts of the Koran. The result is a nuanced, careful view of the conflict between the radical elements of Islam on the one hand and Western society on the other.

This is a good book, though it's very short. It's more of an extended editorial than a real history of anything, but it's still very valuable, and I would recommend it.

Charlie "Bird" Parker has been the hero of four mysteries by John Connolly now, and this latest is in some ways the strongest of the bunch. Parker is a detective with an ability to see murdered people, and talk to them. He regards this more as a curse than a gift: they usually look to him for vengeance against those who killed them.

In the current installment, Parker is summoned to South Carolina by a lawyer friend to investigate a murder. The supposed killer is a young black man; his victim a young white woman with whom he was having an affair, and whose family is very wealthy. Even in the 21st century, such an interracial affair is frowned upon, and when she winds up dead, the young man's life is in immediate danger. Parker is needed to investigate, and of course he'll have to bring along his gay sidekicks Louis and Angel, a burglar and a hitman, both supposedly retired.

Connolly is a strange writer. The prose is almost poetic, the descriptions and philosophy of the writing is dark and elegaic, almost too descriptive. The characters are interesting, especially the villains. In this one, Kittim is especially repulsive and terrifying. In addition, there's a well-drawn small character who is initially not too positive, but turns out for the better in the end.

I enjoyed this book. It has characters from some of Connolly's previous books, and I would recommend reading the four books in order, but this is a worthy addition to the series.

Charles Todd's first book, A Test of Wills, was a good story, and introduced us to his main character, Ian Rutledge, a detective who spent four years in the trenches of World War I, and returned to policework with the ghost of a subordinate he'd had executed wandering around inside his head. It's a strange idea: a sort of dark version of Calvin and Hobbes, with only Inspector Rutledge able to hear the voice of Hamish as he caustically comments on everything that's going on.

In this second installment in the series, Rutledge is called upon to investigate a trio of deaths in the English countryside. One of the dead is a poet who's currently pretty popular, though no one knew she was the poet until she died, and the family's very well-connected also. So Rutledge goes and investigates, but there doesn't seem to be any crime, and though the family's been beset by tragedy repeatedly, everyone seems to think he should go home. He is, however, determined to find out why the poet killed herself, in part because he was attached to her poetry while he was serving in the trenches. There is, however, no apparent crime and worse, if there was a crime, most of the potential suspects are already dead.

This makes for a strange, moody, slow-moving mystery, full of atmosphere and dialog, but not much action. I did enjoy it, though, and I would recommend it, especially to mystery fans.

Simon Winchester has written a very unusual book about a very strange series of events during the last century and the dawn of this one. First, we have various literary authorities in England deciding to compile and edit a massive dictionary (eventually it became the Oxford English Dictionary), which took 70 years to finish and filled multiple volumes. Then we have the editor of the project for most of its life discovering that one of his most valuable contributors was in a lunatic asylum because he murdered someone. The story goes from there.

Winchester is a good writer, and he milks this story for everything it's worth. He spends a good deal of time talking about side issues, as is common with this sort of slice-of-life thing. He does a very good job with them, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty knowledgeable with regards to the American Civil War; the author must tell you of the Battle of the Wilderness to explain how the murderer went mad, and he does so skilfully. The writing of the OED and its contents are intelligently discussed and dissected, and the history of dictionaries themselves was fascinating. The other characters, namely the editor of the dictionary itself, James Murray, are interesting and well-drawn.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. It is short, but it's fascinating, and I would recommend it pretty much universally.