What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

[Shadow Hawk]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

That is one of my favorite naval actions (the battle of Samar) . I remember another lovely quote from the battle; when the japanese cruisers were closing in some wit said "We are sucking them in to 40mm range" ! There is also the quote from someone talking to Clifton Sprague after the battle when it was claimed (by the Japanese apparently) that the U S Escort Carriers were making 30 + knots "I knew you were scared Cliff' date=' but I didn't know you were THAT scared !"[/quote']

 

The Japanese lookouts seemed to be ill trained, as they reported the escort carriers (built on cargo ship hulls) as Essex class fleet carriers (built on heavy cruiser hulls), the Fletcher class destroyers as Baltimore class heavy cruisers, and the Butler class destroyer-escorts as Fletcher class destroyers.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Notice that if they thought the targets were bigger, they also thought that they were further away, which might help explain their crap shooting. On the other hand, Japanese ordnance was so broadly self-sabotaging as to make the the outcome of the battle less surprising in general.

[Escafarc]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

 

 

Far more informative then the Zombie one.

[Orion]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Winter World, by Bernd Heinrich. This biology prof from Univ of Vermont has written numerous books about animal physiology, among other things. This is the first I've read, but it won't be the last. Lots of interesting detail about how insects and animals survive winter. Talks about physiological adaptions such as blood chemicals, hibernation, supercooling, eating more, etc. Rather than a dry research paper style manuscript, this is more of a "walk in the woods with an expert who tells you all kinds of neat stuff about the critters you see" type of thing.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

I'm about two-thirds of the way through Barbara Tuchman's classic history survey The March of Folly -- an examination of boneheaded, self-defeating policies through the ages. Starting with the Trojan Horse of legend and proceeding through the American involvement in Vietnam, one major section details the Popes of the Renaissance, whose greed, power-lust and power-political games led to the Lutheran Reformation (which they ignored in its early stages, too wrapped up in Italian wars and construction projects to notice their hold was collapsing). Another section details the policies of the British government that led to the American Revolution and the inevitable defeat of the efforts to suppress it (Tuchman contends that it would have been virtually impossible for the British to win the war, and that there was no possible outcome of the conflict that would have been in their favor regardless of what happened on the actual battlefield).

[Bozimus]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Another section details the policies of the British government that led to the American Revolution and the inevitable defeat of the efforts to suppress it (Tuchman contends that it would have been virtually impossible for the British to win the war' date=' and that there was no possible outcome of the conflict that would have been in their favor regardless of what happened on the actual battlefield).[/quote']

 

I am not a historian, nor am I well-versed in the history surrounding the Revolutionary War, but this view strikes me as a little hard to believe. Can you elaborate further on why the most powerful nation on Earth (at that time) could not have been victorious in this particular revolution when they had proven quite adept at squashing Irish, Scot, Welsh, etc. insurrections throughout their history? I learned (maybe incorrectly) that the Revolutionary War was a "near run" thing... Sounds like an interesting premise, however.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

It was a near run thing. The British were busy fighting France at the time, and weren't all that worried about a bunch of colonial yahoos.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

I am not a historian' date=' nor am I well-versed in the history surrounding the Revolutionary War, but this view strikes me as a little hard to believe. Can you elaborate further on why the most powerful nation on Earth (at that time) could not have been victorious in this particular revolution when they had proven quite adept at squashing Irish, Scot, Welsh, etc. insurrections throughout their history? I learned (maybe incorrectly) that the Revolutionary War was a "near run" thing... Sounds like an interesting premise, however.[/quote']

 

Tuchman's reasoning was that a rebellious America would have remained rebellious as long as the British were there, even if Washington had been decisively defeated (the fact that the Continental Army survived the disastrous campaigns that led to the loss of New York and Philadelphia, as opposed to surrendering, helps make her case). To keep America "pacified" would have taken so many British resources in terms of manpower and money that the loss would far exceed any gain. After having actually gone to war a defeated America would still have remained restive and, more significantly, unprofitable. And Scotland and Ireland are poor examples -- especially Ireland, which continued to give Britain trouble well into the twentieth century.

 

Canada was offered "Confederation" in 1867 and that worked out fairly well for the British. A confederation with the American Colonies might have kept the relationship profitable -- but nobody seriously proposed it and it was clearly impossible once shots were fired.

 

The British government, composed almost entirely of out-of-touch landed gentry elected from boroughs with as few as eighteen total eligible voters, acted against their rational interests out of stubbornness and pride. It never occurred to them that trying to "punish" the unruly Americans would be both costly and futile.

[Bozimus]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Michael,

You make some interesting points. Especially about the pyrrhic nature of victories that often results from putting down a rebellion.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Tuchman's reasoning was that a rebellious America would have remained rebellious as long as the British were there, even if Washington had been decisively defeated (the fact that the Continental Army survived the disastrous campaigns that led to the loss of New York and Philadelphia, as opposed to surrendering, helps make her case). To keep America "pacified" would have taken so many British resources in terms of manpower and money that the loss would far exceed any gain. After having actually gone to war a defeated America would still have remained restive and, more significantly, unprofitable. And Scotland and Ireland are poor examples -- especially Ireland, which continued to give Britain trouble well into the twentieth century.

 

Canada was offered "Confederation" in 1867 and that worked out fairly well for the British. A confederation with the American Colonies might have kept the relationship profitable -- but nobody seriously proposed it and it was clearly impossible once shots were fired.

 

The British government, composed almost entirely of out-of-touch landed gentry elected from boroughs with as few as eighteen total eligible voters, acted against their rational interests out of stubbornness and pride. It never occurred to them that trying to "punish" the unruly Americans would be both costly and futile.

 

Confederation. I do not think that word means what you think it means, Michael.

 

On the subject of the inevitability or not of American victory in the Revolution, I would only note that the American colonies went from being solidly "British" in 1763 to profoundly rebellious in 1775. How that happened has been told in many, many histories, and we still have a ways to go before we fully understand it, in my opinion. However, we know enough to see how good faith attempts to make the relationship work, on both sides, collapsed successively. The status quo was not sustainable.

 

That doesn't necessarily mean that a new status quo wasn't being worked out on the ground during the years of the War of the Revolution. Britain and the American colonies both understood in 1783 that they could not get what they wanted from the union in 1763. So they worked out a new relationship. It is not impossible that there were alternatives that didn't involve American independence, but I am not entirely sanguine, as any arrangement would have been held up as an example for the British relationship with Ireland, which was pretty much non-negotiable at that point.

[death tribble]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Bomber Boys by Patrick Bishop.

 

This is a look at the bombing campaign in Europe waged by the RAF against Germany. It is pretty good. And now out of date as it was written before the Bomber Command memorial was started. The Americans do get a look in but in the main it is about the RAF and what they did.

[death tribble]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Target Tirpitz by Patrick Bishop.

 

The various missions to destroy the German Battleship before it eventually fell to Tallboy bombs from the Lancaster bombers. Fascinating reading.

Also deals with the demise of Bismark and Scharnhorst

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Recently finished the audio book of I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas by Lewis Black, read by the author.

 

Excellent book that gets into the holiday and, more importantly, into Lewis Black. Smart, funny, crude, and very touching. Nobody can comment on Christmas like an angry, ranting Jew.

[Guest Celt]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Recently finished the audio book of I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas by Lewis Black, read by the author.

 

Excellent book that gets into the holiday and, more importantly, into Lewis Black. Smart, funny, crude, and very touching. Nobody can comment on Christmas like an angry, ranting Jew.

 

I'll have to check it out. I do love a good Lewis Black rant. If you're interested in an hilarious take on Christmas, try Denis Leary's Merry F*%#-ing Christmas special.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

I'll have to check it out. I do love a good Lewis Black rant. If you're interested in an hilarious take on Christmas' date=' try Denis Leary's Merry F*%#-ing Christmas special.[/quote']

 

Seen it, and love it. I've had some very bad Christmases in recent years, so I'm always up for a good anti-Christmas rant. However, I used to love the holiday, so I still like a good heartwarming side to it, too. These two comedians manage to give a bit of both, though more-so Lewis because he has more space.

[death tribble]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

The Resistance by Matthew Cobb

 

The various politics that went into the Resistance in France. The Communist and Far Right. De Gaulle's view and the plots against him. Roosevelt's dislike of De Gaulle and how that coloured American dealings with him. The escape lines and the illegal papers. The Army of Crime and the importance of Jean Moulin. And the pure evil of Klaus Barbie. Very interesting read.

[Cancer]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Caesar's Calendar by Denis Feeney. A full-out scholarly book by a classicist, dwelling mostly on the differences in the perception of time between moderns and the ancients, and the shifts that took place around the time of the establishment of the Julian calendar.

 

For a gamer, the important part to this is that modern concepts of the calendar as marking out a regular set of mathematical coordinates in time (much like a modern map makes for a regular set of mathematical coordinates in space) is utterly alien to the ancient mindset, and probably the medieval mindset as well. No one ... no one ... looked on what we take for granted as the obvious utility of a regular, solar-year calendar as actually having superior utility.

 

Every city had its own calendar and its own way of linking that calendar to the past of legend and oral history. Correlating different calendars was approximately impossible. If you wanted to relate (for example) an Athenian date with a Roman date, you needed to have knowledge of events and people's lives that were important to the folks in both places, and find out when in each location's reckoning those events and lives were. And if there were contradictions between the reckonings, oh well. It probably wasn't very important. Feeney points out (p. 195) that Athens actually ran two different calendars simultaneously without reconciling them; the two had different purposes.

 

Furthermore, methods of reckoning time were conceptually different from how moderns thing. By our way of thinking, the old pre-Julian Roman Republican calendar was (from our point of view) completely, unworkably broken. It was a calendar whose functions were primarily social and political, and early Romans would have viewed a calendar set up to obey the stars (that is, the seasons) would have seemed irrelevant and fussily impractical to them. What was important is that the durations of people's times in office were set up "fairly" so that (in the Roman Republic) regular transitions between consuls happened without general disruption, and that business contracts were possible in that all contracted parties understood when deliveries and payments should occur. Only a couple of festivals were tied to fixed calendar dates; other regular festivals were understood to be moveable, and were declared by the priests in the relevant temples each year by whatever means they used. The idea of anniversaries and what is meant by "the same day" was something quite different to the ancients.

 

So you can see what I mean by completely, unworkably broken:

 

Roman calculation of the date was very different from the calculation we use. We start at the beginning of the month and count forward: January 1, 2, 3, and so on. The Romans did not do this forward counting. They had three fixed points each month, and they counted down, "backwards," to whichever of these points was coming up next. Each month was split in half by the Ides [and not all the months are the same length] ... Nine days before the Ides comes another marker day ... called the Nones. The only catch here is that the Romans counted inclusively, counting both pegs and the end of a sequence instead of only one as we do, so that nine days before the Ides for them is eight days before the Ides for us. ... The third of the fixed three points in the month is the first day, the Kalends.

 

The discussion goes on with more examples of how AFU Roman date specifications are from our point of view, including "What we think of as the 16th of March, the day after the Ides, is for the Romans seventeen (inclusive) days before the next Kalends, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendas Aprilis." And that was for March, which had 31 days, along with May, July, and October. For short months with 29 days (NOT 30; the post-Julius 30-day months were originally 29-day months until Julius added a day to them in his reform and made them 30 days, while he added two days to originally 29-day months make the other 31-day months; and February always had 28 days and he left that alone). For short months you had to tweak the day counts.

 

From a gaming point of view, I take this as carte blanche for any world-maker to mess up his/her calendars any old way the GM feels like that day, and do it differently (irreconcilably differently) in every major city in his game-world.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Today I finished a quirky little book called Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian by Scott Douglas. The stories were originally published in a blog format, and I'm glad he was able to get away with it. It filled me nostalgia and dread. I'm reminded of why I got into this field, and why I ran away screaming.

 

I'm not sure how widespread the appeal is, honestly. Some of it seemed to be written for other professionals, but it should still be largely accessible. If you've ever wondered what really goes on behind the reference desk, give it a look. It's a pretty fast read, and the e-book was free.

 

[Old Man]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

The Wave: In the Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey. I had no idea this book was about surfing when I picked it up at the library--I thought it was primarily about storms and rogue waves. It does cover those but about half the book is about big wave surfing, especially the exploits of Laird Hamilton and his crew, with whom I was already somewhat familiar. Anyway the book is very well researched and written. It's very hard to describe waves, and surfing, with text, but Casey does a pretty good job. Recommended.

[death tribble]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Barbed Wire University by Midge Gillies

 

The lives of British and Commonwealth prisoners of war in the prisoner of war camps and these are those that did not escape. The author is the daughter of a POW and covers conditions in Europe and the Far East.

Fascinating and touching.

[AmadanNaBriona]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Rebels:The Irish Rising of 1916 by Peter DeRosa

 

Good, accurate well researched and well documented chronological account of the Rising.

Simultaneously inspiring and depressing as hell, reading about just how f-ed the whole situation was, and how my personal suite of heroes spent the time before they faced the firing squads' guns.

[Sociotard]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Comparative Constitutional Engineering

 

It was a surprisingly easy read. I'm glad I read it. I've seen several papers that claimed parliamentary republics are more likely to suffer from cabinet instability, but this was the first book I've read to explain why this is thought and to offer some supporting evidence.

[CaptCastle]

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished?

 

Armageddon The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 by Max Hastings. I saw it in the bargain bin. It turned out to be a good read. It focused on events during the last 8 months of the war. It contained a lot of interesting maps to go along with the prose.

[death tribble]

Just finished Robert Vaughan's autobiography 'A Fortunate Life'. It covers all his work and there is a lot more than you might think. Also he was very political. Interesting anecdotes abound including his friends James Coburn and Steve McQueen.

[csyphrett]

No Plot, No Problem by Chris Baty about the Nano and how to do good with it

CES