"The Dreadnoughts" by David Howarth

(Image is a bit small because this is like the only picture of this book I could find, and it looks weird if I scale it up. Sorry about that.)

This is part of a series about seafarers and ships throughout history. I will most likely not review the other books, but I'm doing this one, because I like dreadnoughts. (I know they're not the largest warships--WWII destroyers were actually bigger--but they have the coolest name, and they were the first warships to be super overpowered compared to everything else. They basically rendered all the other warships at the time obsolete.)

 

[EDIT: They actually weren't the first to way outclass all the others. That honor goes to the ironclads.]

The book is fairly dense, but it's not a bad density, if that makes sense. It's not dense because of overly flowery language or not getting to the point, it just has a lot of information per cubic meter. (What units would that even use? Fact/m^3?)

My favorite anecdote from this is when the British were building a new dreadnought and a bunch of British nerds (including Virginia Woolf) (I think the book called them "literati," so basically nerds) pretended to be the king of Abyssinia and his entourage and tried to get a tour. They got one, too, and convinced everyone until a few days later when someone figured out it was a hoax. At which point the British realized they should probably keep secrecy a bit tighter.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: T15+ for violence (people getting explodified by artillery--it does talk about the Battle of Jutland).

However, the book handles it in a way that's more: T. 

4 stars.

(Endnote: The dreadnoughts' purpose in WWI was basically to stop the enemy's dreadnoughts from stopping your dreadnoughts from stopping the enemy's dreadnoughts from marauding all your puny other boats. Even at Jutland, none of them ever sank each other.)