"Fight Write" by Carla Hoch

As the subtitle says, Fight Write is a book about how to write believable fight scenes. This often means "short and violent," because that's how real fights usually are.

I don't know much about most styles of fighting. The one exception is fencing, which I did for several years, and oddly enough this book doesn't really apply to it. Fencing matches aren't terribly short (they often go for a few minutes), they can get flashy, they have lulls in them, and they're not exactly brutal. 

(Although: modern fencing swords are extremely bated and definitely not envenomed, and we wear protective gear designed to stop anyone from actually getting hurt, so I suspect a fencing match with actual sharp swords would be a lot bloodier.)

The part of this book I found most interesting was the part about the psychology and feelings. What characters (and real people) probably feel before and during and after fights, how fights (whether won or lost) traumatize people, et cetera. That, to me, was more interesting then the mechanical "how does this physically work" bits. Not to say that those aren't good, it's just that I found the other part more interesting.

Also, did you know that this book was written by a Christian? I didn't. At least, I didn't when I started out, but I inferred it from the writing (and then confirmed it by looking it up whilst writing this review).

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for graphic violence and some sexual references. Not a lot of the latter, but there are a couple.

4 stars. 

Favorite lines:

    Defenestration means throwing somebody out of a window. Yes, there's a term for throwing somebody out of a window that's not just "throw somebody out the window."

    Page 49.

(Endnote: Who's Write? I certainly don't want to fight him.) 

"Wizards, Aliens, and Starships" by Charles L. Adler

This book purports to be a serious look at the physics and math involved in various fantasy and sci-fi topics. It is... sort of that. The book is divided into four sections: "Potter Physics," "Space Travel," "Worlds and Aliens," and "Year Googol".

"Potter Physics" is the only one to really discuss fantasy, and it mostly points out that a lot of fantasy magic violates either the Law of Conservation of Mass or the most depressing law of thermodynamics (that being entropy). There's also discussion of how the law of conservation of momentum plus the earth's rotation would majorly mess with teleportation, and some decently interesting things about various mythical creatures like dragons and giants.

"Space Travel" is about, y'know, space travel. While it does take an approach I haven't seen before, in that it covers the absolute energy cost of space travel in physics instead of just "as we make better rockets, space travel will get easier", it also is composed of mostly "this is how we could make better rockets" as opposed to "this is how these specific fictional rockets could work".

"World and Aliens" is mostly about exoplanets and the search for life on them. It doesn't really have much of anything to do with any specific fiction.

And "Year Googol" is just depressing, because it's about how long a civilization could theoretically last before inevitably dying of entropy. And personally, as I said, I think inevitably dying of entropy is depressing.

So Wizards, Aliens, and Starships is less "the physics of this specific science fiction" and more "some general physics about vaguely science fiction topics". Which is still interesting, but not as interesting to me as the first option would have been. (Granted, there are probably legal problems inherent to writing a book entirely about other people's books. But even so.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, generally. There's nothing untoward about it.

3 stars.

(Endnote: It's mostly starships. Not a lot of wizards or aliens.)

"Economics In One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt

After some consideration, I have condensed this book into two main points:

A) "The world would work beautifully if humans weren't both dumb and selfish." (If humans were dumb but not selfish they would use this revolutionary technique called "sharing," and if humans were selfish but not dumb they would understand economics.)

B) "The economy would work beautifully if governments would stop trying to make it better." (This because basically every time the book mentioned government programs, it was in the context of "They thought this would stimulate the economy, but actually, as we can see, all it did was mess it up.")

It is my personal opinion that everyone with an influence on economic policy should read this book, even though it spends much of its time yelling "you're being dumb" at everyone with an influence on economic policy. It is not my personal opinion that everyone, period, should read this book, because if you're not the sort of person (like me) who would find it interesting, you'd probably be bored to tears. But if you're going to be doing economics anyway, you can presumably handle it.

For a single lesson (that being "look at the secondary consequences of everything, not just the primary consequences, you numbskulls"), this book is quite long.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E. There is nothing objectionable about this book. That said, it's not the sort of thing a young child would want to read, but there's nothing stopping them. Except boredom.

3 stars. It was interesting and I learned a lot, but all the "the economy was made so bad by this thing" was also kind of depressing.

(Endnote: After much consideration, I decided to read and review this book instead of the author's other work, Floating Point Errors in 1.0000000000000001 Lessions.)

"The Revolutionary Samuel Adams" by Stacy Schiff

This book is less a biography of Samuel Adams and more a history of all the 18th-century politics he was involved in. And there's a reason for that; perhaps because his primary occupation was rabble-rousing, Adams was an incredibly private person. He wrote under dozens of different pseudonyms, we never know quite where he was at any one time (except when he needed an alibi; we know exactly where he was during the Boston Tea Party), and he seldom signed his letters. He's like the Invisible Man: we can't see him directly, but we kind of know where he is and what he's doing by looking at the aftereffects.

As was the fashion at the time, most of Samuel Adams's subversive newspaper articles were written under pseudonyms. My favorite one was "Vindex"; the actual Vindex was a Roman general who rebelled against Nero, but I was heartily amused by how it sounds like you're saying "Windex" with a vampire accent.

The book spends about a chapter on Adams's early life and about a chapter on his later life. They're not the important part. Also his life after the Revolution is kind of sad; he was very good at rabble-rousing, but got kind of lost and fell out of favor when rabble-rousing was now counterproductive in our newly formed nation and everybody had the rights he was yelling about not having.

But the parts in the middle are not sad. They are in fact kind of funny, with how the royal governors despair of their inability to actually do anything about this one guy who they know, but cannot prove, keeps writing subversive essays and turning the town of Boston against them. And then the one time they try taking him out is foiled by Paul Revere.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, probably, for some violence.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    If you read only the essays in the papers you might reasonably conclude that ancient Romans peopled eighteenth-century New England.

    Page 159.

(Endnote: Von, two, three bottles of Vindex. Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha.)

Mini-Reviews 18: Wheels on a Big Rig

Callings for Life: God's Plan, Your Purpose by Jeffrey Leininger

This book takes a hundred and fifty-four pages to say something that I can pretty comprehensively sum up in three sentences: "God probably hasn't called you to do something grand and epic, so you should focus on where God has put you now rather than the grand and epic thing you think God wants you to do. Having a normal life is not bad, and you should value it. God intends you to do a lot of small things rather than one really huge thing."

As you may have suspected, I was not enthralled. Oh, it's a lovely exploration of the doctrine of vocation, I just couldn't get into it because A) I fully grasped the point from reading the back cover, and B) I already understand the doctrine of vocation. I read nonfiction to learn things, and I honestly don't learn much from a book that repeatedly tells me something I already know for 154 pages.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for people dying in some of the examples it gives. It would make a supremely boring videogame.

3 stars. It's not a bad book, it's just also not the right one for me.

Tags for this one: 3-star, Christian nonfiction, nonfiction, rated E10+

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams 

This book is quite short. Also slightly sad. Though not as sad as I was expecting, given that I expected |the titular rabbit to die outright, and he only sort of dies|. Also there's a fairy involved. 

I had to look up what velveteen was, because I didn't actually know. It's apparently "velvet but instead of making it velvety by cutting the vertical threads, you make it velvety by cutting the horizontal threads." Or something of that sort.

This review is part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for being sad.

3 stars. It somehow manages to be both slightly depressing and slightly sappy.

Tags for this one: 3-star, rated E10+

Mr. Popper's Penguins by Richard and Florence Atwater

This book is less short than The Velveteen Rabbit is, but I have similarly little to say about it. Hence this being a mini-review.

The plot of this is not terribly believable, but that's part of its charm.

This review is also part of my first completed quest.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, junior fiction, rated E

(Endnote: And they're rollin' rollin' rollin', rollin' rollin' rollin)

"Thing Explainer" by Randall Munroe

This is a book of not-simple stuff explained in simple words. Or, as the person who wrote this said, "the ten hundred words people use most often." It has a place in the back that tells you what those words are.

I decided to write this in the spirit of the book, so I'm also only using those ten hundred words for this. We'll see how that goes.

Thing Explainer explains a lot of things. Some of the ones I like best are:

"Shared space house" (International Space Station)

"The US's laws of the land" (US Constitution)

"Tree" (Tree)

"US Space Team's Up Goer Five" (Saturn V rocket)

(Yes, I know the things inside the bent lines aren't in the ten hundred words. The book does the same thing in the things-in-this-book page, and I felt like it would make it less confusing.)

What If and What If Two had little drawings on most of the pages. This doesn't, because its pages are full of big drawings of the stuff it's explaining. (But there are sometimes little drawings inside the big drawings.)

For some reason, the number after eight is not in the ten hundred words. I don't know why.

If this were a game for computers, I would say it was for: Everyone.

Four stars. Some of the things it explains are things to do with that belief where people think that animals turn into other animals over time and that's how all the animals got to be themselves, but it's easy to just not read those pages. If you were reading it with a small child, they could be a good thing to talk about (like, "this is what a lot of people say, here's why it's wrong.") The rest of the book is good, though.

(End note: I didn't have to look up every single word I used here in the place in the book where all the words are. The computer place for the computer pictures the person who wrote this draws has a nice little thing (or at least it did when I was writing this) where you can write things and it tells you if you used words that aren't in the ten hundred words.)

"Creatures of the Deep" by Erich Hoyt

Also known as, "the book with the creepy fish pictures."

Okay, they're not that scary, but I still wouldn't want some of those to suddenly show up in a movie or videogame. Granted, the SamTheLibraryMouse Theory of Jumpscares (which I made up just now) states that the content of a jumpscare is secondary to the vibes of the scene in which the jumpscare takes place as regards the overall scariness of the jumpscare, (whew that's a mouthful) but still.

(One corrolary of the SamTheLibraryMouse Theory of Jumpscares is my joke that a box of cereal appearing out of nowhere into your face in a dark and well-spookified spooky alley is at least as scary as a scary monster appearing out of nowhere in a normal and cheerful forest. But enough about jumpscares. How did I even get this sidetracked?)

This book has an entire chapter dedicated primarily to giant squids. It also has an entire chapter dedicated to "oh no we're killing the oceans niuuuuuuu," which... On the one hand, overfishing is a legitimate problem, but on the other hand, what do you expect your readers to do about it?

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references (describing modes of reproduction of various undersea animals; it's not lurid or anything, but it does describe the weird ones.)

4 stars.

(Endnote: There's plenty of fish in the sea, and most of them are weird as nouns.)

Mini-Reviews 15: It's The Long Title Song!

Handbook of Consolations for the Fears and Trials that Oppress Us in the Struggle with Death by Johann Gerhard 

I thought this book was some sort of grief counseling, for when someone you love dies.

It is not.

This book is for when you are the one dying, or when you're talking to someone who is, and you/they are struggling with your faith. It's written in the classic ancient-greek-philosophy-instruction style of "Student: I have a question, and it's this! Teacher: I have an answer to that question, and it's this."

It's quite good. If I'm ever dying of sickness, someone please send me a copy.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for discussion of death.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, Christian nonfiction, nonfiction, rated E10+

The Story of Be by David Crystal

I got this out of the library on a whim because it looked interesting. It was, in fact, interesting.

While I (as a firm believer in the Tower of Babel) disagree with it on where languages came from, most of the rest of it is pretty informative.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for sexual references ({T15+ish describing the "sexual be", as in "being with someone"}).

3 stars. Not amazing, but it's definitely not bad.

Tags for this one: 3-star, nonfiction, rated T15+

The Innocent by David Baldacci

I have now read a thriller. Yay me.

It's about this special forces assassin guy who gets almost assassinated himself (repeatedly), then teams up with a teenage girl who's been having a bad time in foster care and whose parents have just been murdered. Because person or persons unknown keep trying to assassinate the both of them, and also keep assassinating other people who they try to get evidence from.

Also known as "489 pages of the plot thickening and 57 pages of 'oh yeah, it's all coming together.'"

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: M for mostly offscreen sexual content between two adults (which I skipped over anyway), strong language (though no Cardinal Swearwords that I recall), and semi-graphic violence. This is a book for adults.

3 stars.

Tags for this one: 3-star, modern setting, rated M, thriller

(Endnote: I'm really starting to run out of titles for these things.)

"What If? 2" by Randall Munroe

I liked the first What If? better, I think. My favorite hypotheticals from this one are:

"How many pigeons would it require in order to lift the average person and a launch chair to the height of Australia's Q1 skyscraper?" (|A few tens of thousands, or more than the mass of the galaxy, depending on how clever you get with your pigeon stacking.|)

"Can all the world's bananas fit inside all of the world's churches? My friends have had this argument for a little over 10 years now." (|Yes, they would fit.|)

"Dear Randall, what would happen if you shrunk Jupiter down to the size of a house and placed it in a neighborhood, say, replacing a house?" (|Jupiter is very hot and would violently explode.|)

"Why don't compasses point toward the nearest hospital because of the magnetic fields created by MRI machines?" (|They do, but you have to get pretty close.|)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for swearing, I think. Again, this would be a pretty fun videogame.

 

4 stars. I know I said I didn't like this one as much as the first, but that just means it's a less enthusiastic four stars.

Favorite lines:

    Decorating Tip

    The air in your house should be in gas form

    Page 14, from "Would there be any danger from standing next to a large object that was 0 Kelvin?"

    Q. What if your blood became liquid uranium? Would you die from radiation, lack of oxygen, or something else?

    A. [said by a stick figure in a lab coat] "You would die from what we in the medical profession call not-having-any-blood-and-being-full-of-molten-uranium syndrome. Or 'Jeff's disease' for short. Man, poor Jeff."

    Page 30. This is from one of the "short answer" sections.

    Q. What would happen if you microwaved a smaller microwave, while the smaller one was on as well?

    A. You would no longer be welcome in that IKEA.

    Page 91, from another short answer section. There's no "A." in the original text; I added it to forestall confusion.

    Congratulations to Australia, new rulers of the galaxy.

    Page 124, from "If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?"

    "Can whoever is building these aqueducts everywhere please stop? We have enough!"

    "NEVER!"

    Page 158, from "How many people would it take to build Rome in a day?"

(Endnote: There's also one about "what if Nascar didn't have any rules and the only purpose was to get a car around the track as fast as possible", which ended up with building a particle accelerator the size and shape of the Nascar track.)

"What If?" by Randall Munroe

This book is a little like the Imponderables series, except Imponderables asks "why does this happen?" and this asks "what if this happened?"

It's also the most hilarious thing I've read since Discworld. My favorite of the approximately 60 hypothetical situations in here are:

"What would happen if you made a periodic table out of cube-shaped bricks, where each brick was made of the corresponding element?" (|Toxic gas, fire, explosions, and radiation poisoning would happen.|)

"Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns?" (|Theoretically yes|)

"What would happen if you strapped C4 to a boomerang? Could this be an effective weapon, or would it be as stupid as it sounds?" (|The author didn't give an actual answer to this one, instead briefly wondering why you would want the high explosive to come back to you if you missed.|)

"What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty?" (|It would either make a loud bang or explode violently, depending on whether it was the top half or the bottom half that suddenly became a vacuum.|)

"Is it possible to boil a cup of water by stirring?" (|No, it isn't|)

And my personal favorite, "If a bullet with the density of a neutron star were fired from a handgun (ignoring the how) at the Earth's surface, would the Earth be destroyed?" (|No, though it would do weird things while burrowing into the core, and if you put it on a sufficiently sturdy pedestal it would do even weirder things to anyone who tried to touch it|)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A stern T for some bad language, for all the explanations except {T15+ish "If a woman were to have sperm cells made from her own stem cells and impregnate herself, what would be her relationship with her daughter?"}, which is T15+ for sexual references. This could be an awesome videogame.

4 stars.

Favorite lines:

    "Well, you know what they say -- 'Lightning always strikes in the same place. That place is in Venezuela. You shouldn't stand there.'"

    Page 269, from "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?"

 

    "I'm ruined! Where did it all go wrong?"

    "Uh. I'm guessing the part at the beginning where you decided to print out Wikipedia."

    Page 254, from "If you had a printed version of the whole of (say, the English) Wikipedia, how many printers would you need to keep up with the changes made to the live version?" (|Only about 6, but the ink would ruin you.|)

    "Then the 92nd little pig built a house out of depleted uranium. And the wolf was like, 'Dude.'"

    Page 3, from "What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?"

 

    Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.

    Page 12, from "What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?"

 

    "Oh, that's easy. There are tons of parachutes lying around on a submarine."

    Page 81, from "How long could a nuclear submarine last in orbit?"

 

(Endnote: As befits a book by the author of xkcd, there are little comics interspersed with the normal words. These are the source of most of my favorite lines.)

"War on the Frontier: The Trans-Mississippi West" by Alvin M. Josephy Jr.

This is a book about the American Civil War, specifically (as the title says) the parts in the Trans-Mississippi West. I don't actually really have anything to say about it, this review is just to point out the unintentional hilarity of a historical picture featured in the book.

This picture was created in 1862 by John Stevens, a sign painter, which may help explain the strangeness. It's reactionary and anti-Native-American and racist, and it was created for fearmongering purposes, so it wasn't intended to be funny...

I had to scan this, so the image quality might be kinda bad.

What I'm pretty sure is supposed to be going on in this picture: Shirtless Guy, after murdering two of Green Woman's children, is trying to murder a third while Green Woman tries to pull her child away. Meanwhile, Blue Kid throws out his arms in an attempt to protect his family.

What it looks like is going on in this picture: Shirtless Guy and Green Woman are having a tug-of-war over a badly-proportioned small child. Green Woman is attempting to Force-push Shirtless Guy, and Blue Kid is T-posing over two of his siblings (or possibly one sibling with a doll) in the background.

 

It was the T-posing that elevated this from "ok weird" to "this is funny and I should make a blog post on it so other people can see how funny it is". John Stevens's history as a sign painter, coupled with the (lack of) artistic quality of the picture, leads me to believe he never actually had any formal training. And probably didn't understand how to pose people so they look realistic (the T-posing kid strikes again) or to draw children so they don't just look like tiny adults.

 

Yes, I know this picture plays into a lot of the prejudices of its time. I'm not laughing at the racism, I'm laughing at the T-posing kid and the woman in green's attempts to use the Force.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: M to AO for graphic violence, like all the war books.

However, the book handles it in a way that's more: T15+ for graphic violence (massacres by Native Americans, and massacres of Native Americans--it went both ways--are not pleasant).

4 stars. Informative.

(Endnote: I reviewed The Dreadnoughts because I like dreadnoughts, and I reviewed this because I thought something in it was funny. There's a vast ocean of other books in these series that I haven't reviewed.)

Mini-Reviews 6: Half-Blood Prince

Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart by Mimi Swartz

This is certainly informative, especially so since I don't usually go in for biomedical engineering. It was published in 2018, but according to my research (read: I looked at the article "artificial heart" on Wikipedia) nobody's yet managed to make a complete one that's available for anything other than experiments.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: T15+ for gore, because this is heart surgery.

However, the book handles it in a way that's: also T15+, but for strong language (including one instance of The Cardinal Swearword) and some sexual references.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, nonfiction, rated T15+

Battlesong by Lian Tanner

Behold the third book in this trilogy (second book here). I probably won't ever read the first book, but you never know.

We do manage to |defeat the angry uber-Luddites for good| in this one, courtesy of |finding a hidden science facility| (Aperture Science, anyone?) and any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. And if you live in a world that's been forcibly regressed to medieval times, modern technology counts as sufficiently advanced.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for the same things as the other one.

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, dystopian, rated T, series component

Minecraft: The Crash by Tracey Baptiste

This is an interesting look at how to handle sudden grief and other strong emotions, but I'm not sure I needed that from a Minecraft book.

At least they have their version be explicitly modded in this. Honestly, "It's modded" is the solution to basically every "There are no [insert thing] in Minecraft!" plot hole ever (I'm looking at you, Winter Morgan's unrealistic command blocks), but... I've seen two books use it, now, and one of them is this.

 

Nothing ever crashes in this one, making this a case of a Somewhat Misleading Title™.

Minecraft is a videogame, and it's rated: E10+ for fantasy violence. This one has grievous injury as well (car accident).

4 stars.

Tags for this one: 4-star, adventure, Minecraft, modern setting, rated E10+

(Endnote: What if the people in Sunker's Deep and Battlesong cracked into a nuclear isolation facility and didn't know what it was because none of them can read? I see no way that could end horribly.)

"Walk Through Fire" by Yasmine S. Ali, MD

This is a book about the 1978 Waverly train disaster, which with 98% certainty you didn't know about before reading this article. (Or before I told you, if you're my mom.) Basically, a train derailed in the middle of the town of Waverly, Tenessee. Then, two days later, a tank car full of petroleum exploded and swamped the local hospital in burn victims.

This book is honestly very well-written, for all that it tells the story fairly non-linearly (e.g. starting with something in one chapter and going back to the life and times of someone random in the next chapter). It all ties together around 2/3 of the way through the book, when the tank car exploded. The author has a way with words that makes the random snippets of seemingly unrelated people interesting enough that readers (read: me) don't get bored and DNF the book.

Also, it's written by the daughter of the head surgeon at the hospital that got swamped in burn victims. I didn't realize that until I'd finished the book and got to the author bio at the back.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: M for graphic violence.

However, the book handles it in a way that's more: T15+ for matter-of-fact descriptions of things like people getting their skin burned off.

4 stars. It's almost good enough to get 5, but not quite.

 

(Endnote: Our library has a display called "Learn Something New and Oddly Specific", which is where I found this book and that book about heart surgery that's currently languishing in an unfinished mini-review collection. I keep telling the librarians it's a great idea in hopes that they'll keep it around for longer.)

"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.)

"The LEGO Technic Idea Book: Simple Machines" by Yoshihito Isogawa

"Wade McClusky and the Battle of Midway" by David Rigby

I suppose this all just goes to show that I am not used to reading adult history books.

For one thing, it sometimes felt like a full 20% of the book was citations. Pretty much any time the author mentioned a date, event, person's name, argument, number, piece of cheese, or cat, he cited a source for it. (Note: I don't think he actually mentioned any cheese or cats in this.)

I have been assured that such things are normal in such books, but it kinda surprised me.

While reading a particular section, I was reminded of a line from a Cul de Sac comic: "I have only just begun to delve into the infinite possibilities of minutia." The section in question was about how many planes attacked the carrier Akagi during the battle; after citing more sources than I would have thought possible and writing down the thoughts on the matter of every eyewitness he could find, Rigby concluded that there were almost assuredly five planes attacking the Akagi, not three or eight.

The author spent a lot of time refuting the popular (apparently) opinion that McClusky didn't know what he was doing during the Battle of Midway. I think he succeeded, as I came away convinced that he did in fact know what he was doing. It got a little repetitive after a while, though.

About half the book was a biography of Wade McClusky himself. (I can never type his name right on the first try, by the way; I always mistype it McClusly or something and have to correct myself.) Then the other half was the battle of Midway, which sort of came in the middle of the biography. This makes sense, but it was still like "Biography biography biography !MIDWAY! biography biography."

Due to dragging in parts, I'm giving this three stars.

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: Like with my review of The Great War, M to AO. War is... not pleasant, y'all.

However, the book handles it in a way that's more: E10+. Fine for younger people, but they probably wouldn't want to read 350 pages of mostly nitpicking and citations.

As with every time I read and review something my mom also has, here's a link to her review.

"The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War" edited by Robert Cowley

So, as you can see, I don't review much nonfiction. (Caveat lector: the newer, smaller "nonfiction" tag is for nonfictional stuff that I have reviewed since 2021. The older "non-fiction" tag is for nonfiction reviewed before then; I don't quite disown anything under that tag, but it's kind of terrible.)

Anyway, this book is rather obviously about World War One, aka the Great War, aka the War to End All Wars. It's a collection of essays on various WWI topics ranging from the Battle of Jutland (Jutland, by John Keegan; pages 154-177) to the Red Baron (The War Lover, by Robert Wohl; pages 271-285) to the First Battle of the Falklands (The First Battle of the Falklands, by Ronald H. Spector; pages 124-140). The essays are of varying quality, ranging from 2 to 4 stars. I'll summarize particularly notable ones below.

One of the earlier ones (possibly even the first; can't remember which) had an approximately 3-page documentation of the etymology of the phrase "no-man's-land". It was super boring. If you ever read the book, just skip that, unless you're into 3-page etymologies.

 

The Christmas Truce (pages 50-64), by Stanley Weintraub, was about the Christmas truce of 1914. It was a weirdly heartwarming episode in the middle of an otherwise super horrific conflict, and almost assuredly one of the more... kid-friendly essays in here. Pretty sure I smiled all the way through it, only to stop smiling again when the next essay was about the Battle of Aubers and had a horrifically huge death toll again.

(Side note: You may notice I use the word "horrific" twice there. This was World War 1, it killed 15 to 22 million people.)

Section 3 was the polished jewel of the collection, containing only 25% lackluster essays and some of the book's best. (Note: I am biased to essays/books/what-have-you describing large machinery, so bear that in mind.) I mentioned Jutland and The First Battle of the Falklands earlier, and the only other noteworthy one was The Wreck of the Magdeburg (pages 141-153) by David Kahn. 

The German warship Magdeburg was a normal small cruiser (smaller than a light cruiser), which went aground off an island in the Gulf of Finland. It was carrying important stuff and they couldn't let it get captured, so they blew it up. 

Except it didn't work completely, and Russia was able to recover some stuff. This included what they termed "Codebook 151", which they sent to the British codebreaking agency, and... well, they broke it. Knowledge ensued.

On pages 215-216 (territory of Kut, by Robert F. Jones), there's a description of a death march. I don't actually know how graphic it was, because I saw the words "death march" and skipped to the end of the essay. Let the prospective reader beware.

 

"These Hideous Weapons" (pages 307-319), by Bruce I. Gudmundsson, is about flamethrowers. I learned some interesting stuff about them, including that they were mostly operated by former firemen (remind you of anything?) and that the French ones were manufactured by a maker of cigarette lighters.

 

Die Pariskanone (pages 404-409) was about a giant cannon capable of firing shells 65 miles and hitting Paris with them. It was broken up at the end of the war, but then some guy in the 60s "[left the Canadian government] to pursue his real interest: very big guns." That line just cracked me up. (The guy ended up going to prison and eventually being assassinated for supplying very big guns to various less-than-savory countries who could pay for them.)

 

Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: M. Possibly AO. It was WWI.

However, the book handles it in a way that's more: T15+.

Overall, this book gets 4 stars. It had its boring parts.

Link to the actual post.