A History of Air Warfare Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a must have for all with an interest in air power. With contributions from the world's leading experts on air power history and strategy, the book is unique in the breadth and depth of its examination of the development of air power.
The book's structure is excellent. The chapters are concise (nominally 20 pages) and provide insight into air power's role in the conflict being considered. What is very useful is the positioning, in most chapters anyway, of air power's role in a particular conflict with how it was used on other conflicts past and present. This provides a bit of cohesion to the book which is sometimes difficult in a collected work. This is particular important in this work as the authors generally examine different aspects of air power (the chapter on the Israel-Arab Wars focused on air superiority while that on the Falklands had a distinctly logistical feel about it). This is not a criticism of the book as it is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of every aspect of air power in every conflict.
Perhaps the most positive aspect of the book is that it wasn't written by or for air power zealots. The perspectives offered were balanced (in the main) and different viewpoints were raised. This was most notable in the final part of the book (Part V - Perspectives) in the two concluding chapters by Van Creveld and Hallion. Both provide an overview of the evolution of air power and its potential future, each arriving at well argued and supported (but different) conclusions.
In summary: as you read through the book you gain an understanding of how certain aspects of air power (technical, logistical, strategy or tactical) developed over a number of conflicts. At the end, you are presented with two essentially opposing views on what this history means for the future. Concluding the book in such a way makes you challenge your own interpretation of where we have been and where we are going. That is what makes this book a must read for all with an interest or viewpoint on the past, present or future of air power.

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***Selected for the 2010 Chief of the United States Air Force's Reading List***This one-volume anthology provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that air power has played in military conflicts over the past century. Comprising sixteen essays penned by a global cadre of leading military experts, A History of Air Warfare chronologically examines the utility of air power from the First World War to the second Lebanon war, campaign by campaign. Each essay lays out the objectives, events, and key players of the conflict in question, reviews the role of air power in the strategic and operational contexts, and explores the interplay between the political framework and military operations proper. The concluding section offers wider perspectives by focusing on air and space power in both unconventional and conventional warfare from 1913 to the present. More than a simple homage to air power, A History of Air Warfare exposes air power's strengths and weaknesses and, where relevant, illuminates the challenges of joint operations and coalition warfare. Because of its critical approach, even treatment, and historical background, the book will appeal to modern warfare scholars, air power specialists, and general readers interested in military history alike.

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A Fountain Filled with Blood: A Mystery Review

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(More customer reviews)Despite its title, which was taken from an old hymn by the English poet Thomas Cowper, A FOUNTAIN FILLED WITH BLOOD is neither grisly nor especially violent. This book, the second in a series by new author Julia Spencer-Fleming, is a traditional mystery that is unlikely to offend anyone and quite likely to entertain many.
Clare Fergusson is a former Army helicopter pilot, now an Episcopal priest in the small upstate New York town of Millers Kill. In her late 30s and unmarried, she has in general a healthy, no-nonsense attitude toward life and a particular calling toward her religion, which is also now her livelihood. Her faith is strong but unobtrusive --- there's no proselytizing here. Rather, the author uses the occasional inclusion of a prayer or a bit of ritual to add atmosphere while also providing insight into Clare's character.
Here, as in the first book in the series, IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER, Clare partners up with Sheriff Russ Van Alstyne to solve a crime into whose path she, literally, stumbles. It seems someone around Millers Kill doesn't like gay men. Two are badly beaten in a manner that suggests a hate crime and then one more is found dead; he's the body Clare stumbles into. There happens to be a connection between the dead man and a young couple whose marriage she is to perform in a couple of weeks, which gives Clare opportunity to learn some things Russ and his deputies might not. Because of her military training and a healthy dose of curiosity --- of the sort that amateur detectives must have or these books would never go anywhere --- Clare doesn't hesitate to learn all she can, though at some cost to herself.
The small-town setting will feel familiar to a large number of readers, regardless of the specific upper New York State locale; there is a sort of comforting togetherness going on. There's a Fourth of July celebration in the park and a town meeting where a new development is opposed on environmental grounds. There's a big old Victorian house on the edge of town that has been turned into a bed and breakfast and is run by a pair of openly gay men who are life-partners. There are summer tourists with their stiff, new city-bought leisure clothes, necessary to the fragile economy but getting in the way. Even the nature of the crimes and their impact on the community seem familiar, especially when Clare proposes to her vestry that their church should show support for the victims of a crime that the older, uptight vestry members would rather pretend had no connection to sexuality.
An interestingly different thread of tension runs through the entire book, in the form of a strong sexual attraction between the priest and the sheriff, who not only is a very married man but also loves his wife --- and they both know it. These two characters are extremely well drawn, real people in a very personal conundrum.
Spencer-Fleming is at her best with action scenes --- most interesting in that she portrays them vividly yet without gratuitous violence. She writes so well that she doesn't need blood and gore to get our attention. In the latter half of the book, there is an extended episode in which Clare uses her helicopter pilot skills, honed during the Gulf War, that will have you breathless as you await the outcome, unable to guess what it will be.
For readers who prefer conventional mysteries --- and for anyone who might like a change of pace from the tougher, darker thrillers --- A FOUNTAIN FILLED WITH BLOOD would be a good choice. Especially since, if you like it, the author's previous novel, IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER, is now out in paperback.
--- Reviewed by Ava Dianne Day

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Angels on my Wings Review

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(More customer reviews)Where was the editor? All of a sudden the angels became angles and whether became weather. Very distracting. Reviewing from my Kindle. Insufficient punctuation.

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Transcons flight three seven departed from Los Angeles bound for JFK airport in New York. Sometime after they reached their cruising altitude, the first officer noticed the pressure dropping in the cargo hold below. Neither the captain nor the first officer was aware that a partially filled propane tank had been loaded into the cargo hold and was about to explode.Mayday, mayday Transcon flight three seven. Rapid decompression, explosion onboard. Descending to one-zero thousand. Clear all traffic below! These words echoed into the headset of the flight controllers at Lincoln Center and a desperate feeling came over them as they watched flight three seven descend on their radar screen.

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Black Sunday Review

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(More customer reviews)Before Thomas Harris, a respected reporter for the Associated Press and ace novelist, created the creepy-yet-charismatic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in his novels Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, he had already dabbled in another and even more frightening topic: a massive terrorist attack against a "soft" (undefended, usually civilian) target in his 1975 debut novel, Black Sunday.
Like The Sum of All Fears, a Tom Clancy "Jack Ryan Novel" that was clearly inspired by Harris' tautly written thriller, Black Sunday's plot focuses on a plan by Palestinian terrorists to commit a deadly and spectacular attack on a highly televised event: the Super Bowl.
The reason for the attack -- at least from the Palestinian side -- is a common thread that runs through both novels: America's unswerving support for Israel in the apparently never-ending Middle East conflict.
And just as Clancy --possibly taking his cues from this novel -- would later do in Sum, Harris not only has a dedicated group of terrorists to carry out this diabolical plan, he has a psychotic American co-conspirator on board, a man whose recent life has pushed him over the edge from understandable resentment to psychotic lust for revenge against his own country.
There, however, the similarities end, for whereas Clancy's obviously insane Marvin Russell was a murderous Native American of the Lakota tribe and was considered both untrustworthy and expendable by his Arab "allies" and was used as a mere conduit into the Denver area until the homemade nuclear bomb was in place in that Colorado city, Black Sunday's Michael Lander is a willing planner and executioner of Black September's spectacular plot to turn a blimp into a makeshift weapon of mass destruction. A Navy veteran with experience on both dirigibles and helicopters, Lander was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and spent six hellish years as a POW until the Paris Agreement ended American military involvement in Indochina and Hanoi released all the American prisoners.
For Lander, it is his Vietnam experience that is the catalyst for his willing embrace of the Black September terrorists. Ostracized by his fellow POWs for collaborating with the North Vietnamese and discovering that his wife has had an affair, Lander is pushed to the brink of madness by the hostility his fellow POWs -- especially the senior officer -- feel toward him. Unable to cope with his humiliation and anger, Michael Lander resigns his commission and goes job hunting, finding the going tough until, finally, he is hired by the Aldrich rubber company to fly blimps.
By now, however, Lander is plotting a most lethal sort of revenge upon the country he believes caused him to lose his pride, his honor, six years of his life, his manhood, and his wife. Inspired by the Black September attack on the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, he contacts the radical terrorist group, asking for explosives and technical assistance so he can convert the Aldrich blimp into a flying Claymore mine. The target: the Super Bowl championship game. The place: the new Superdome stadium in New Orleans.
Intrigued, the Palestinians send one of their deadliest -- and most beautiful -- operatives, Dahlia Iyad. She spends a year in the United States, cultivating, evaluating, and becoming intimate with Lander, a man she knows to be increasingly insane yet incredibly useful to Black September's goal of making America pay for her support of Palestine's hated enemy, Israel.
Harris takes the reader along on a transatlantic race against the clock as the terrorists make their detailed plans and get ever closer to accomplishing their deadly mission, while Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service), the CIA, and the FBI hunt the terrorists down after finding clues that point to an impending attack on American soil. Leading the hunt is Major David Kabakov, whose ruthless efficiency at chasing and killing Palestinian terrorists has earned him the dark-humored nickname of "the final solution." And as Harris interweaves the storylines of the hunter and hunted, the reader is enticed to keep reading to find out who will preservere....and who will die.
Harris masterfully flashes backward and forward through time, driving the terrorist plot forward step by step and describing the American-Israeli collaborative effort to find Dahlia and her comrades before they can carry out their plan in minute detail, all the while examining Lander's long spiral into murderous madness. The pace is fast and furious, giving the reader an excellent example of a well-crafted suspense novel that not only never loses focus or goes into unnecessary tangents, but is also grounded in the reality of the mid-1970s. It discusses such real-life events as the Munich Massacre, the Vietnam War, the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, and the beginning of the spread of global terrorism. Black September, the Palestinian sponsors of Lander's plan, really existed, and so did most of the agencies and entities depicted in the novel, with Aldrich Rubber being a fictional stand-in for Goodyear.
Black Sunday not only marked the debut of a master of the suspense genre, but it was also made into a moderately successful motion picture which co-starred Bruce Dern and Robert Shaw.

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Rotorcraft Flying Handbook (Updated Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)It isn't great literature but there are very few wasted words in this book, which is the only textbook used at the flight school where I have been getting my helicopter training. The color diagrams and charts are immensely helpful in understanding aerodynamics. This book teaches you pretty much everything useful for flying helicopters that you can learn from reading a book (i.e., not all that much; don't expect to hold a hover until after a few hours of painful practice).

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The essential guide for anyone who wants to fly a helicopter or gyroplane-newly updated.
Designed by the Federal Aviation Administration, this handbook is the ultimate technical manual for anyone who flies or wants to learn to fly a helicopter or gyroplane. If you're preparing for private, commercial, or flight instruction pilot certificates, it's more than essential reading-it's the best possible study guide available, and its information can be life-saving. In authoritative and understandable language, here are explanations of general aerodynamics and the aerodynamics of flight, navigation, communication, flight controls, flight maneuvers, emergencies, and more.With full-color illustrations detailing every chapter, this is a one-of-a-kind resource for pilots and would-be pilots. 500 color photographs

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Enemy Mine Review

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(More customer reviews)I have been eagerly awaiting the story of Kathy Trayhern. This is a great story. The chemistry between Kathy and Mac is great. The trust established between the two is well crafted. Both are heroic. Ms. McKenna's use of the symbol of the butterfly at the beginning of the book is continued throughout the book in the way that everything Kathy thinks changes. While Garcia is a drug lord and the scum of the earth, his saving grace is his love for his daughter. She realizes that two wrongs don't make a right. His father kidnapped her family so she would kidnap his daughter. She decides by the end of the book that she cannot inflict that kind of pain to the little girl. Kathy's relationship with all the minor characters is well written and often humorous.
This book contains romance, adventure, and great characters. All of the characters, heroes and villians are well developed and the technical knowledge is well stated. We also are treated to a viist from the Ladies of the Black Jaguar Squadron. One of the BJS scenes is hilarious. Lindsay McKenna has a real winner in Enemy Mine. It is a must have for her fans.

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A New York Times Bestselling AuthorMarine Black-Ops helicopter pilot Kathy Trayhern wanted one thing from the Garcia Drug Cartel. . . . Garcia had kidnapped and tortured her family. Now she would do the same to his - and wipe out his whole illegal jungle operation as well. But to get the job done, she'd have to enlist the help of a man she didn't even trust - and undercover agent Mac Coulter was no fool.Available only in Romance 8 & 12.

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