Epinions Recent Reviews for szz

How the Mexican revolution spilled over into the United States and was Forgotten

Sun, 1 Aug 2004 00:29:52 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - Only a serious student of the Mexican Revolution would know that that Revolution produced a manifesto calling for revolution in the American Southwest by ethnic Mexicans. And even when mentioned in histories of the Revolution it is seldom noted that...

Biased history done poorly

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 01:57:56 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author szz - John Mosier has published a second revisionist book on military history, this time about World War II in Europe and the Mediterranean: The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II. [0] I note...

Well argued revisionist history about the Battle of Gettysburg.

Mon, 8 Dec 2003 10:24:33 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - If you do not know the name of the commanding officer of the 20th Maine on 1 July 1863 this book may not be meant for you. However, if you KNOW that the fight for Little Round Top on 2 July was one of the critical events of the battle of Gettysburg...

The West Texas cattle frontier in fact, done as fiction

Tue, 20 May 2003 23:53:29 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - Sam Chance is a novel about the Texas cattle frontier. It is historically accurate as it traces the gradual change of that frontier from a Spanish/Mexican model of free ranging, semi-domesticated stock of half-wild Spanish ancestry exploited but...

Ironclads Worked

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 18:54:29 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad & the Man Whose Invention Changed the Course of History is, naturally, the story of the Civil War ironclad Monitor. In a book as concise as the title is long: Fit into a package only slightly...

The Best Historical Novels Ever?

Sat, 31 Aug 2002 14:01:54 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - (This is a joint review of The King Must Die and its sequel, The Bull From the Sea) Is it possible for anyone to write better historical fiction than Mary Renault's two volumes retelling of the Greek legend of Theseus? No. These two...

Globalization is Bad?

Thu, 4 Jul 2002 13:36:56 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - A two sentence summarization of Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis: Forcing the people of India, China, much of Africa, and various European and American colonies in South East Asia into the world economic system at the end of the 19th...

The Rise of IJN Air Power

Wed, 5 Jun 2002 09:41:59 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - If you like to argue that American bombing of Japanese cities during World War II was moral you have another tool to use. You can open Sunburst to page 117 and point to the map of China showing all the Chinese cities the Japanese bombed between...

While Waiting for the Barbarians

Sun, 12 May 2002 21:21:24 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - I read Nobody Loves a Centurion, the 6th novel of John Maddox Roberts' SPQR series, all the way through. Unlike that other historical novel also set in classical Roman setting, The Eyes & Ears of Rome in Spain, which I recently reviewed...

The German Path to France

Sun, 5 May 2002 15:16:21 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - This is an excellent study of political and military decision making in Britain, France and Belgium, starting before World War II and leading past the surrender of the Belgian Army on the 27th of May 1940 to the evacuation of the Second British...

A Nice Cover....

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 17:20:36 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author szz - This is not a good novel. It has a beautiful cover, but what you read inside is not worth the purchase price. Not by any criteria. I knew it was not going to be great after reading the editorial review at Amazon.com. But I had hopes prompted by a deep...

As Tough as the 101st Airborne

Sat, 9 Mar 2002 20:10:50 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - Did you know that it was so cold and wet in the foxholes occupied by the infantry on the American front lines near the German border during late 1944 that some men couldn’t even use their fingers to button their jackets? This sound like a stupid...

The Best Possible Description of the Battle of the River Plate

Fri, 4 Jan 2002 00:54:27 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - This is a new interpretation of the naval Battle of the River Plate that took place in December 1939. This battle was fought between a German “pocket battleship”, the Admiral Graf Spee, and three Royal Navy cruisers. It was the first significant surface...

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS THAT WASN'T

Wed, 31 Oct 2001 14:04:30 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - [Contains much political commentary, like James23's review, but done completely independently.] The United States’ Presidential election of 2000, with its month long uncertainty about the outcome in Florida, was universally called a “constitutional...

A Naval History Book that Reads Like a Detective Novel

Thu, 5 Jul 2001 17:53:49 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - If you are interested in WWII British or Australian navy history, this book is well worth reading. The author of Bitter Victory takes a difficult subject with many uncertainties, the loss of HMAS SYDNEY in action against the disguised German...

What if Germany Won?

Tue, 3 Jul 2001 13:11:20 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - It is 1964. Greater Germany has won the war that Poland, France and Britain started in 1939. It has made peace in 1945 with The United States, ending the war started in December 1941. In Eastern Europe, Germany has more or less conquered everything up to...

"You must be careful about what you pretend to be,

Mon, 2 Apr 2001 17:04:14 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - because in the end you are what you pretend to be.”

Last weekend I rented and watched a very intriguing movie adapted from a Kurt Vonnegut novel and staring Nick Nolte. The movie was “Mother Night”. I have absolutely no idea what that...

A Great War Movie, From an Unusual Perspective

Tue, 27 Mar 2001 12:31:57 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - About one-fourth of the way through watching Command Decision I remarked to my wife that the movie was obviously based on the script for a play, only slightly re-written for the cinema format. I pointed out that there were few sets in the movie,...

Interesting and entertaining for several reasons

Fri, 9 Mar 2001 18:57:11 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - One of the presents I got for my birthday was the 1961 war movie Hell is For Heroes, which was directed by Don Siegel (Dirty Harry). I wanted it for two reasons. First, Robert Spiller, who teaches at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at...

The Best of John Ford's Cavalrey Trilogy

Sun, 18 Jun 2000 13:27:33 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author szz - First of all, this is a great movie. It has a good story, action, humor, interesting characters, great acting by members of John Ford's "stock company" plus Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple and John Agar, honorable Indian "opponents" and...

Tedious and Pretentious

Mon, 12 Jun 2000 14:58:59 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author szz - The second most interesting thing about this book is that the publisher has the audacity and money, combined with sufficient contempt its customers, to make it a literary success. Tides of War is a poorly written novelization of the famous war fought in...

The Emperor Has no Clothes

Thu, 25 May 2000 22:24:22 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author szz - The historical novel Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield has received almost universally good reviews. It received outstanding reviews in both the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review, and good reviews in The New Yorker and USA Today. As of...