OT - Book (Non Fiction) Review/Recommendations Thread

[Adm.Lee]

Got two for today.

I'm 2/3 through "Ike's bluff" by Evan Thomas. This is good! Not only informative, but an easy read, too. It's a bit before our T2k time, but still important. It's Pres. Eisenhower's foreign & defense policies, how he wrestled with the fact that he could blow the world to Kingdom Come in a day. Ike opted for a light touch and plenty of misdirection. Journalists and historians since have thought of Ike as a bumbling geezer who didn't seem to care about dangers, but that was mostly his act, working to put the American people at ease. He didn't want panic pushing the country into a Prussian- or Soviet-style police/garrison state, and he didn't want to panic the Soviets into starting something they couldn't finish. His "New Look" defense policy (aka "massive retaliation") was meant to keep the US out of all wars, since any war could easily escalate to the Big One.

"Rules of the game" by Andrew Gordon. It's about the Royal Navy's leadership at Jutland. The first 1/3 of the book sets up the battle, and takes us deeply into the first phases of the action. Then, we go back in time, to see how the peacetime RN became so set in its ways, especially in regards to signalling, that hardened initiative and tactical thinking. That's also about 1/3 of the book, and it dragged a bit, IMO. The last third resumes with the battle and the aftermath. There's a good bit on how contemporary navies could pay attention to what happened, and learn how to avoid peacetime mindsets that stultify wartime thinking. The Jellicoe vs. Beatty arguments that riled the service in the postwar years are included.