OT - Book (Non Fiction) Review/Recommendations Thread

[Adm.Lee]

Good- Baghdad at sunrise: a brigade commander's war in Iraq / Peter R. Mansoor. Col. Mansoor commanded the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division from June 2003-July 2004 in Iraq. His brigade had some of western Baghdad, and succeeded in quieting its area, and then moved to the Karbala fight against Sadr on their way out in 2004. It's a good read, especially if you want to learn how to do counter-insurgency. He went on to be a staffer to Gen. Petraeus when he led MNF-Iraq, but has now retired to teach history at Ohio State.
I may have met him way back when-- he started his doctoral program at OSU when I was finishing my bachelor's in military history, and took a few grad-level courses (summer 1990). His thesis was published: The GI offensive in Europe : the triumph of American infantry divisions, 1941-1945, and that was a really good book, too. The US infantry usually gets a bad rap, but he brought out that they had their good qualities, and it was those that won the war in the ETO.

Bad- Wings of Gold: the US Navy's air offensive in the Pacific by Gerald Astor. I think the author did a cut & paste job with a bunch of oral histories, and slapped together the connecting text, which was full of technical errors. I admit to being unusual, but I was in grade school when I could tell the difference between SBD and SB2C dive-bombers, and I knew that the IJNS Yamato had 18.1" guns, not 17"! Especially disappointing, since his biography of "Terrible" Terry Allen was pretty good.