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Member: Shrike58

Library3,142 books — see library

Reviews259 reviews — see reviews

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

Tagsactual (633), science fiction (533), pre-1983 (295), cold war (211), united states-19th century (200), warplanes (163), naval warfare (157), united states-20th century (149), 2006 (138), civil war (137) — see all tags

Groups50 Book Challenge, Amateur Historians, American Civil War, Archivists on LibraryThing, Aviation, Combiners!, Final Frontier - Spaceflight, History Readers: Clio's (Pleasure?) Palace, Military History, Naval History and Fictionshow all groups

About me I'm just some guy that lives in the Washington, DC area and who happens to be an archivist, and that's about as much as I care to give away. You can figure out my reading tastes from looking at the list.

For those of you who are curious my icon is a Curtiss A-18 Shrike; a 1930s warplane

About my library Due to accidents, deaccessioning, and living in an area well served with libraries, I only own a portion of the the books I'm listing (see the tag "actual"), but I have read EVERY single one of them (or will in the coming year). At least this was the case before the current buying binge of the last year or so! The main thing is that I have years of lists and journal entries tracking my reading that have lacked a home, at least until now; let's just say that some people's libraries are more virtual than others! As for how I rate I figure five stars is a book you should probably own as a generalist, four is worth rereading (or owning if you're a specialist), three is worth reading once, two wasn't all it's cracked up to be, one is that I read this book so you don't have to. If I have a particular quirk of organization it's that I prefer to use the editor as the author instead of just listing these books that produced themselves. Also, books that are yet to be tagged and rated are the de facto "to read" list; I tag and rate everything.

Favorite authorsNone specified

Account typepublic, lifetime

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/Shrike58 (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Shrike58 (library)

Member sinceDec 22, 2005

Comments from other LibraryThing-ers

(Leave a comment.)

RE Sydney & Kormoran. Hey thanks, I heard yesterday. Hopefully that'll put some minds to rest in Australia. I have Kormoran's skipper memoir;
always sounded like the Sydney came to close and got torpedoed (on top of shelling). I wonder if they'll be able to bring up some interesting items from both ships (supposedly purty danged deep there). Regards, A
That Edward Hamilton! You never know what little treasure will turn up there (if you don't go blind reading their newsprint ads)
Happy New Year mates!
My wife & I are just coming out from a long bout of some kinda flu and 2 weeks of holiday company. I hope Santa treated you well, I received an armload of books (Rome, ACW, Napoleonics, WWI, WWII, scifi)…which I’m currently plowing through. Among them were several from the “print on demand” publishers which provide hard to find monographs (WWI in East Africa). I received & read that old classic GOSHAWK SQUADRON by Derek Robinson (better than BLUE MAX to me). Adrian Goldsworth’s CANNAE is a quick read. Sloan’s ULTIMATE BATTLE (Okinawa) is a collection of oral history anecdotes not an operational study but a good one of that genre. I recommend the new STALINGRAD by Michael Jones, lots of new research & analysis incorporated (and corrects some myths along the way). I also finished McCullough’s final Masters of Rome volume: ANTONY & CLEOPATRA, not up to her others in my opinion. Also the newest from Dan Abnett’s “Gaunt’s Ghosts” series, ONLY in DEATH, gripping space opera! I was also surprised to find that my (American) football team, the Redskins, somehow slipped into the playoffs. We’ll see how long that lasts! Well, I’ll be interested in checking to see what yall have added to your collections. I hope 2008 is a banner year for stocking your shelves with goodies. Regards from a damp Maryland, Ammianus
Hiya pal, see my Antietam note in American Civil War group. Cheers, A
Just spotted this book and reckoned it would be of interest:
War, technology, and experience aboard the USS Monitor
http://www.librarything.com/work/448709
Regards, Donogh
The penalty for McLaren seems Draconian, but the team is responsible for the actions of it's employees if condones their behavior, either actively or by inaction. I do think that Alonzo and de la Rosa got off way too easy, they were aware of the illegal data for three months. Shame some people don't have to be held accountable.
As I bought 'Conqueror' by Rob Griffin because I saw it on your catalog, perhaps you'd be interested in knowing he also has a book on the Chieftain.
I have corrected the spelling mistake (I was in a bit of a hurry, italian is written with a e in norwegian ie italiener=italian)
I am sure there are many more of the same, I fix them when I see them.
Mates: Wow! Check out this new to me publisher. http://www.leonaur.com/
I've purchased Lejune's memoirs from them as well as SGT Guillemard. Cheers, A
I see that you read THUNDER RUN. There are two other books covering the same subject but from different levels. I just finished TAKEDOWN: The Third Infantry Division's Assault on Baghdad by Jim Lacey which covers the divisional level story from Kuwait to Baghdad. HEAVY METAL: A Tank Company's Battle to Baghdad by Jason Conroy & Ron Martz is the story of C Co 1/64 AR and includes actions after the fall and early occupation of Baghdad.
The pressure was too much! Just ordered it from Abe.
Yes, I see that indeed hardware is appearing on your acquisition list. Thanks, I just had to go add "Conqueror" to my wish list.
Hello Again,

I recieved the Graff book "Medieval Chinese Warfare" just after Xmas - it was great. More recently I discovered that the publishers had a follow up "War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China 900 - 1795" different author but samp publishers and same format. I got my hands on that as soon as I could.

Very similar to the earlier work - most enjoyable.

Cheers
I concur RE Hodges & HUertgen...from my reading he seemed to be one of those "Hey diddle diddle, right up the middle" guys. Regards from rather toasty Maryland!
Picked up this new bio: Courtney Hicks Hodges, not the greatest but fills a gap in the WWII US bios. Cheers, A
Thanks for the covers!!!
Thanks for the cover for Woolley's Freikorps book - it was MUCH better!!
Thanks for your reply. Really useful! I had come across most of these books, but wasn't sure about them. It's good to have the opinion of someone who's read them. I hadn't heard of Ben-Ami Shillony before.

It's a pity so many of the books written about Japan in this period seem to be quite polemical. I suppose really I ought to learn Japanese, if I can find the time . . .
Hello, I notice you have read a lot of books about Japan. I wonder if could recommend me any good books in English on the rise of militarism and the failure of democracy in early Showa-era Japan, or on the Sino-Japanese conflict in the 1930s and 1940s? This is something I'm interested in at the moment.
Hey Shrike; see this one??! Barbarossa: The Air Battle July-December 1941 (Hardcover)
by Christer Bergstrom (Author)
Well well, look what I found on Amazon FINALLY in English, [The Napoleonic Wars through the Experiences of an Officer of Berthier's Staff] by [[Lejune]], 2 volume set from Leonaur Ltd in the UK. And reasonably priced.
Thanks again Shrike,

the Graff book is now on order at Angus and Robertson. It might take a month or so to arrive (no Australian Distributors have it here) but It will be worth the wait.

Cheers from Oz
Saw your post regarding "Medieval Chinese Warfare". I'm off to the bookshops to find out how I can get my hands on a copy.

Many Thanks
Cheers
Hagedorn's book on Aircraft of the Latin American Wars is excellent. It's pretty much all photos and color profiles, with most of the text downloadable off the web. Was done to keep the size of the book down and thus keep it affordable. It's the typical high quality book from Hikoki, who being small, do small print runs. Once they go out of print, they are hard to find and expensive. I'm probably not making things any easier for you and I apologize for that! E-Bay and ABEBOOKS have been getting a lot of my money this last month. Been finding too much that's been on my want list and ones that I didn't know existed. I just have to remind myself that I got good deals on some of them.
Hi Shrike, sorry that I haven't gotten back to you sooner! I've been busy trying to catch up after a business trip and haven't been in LT until tonight. I am very happy with both books. Both have lots of internal amd external photos, contemporary photos, descriptions of variants, schematics, and color profiles. The T-35 1/35th scale schematics are on a fold-out in the back, due to it's size. All photos are B&W, and some of the contemporary photos are grainy. All of the books by this publisher (Barbarossa Books in UK) that I've seen have been excellent. Hope this helps!
Well, I appreciate your efforts to tidy up the military history books here. I actually don't own that many military history books (c. 100) since I end up checking most of the ones I read out of the library. I'm not able to purchase as many new books as I used to anyway, now that I'm on a grad student's stipend. :) Most of my research right now is focused on the Spanish-American War, so over time I suspect my library will start growing in that direction.
Thanks for the information on updating the missing covers. I plan on tackling that as soon as I've finished scanning in the rest of my library (another 500-1000 books). BTW, I notice that we share a really interesting and eclectic set of 165 books. Also, I actually just moved to NC from Northern Virginia last year
Thanks for more covers!!!
Thanks for the pointing out the covers.
Merry Xmas !Shrike, finally finishing cataloging everything. Take a look you might see a title you've missed. Cheers, A
Hello--do you mean you used to be a patron of Twinsburg Library? Very interesting :-)
Thank you for the notice of the [no title] book in my library. This problem is certainly quite a nuissance. I've now gone through my catalog and assigned a primary language to all of the books which had none, and cleaned up the many [no title] books I found along the way. Do you know if the [no title] problem has been occuring with books which do have a primary language? And if so, how does one find these books in that it is in fact the work and not the book which has no title?
Hi, thank you for bringing "The Shattered Sword" to my attention. I read about this book while visiting combinedfleet.com, and have read an excerpt from the book's website.
Thanks for pointing out the 'No Title' book by A.J.Barker. This is in fact 'Suez : The Seven Day War' Now I've tried all ways to get this title to take,but hovever I try,Manually or through the various Libriaries available - no go.When I've time I will investigate further. Any thoughts? As it is coming up as owned by no-one else I badly want to get it in.
Again many thanks
devenish
Thanks for pointing out the covers!!
Thanks for the suggestions.

I've already read When Thunder Rolled, and have been looking for a good(& cheap) used copy of Flying Black Ponies for a couple months now. I also picked up Cheating Death a couple nights ago and its looking good so far.
Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't read Naimark, but I think I came across his name somewhere before.

As for the impact of looting and rape on discipline and fighting ability of the troops, it is no doubt negative.

What troubles me, though, is that Westerners, Americans especially, in their usual geo- and ethnographical ignorance, call soldiers of the Soviet Army simply "Russians," which just adds to the Western Russophobia, a phaenomenon much older than the Cold War. I'm not sure any data on ethnic composition of the Red Army available, but I'd venture to guess that by the end of the War Russians were not in the majority in the ranks. Tartars, Uzbeks, Ukrainians and the rest must share the blame.

... Oh, by the way, I'm neither a Russian, nor a Russian patriot.
Beevor-schmeevor

True ... but, you see, it's all about the packaging. For example, in his book, Beevor mentioned once (if I remember correctly) the rapes happened in the parts of Germany occupied by the Western Allies. In his BookTV talk about his book he said that it was widespread there, though not on the same scale as in the East. Of course, with modern technology a video document is as "hardcopy" as a printed one, but still ... how many people watch BookTV? In the West, the raping and pillaging committed by the Red Army had been generally known, even if not so much talked about. So, why all that big stir? I wander ...

Or, take The Hitler ... oops, History Channel. Their program about the downfall of Berlin, broadcasted in the wake of the publication of Beevor's book, was announced as "Red Army pillages and rapes." In the hour-long program (minus commercials, of course), Mr. Beevor mentioned the rapes in the very end, and talked about the issue for a couple of minutes. Then the host, a guy from THC, said that, of course, the Russians deny all that. Well, what will a "general viewer" remember? How many Soviets were killed in battle, or the rapes?

... Regardless, the book is just poorly written, rapes or no rapes. Compare with the "Armageddon" by Hastings: he's not easier on the Soviets, but he can write!
Yes, I imagine this LibraryThing website does skew young -- although I am now an official senior citizen (though I haven't matured much beyond age 12). Most people my age are probably not computer literate but I have been glued to a computer for the last 18 years. I have tried to interest my older brother in this (he collects rare baseball books) but he's too busy reading.

I like your definition of a fan. I certainly do not relish the idea of attending a convention of fans of psychopathic serial killer true crime books, especially since the untimely death of my overly large dog :).
Do you think it's indigenous to librarything that it attracts so many sci fi and fantasy fans? I was immediately attracted to it because I've been cataloguing my books on bookcollectorz and it's not nearly as user friendly (except that I can use a hand-held barcode scanner to enter books there). Maybe with more publicity about this site (and I'm doing my part to get the word out), those genre fans will be outnumbered; maybe not. Maybe I am unique -- I haven't read the Lord of the Rings series nor any Harry Potter books either.
Really? I don't know much about LiveJournal; is it a blog? There are many many people who love science fiction and fantasy but I'll never be one of them. It must be the lawyer in me.
You're right -- most of the people that match up to me, for reasons I can't figure out, seem to have a lot of sci-fi and fantasy and I don't have any. 'Tis a puzzlement.
Hi, thank you for uploading the cover pictures and telling me they were there! I'm still new to LT and so the uploading and changing covers is new to me, but it's a nice feature. You have great books in your list! Thanks for dropping by.
Hey, thanks for stopping by. I'll definitely have to check that one out, as it sounds pretty interesting. I always appreciate recommendations. : )
You asked why I gave "Gulag" two stars (I'm slow on responding to comments). It got two stars because I've started reading it twice and couldn't finish it. There is a bit more political posturing than I'd expected, but it's just very dense and thick. After slogging through Kershaw's "Hitler" set and starting into Joseph Frank's Doestoevsky set, I'm just tired of thick books.

Once I finish it, I'll re-rate the book appropriately. Thanks for reminding me!
Unfortunately I have only been able to identify the artists for about half my covers. I nearly commented artists but decided on tags, it means I can call up an artists work on a graphical shelf.
Scanning and uploading 2000 covers was quite an effort, I hope it will prove useful to others with british editions.
Gee, I'm also just a middle-aged guy that lives in the Washington, DC area and who happens to be an archivist - how strange!
I make no apologies for getting you into LibraryThing! I think every bibliophile is also a LT-ophile - once they find out about it ...
Hi there. Indeed I am that rivkat.

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