Tag: Nonfiction

Review: Dragon’s Wings

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A 2013 book by noted PLAAF watcher Andreas Rupprecht, Dragon’s Wings is one of the first looks behind the curtain of the Chinese aircraft industry. Though now obviously old, it’s still a good snapshot into the past. Besides the familiar J-6/7s and the newer domestic J-8/10-etcs, it provides a look at many of the never-were (and frequently technically impossible at the time) aircraft proposed.

However much it’s shown its age, it’s still a great book. It’s an excellent coffee table book for aircraft enthusiasts.

Review: Small Arms For Urban Combat

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Small Arms For Urban Combat

Russell Tilstra’s Small Arms For Urban Combat seems at first glance to be just what the title says. It’s a nonfiction reference book about various small arms and their usefulness in urban war. However, it turns out to be a lot more shallow than that.

Sadly, this is less an analysis and more of a “Basic first guide to small arms”. While not bad by itself, it would have been a lot better with a more honest title. The urban warfare part feels like an afterthought.

Review: Interception

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Interception: The Secrets of Modern Sports Betting

Ed Miller and Matthew Davidow are two of the sharpest (word choice deliberate) and most experienced minds in sports betting. This made me have very high expectations for Interception, their most recent book on the sports betting ecosystem. I’m delighted to say that it only took a few pages for it to outright exceed them.

For me specifically, it was a little less of an experience in that I already knew most of the plain facts stated within (the tricks you think will work will not, sportsbooks offer far more markets than they can realistically handicap so they use restrictions to ‘counter’, etc…) But I still found it enlightening and illuminating. And for a newcomer it’d be vastly more so. The one thing I had against it was how its tone was a little snarky for my taste, but that’s a mild stylistic complaint.

Anyway, you need to read this to understand sports betting and how it’s going. This book has also made me ever-more convinced that a modest minimum bet liability law would be extremely beneficial to the sports betting ecosystem, but that’s a topic for another post. As it stands, it’s the best sports betting book I’ve read.

Review: Pilot Error

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Pilot Error

The first Fuldapocalypse review of 2024 is of a nonfiction book by pilot and aviation commentary Sylvia Wrigley. Pilot Error looks at the plane crashes where it was obviously the pilot’s fault. And not being unlucky or something, but just really, really bad.

There’s a reason why most of the crashes in this book are private light planes and why many are not fatal. It’s because Wrigley is by her own admission trying for dark humor and some of the most horrendous crashes like the pilot trying to land blindfolded for a bet/dare on a flight with dozens of passengers are not funny but just horrifying.

So in this you get drunks, idiots, and drunken idiots. It’s enough to make you glad that 99.9999% of the people in a very demanding role are not like the ones in this book.

Review: Sukhoi Su-15

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Sukhoi Su-15: The Boeing Killer

A Yefim Gordon book on the titular interceptor, Sukhoi Su-15 is exactly what it says it is and exactly what you’d expect. Which is to say, a book on an obscure Soviet plane that has a lot of details, but is questionably laid out and where you really, really want to double-check everything. In this case, some of the details are interesting.

These include things like the overlooked for-but-almost-always-not-with ground attack armament it had, and of course model kit reviews. (I do like the look of the Flagon). The issues besides the ones inherent to any Yefim Gordon book are that the Su-15 really didn’t have many variants or career highlights beyond the KAL shootdown. But you could do worse if you like obscure planes.

A Veterans Day Announcement

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Today is Veterans Day, or Armistice Day at the end of World War I. Now I’ve said many times-I’m a soft sheltered civilian who could do absolutely nothing in a real fight except get killed. I also have no immediate family who have served in the military. That being said, even though all my knowledge comes from secondary sources, I feel pretty confident in saying one thing, which I think today is as good a time as any to say it.

Veterans simply cannot be lumped into any one category.

And I’m not even talking about different countries, different wars, different branches, different specific units (of course an administrator in the back who faced only the occasional rocket, be it a V-2 or Type 63, is going to have quite a different experience from the tip of the spear). Seriously, the accounts from people in very similar places and roles at the same time can be totally different, as do their beliefs on everything from politics to military doctrine.

Granted, I think part of the problem is pop culture having a tendency to treat the military with the two extremes of either “John Wayne” or “Oliver Stone”. Which is at least understandable, I mean I can give a lot of it the benefit of the doubt. It’s just that “Yeah this isn’t like Hollywood” just makes me go “uh, and? Yes? Fish live underwater? The New York Knicks are not a good basketball team?”

Bringing this to my own writing, there’s not much precedent for how to describe the experiences of a female forward nurse from Kyrgyzstan fighting in the most intense nine days of battle since 1973. So with regards to All Union’s Cholpon, I guess I have to hope I did my best.

And yes I know a lot of you hate it when we say that but to all veterans who served honorably, thank you today.

Review: American Military Helicopters

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American Military Helicopters

E.R. Johnson’s American Military Helicopters is one of those giant encyclopedias of aircraft that appeal only really to a certain group of people, but which appeals a LOT to said group. This is a huge catalog of everything that has either had a rotary wing or a vertical takeoff feature that either entered or was considered for American military service.

So you get stuff like the UH-1 and F-35B. But you also get obscure projects from the 1950s and 60s that ranged from gargantuan lifters that challenged the Soviet monsters in size to literal flying jeeps. The history nerd in me complains that it didn’t go as far into the VTOL weeds as it could have, but as an expanded “coffee table book”, it’s excellent for what it is.

Review: 25 Days To Aden

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25 Days To Aden

Michael Knights’ 25 Days to Aden is one of the best nonfiction military histories I’ve read recently. As of this post it’s also very timely. Diving deep into the crucial but obscure in the outside world battle for the city of Aden in the early stages of the latest Yemeni civil war, it tells of how a coalition of the UAE, putting its petrodollars to effective use, and local Yemenis ousted the Houthis from the vital port city.

The biggest problem with this book is very obvious from the first page. Knights clearly relied completely on UAE sources, and thus the book is about as biased towards them as Arrian was towards Alexander. It’s not so much the exact facts (Kenneth Pollack, no fan of the Arab militaries, has praised the smaller, well-resourced Emirati army as a big exception), so much the tone that, along with the usual issues in war reporting, leaves one feeling inherently suspicious.

However, this insiders look also has great advantages. It shows a skillful campaign conducted with limited resources and the quirks and compromises that had to be made when dealing with a low-education local army. The two things that accurately jumped out at me were A: It was calculated that 20% of all ammunition would be wasted with random ‘celebratory’ gunfire, and B: Chewing khat was so vital and important that one simply did not fight battles in Yemen during chew time. It also shows that tanks still are very important even in an age of drones and smart weapons, but that kind of goes without saying.

Finally and most importantly, Knights is unbiased in a crucial way in that he has no illusions about treating the temporary victory as more than what it was. The political context of Yemen in its entire history can be summed up by me saying “latest civil war”, and Knights mentions the effectively unsolvable political context.

So keeping its biases and flaws in mind, this is a highly recommended read.

Review: Women At War

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Women At War

Edited by Elspeth Ritchie, Women at War is a collection of academic essays about the massive expansion of women in the US military through the years of war in the 21st century.

Now there’s a few things I’d like to say about the controversial topic of women in the military. The first is that in the “yes or no” arguments, my armchair opinion is “we don’t really have a choice”. As the current crunch shows, topping up a big volunteer military is tough already. There simply are not 200,000 ready gigachads who would join the military instead. The second is that I hate the term “combat roles” to refer to the controversy of infantry/armor/etc…, because it implies a false dichotomy between never intended to be in harms way and full inclusion in fields where you could raise legit objections. The third is that the worst thing that could happen to women in the military (or minorities in any field, basically) is the kind of identity-politics obsessed person who thinks that any disproportionately small amount of _____ in _____ must be due entirely to the Bias of the System.

Anyway, this actual book is a mixed bag. There are a lot of understandably dry but very thorough and cited articles on various effects that are done with proper hard-science rigor. Then there’s the fluffy pretentious ones that feel very out of place. Like I understand getting figures on how many women have been “naughty” on overseas deployments is going to be hard, but you could at least try instead of engaging in theorizing that ranges from the obvious to the silly. And that at least you can justify the theoretical with the difficulty in getting solid figures. There are other topics where instead of examining say, how the cultural differences in another country make the incorporation of women into the military better or worse, the writer just gives out marshmallow talc.

Stuff like this is why I just can’t recommend the book fully, even though it has many excellent articles and resources. Then again, that and its high price is just the nature of academic publishing. Of course, the other side of the coin is that you can get lots of relevant facts, figures, and stories about the topic, which is also the nature of academic publishing. So its your call.

Review: Stealing the Atom Bomb

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Stealing The Atom Bomb: How Deception and Denial Armed Israel:

I want to say that Roger Mattson’s Stealing the Atom Bomb does the story of a critical and underreported part of nuclear history justice. In the mid-1960s, Israeli agents swiped enough highly enriched uranium to make multiple first-generation warheads from an enrichment plant in Pennsylvania. As the subject matter is incredibly secret, Mattson had to wade through a massive jungle to find out more. To his credit, the book is well-researched and detailed.

The problem is that so much of the book is about how the investigations went. That could be interesting in and of itself, but it’s told in such a stilted, dry way. So I regretfully have to say that what could have been a great resource has become a niche topic for nuclear weapons historians.