What are you reading right now?

[Bertgang]

Just started with "rapidi ed invisibili" (quick and stealth) the sort of historical submarine almanac casually found yesterday.

[KevinB]

Just finished The Secrets of the Holy Lance by Jerry Smith.
It's about the spear that pierced Christ's side by a Roman solider when he was on the cross.
The first half of the book I couldn't keep up with all the historical sounding names and places but later when Hitler acquired it it got very interesting.
Another interesting bit is that it was taken to Antartica where the Nazis built an underground base called Station 211 where a planned assault on it was allegedly taken place sometime in 1946 by Admiral Byrd and practically an invasion fleet.

[Kpt. Kozloff]

I know it's an old title but i keep coming back to it: Alistair MacLean's "HMS Ulysses". Great and truly gripping story.

[blue3golf]

Reading Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox. Only about half way throught it but not to bad. Has alot of interesting insights and possibilities since there isn't a whole lot of actual written record from his time. Tries to make sense of what his "historians" wrote of him and the actual happenings.

[Linton]

I have just finished Hunter and the Hunted.Quite good but there were a few factual errors.

[hellas1]

Hello sub pimps and pimpettes,

Your friend, posting yet again hellas1 here.

I currently am reading the "writing on the wall" of my being umemployed and thus am not reading nor collecting any subbie books.

My current station in the submarine called Life is "Unemployed Loser."

Fear not, loved ones, I SHALL rise again.....


hellas1

[ASWnut101]

... Marajuana does interesting things to the human mind...






J/k!:p

[Sailor Steve]

I stepped away from the naval books for a bit, and read a great biography of the man who invented America-Benjamin Franklin, by Walter Isaacson.

Everybody has heard of Franklin and the kite, but what I didn't know was that after he retired from printing (at age 42), he purchased several Leyden Jars and hooked them together in a box, experimented with dumping the water out to see it the charge was actually held in the water or in the glass (it was the glass) and finally published his findings with the Royal Society, for which they gave him a gold medal. He apologized for coining his own terms, and asked them to feel free to change whatever they wanted. The terms he used are still with us today: Positive, Negative, Plus and Minus Charge, Conductor and Electrical Storage Battery.

Later he was the first scientist to actually experiment with the idea that lightning might be electricity, and designed and built the first lighting rod. When he visited Britain later he was honored as an equal and counted among his friends the great chemist Joseph Priestley, philosophers Edmund Burke and David Hume, and the legendary economist Adam Smith. Franklin's papers don't mention it, but according the the papers collected by Smith's daughter Smith actually asked Franklin's opinion on some early chapters of The Wealth Of Nations.

When the American Revolution was starting in 1775 Ben Franklin was still in Britain, trying desparately to get both sides to come to an agreement. He returned to America in time to sign the Declaration Of Independence, and it was after John Hancock said "Now we must all hang together" that Franklin made his famous rejoinder: "Yes, we must all hang together, or most certainly we shall all hang separately!"

Franklin spent the rest of the war in Paris, and in 1783 was the primary negotiator for the peace treaty betwean Britain and the newly-independent America. In 1787 he was one of the prime movers behind the new Constitution, and he was the one who cut through all the infighting and arguing and managed to get the states to finally compromise. He has been called the First American, and one writer pointed out that of all the Founding Fathers, he alone would be at home in an office park or a shopping mall. That same writer called him "Our Founding Yuppie"; and he really did personify the upwardly mobile shop-keeper of the 1700s.

Benjamin Franklin, by Walter Isaacson. The best I've read in a long time. Highly informative, very readable, lots of fun.

[Sailor Steve]

War Beneath The Sea, by Peter Padfield. I just finished it, and I can't recommend it enough. It doesn't have the depth of Blair's books or the breadth of Roscoe, but it is very readable and contains the stories of all the major commands, including the accomplishments of the British submarines in the North Sea, Med and Pacific (including the X-craft), as well as the Japanese successes and failures.

Things I didn't know:

1) At the same time the British were being amazed that BdU never realized they were reading the Enigma codes, they also never once considered that B-Dienst was reading their signals!

2) I guess I was spoiled by SH1, and assumed that the Americans always had a waterproof TBT, but according to Padfield the first US boats fitted with a surface relay system at all had something similar to the German UZO, with regular binoculars being fitted into a control system that relayed the bearing down to the TDC, and that not until early in 1944!

3) In spite of the successes of US boats against Japanese shipping, US high command never had a German-style policy of an all-out anti-merchant war. Enemy warships were always the first priority. If the Americans had followed the German example they might have starved Japan by the end of 1943.

All this is speculation of course, but Padfield makes a good case. Overall the book is very detailed for only 500 pages.

I learned a lot from this book. Get it and read it; it's a good one!

[diesel97]

"Wolfpack" by Steven Trent Smith about the pack attacks into the Sea of Japan. Gotta get ready for the Pacific !.

Thanks for the review of Padfields book Steve.

[nikimcbee]

"The Devil's Sandbox." It's my buddy's unit and their actions in Iraq.

[TLAM Strike]

"Far Distant Ships" Joesph Schull, about the Canadian Navy's operations in WWII.

[master cylinder]

just finished "red star rogue".this is an amazing and shocking true story of what would and could have surely changed the american way of life back in 1968 and well beyond.-if the russian sub had suceeded! read it!-jem.

[tedhealy]

Bacalao - Historical fiction about a Gato class sub and it's crew during WW2. A slow start, but still very good. It's very similar to Red Scorpion, another historical fiction story about a US sub in WW2 (although Red Scorpion is about a real sub - USS Rasher).

Thunder Below! The USS Barb revolutionizes sub warfare in WW2.

[Grey_Raven75]

Stephen King's IT. But my copy of Silent Victory just arrived today, so I may have to wait on finishing IT.