Just finished reading 'Rising Tide: The Untold Story of Soviet submarines in the Cold War' by Peter Weir and Walter Boyne.

Rating: 3.5 (ouf of 5)

The book offers a glimpse into how the Soviet Navy was led by its commanders and the Politburo in Moscow. If anything, it shows that submariners were just as expendable as any soldier in the Red Army.

The writers, however, have concentrated too much on activities that took place in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas I think that activities and happenings in the 1970s and 1980s were much more interesting due to the Soviet Navy picking up steam in the field of technology. But alas, Weir and Boyne wrote nothing about either the impact of the Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal or the crisis of 1984, when NATO held an exercise which the KGB and GRu at first - and wrongly - interpreted as preparations to start a nuclear war.
(As I understand it, Moscow flushed the boomers and rushed them out to the Barents Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk. But thanks to the bravery of a double agent working at the GRu, the Reagan administration was informed about Moscow's anxiety and quickly made the Politburo understand that it was all an exercise aimed at testing strategic readiness.)

If it hadn't been for the chapter on the sinking of the Kursk, which gives the final explanation on how and why it sank, down to the last bolt of the 65-76 hydrogen-peroxide training torpedo, I would've rated the book 2.5, not 3.5. But even then I have qualms with this chapter, as the writers relied heavily on a bunch of retired Russian submariners for their info - submarines who had retired some time before the Kursk sank.

Other books I read:
- Red Storm Rising, Clancy (cool)
- Blind Man's Bluff, Sontag (informative as hell!)
- Red Phoenix, Bond (hmmmm)
- The Third World War, Hackett (kinda cool)
- The Fifty Years War, Friedman (OK but nothing special)
And no, I won't mention the utter cack written by that DiMercurio-fella