If you enjoy WWII aircraft, and appreciate the breath taking detail and accuracy of Rikyu Watanabe illustrations, you must have this book. I found my copy 3 years ago at OshKosh, and have been offered (...)for it - no way was I parting with it. It is, without question, the finest piece of reference / art work on these 12 aircraft I have ever seen. Vet, IFR Priv. pilot, R/C aircraft modeler.

I'm a WWII airplanes enthsiast, and this book has filled all my expectations. The text, the scaled drawings, the fold-out panels, everithing is exceptional in this complete guide of WWII airplanes. The drawings of this book are incredibly detailed, and if you're meticulous, you'll never find a book like this. My grandfather was a WWII pilot and became nostalgic when he saw the plane he had flown.

In my opinion, the most beautiful book of WWII aircraft which has ever been published.

I have flown the F4U-5NL Bu.No. 124511 found in the picture on page 253 with Ens. Cawley's name on the side. He was one of our squadron mates in VC-4, NAS Atlantic City in the early 'fifties.

Brings back many fond memories. Highly recommended to all aviators and aviation enthusiasts.

J.D. Williams Lcdr. USNR (Ret)

This fully-illustrated hardback has come out to coincide with the like-named exhibition at Telfair Museum of Art. It may be the largest retrospective show of Frieseke's work to date (it is certainly NOT the first). Many well-illustrated catalogs of his work have been published in the past - I have six of them on my shelf - but this is by far the most comprehensive. The primary author, Nicholas Kilmer, also wrote the highly-acclaimed _A Place in Normandy_ and the Fred Taylor mysteries (_Harmony in Flesh and Black_, etc.). Contributions by David Sellin, Virginia Mecklenburg, H. Barbara Weinberg, and Linda McWhorter (coordinator of both exhibition and catalog) flesh out the text. The reproductions are magnificent. Do a web search on Frieseke, and see how many paintings you recognize. It is high time that this painter of well-known images should gain "name-recognition"!

For the most part, this book could have been written a hundred years ago.

To give it its due, it is quite readable and provides a clear, lengthy, detailed narrative of Frederick's diplomatic activities and military campaigns. (There is some virtue to making the reader spend a few hours on the Seven Years War, rather than whipping through it in a few pages. Part of its dynamic and importance is that it was a very long war.)

I'm not sure who will really enjoy this book, though. Casual readers will find it way too long. Serious historians will be very disappointed by its narrow focus and its inattention to the massive body of scholarship on Frederick and Prussia during his reign. (The bibilography is grossly inadequate.) Even military buffs will want to know more about the organization of the various combatants and the important battles fought by Frederick's armies (including those of his allies and those he did not personally participate in).

The treatment of military and diplomatic matters lacks meaningful context. The military history is battles and campaigns; diplomatic history is Frederick's letters to his ambassadors and his fellow rulers and relatives. There really is no broader understanding of the larger context of how diplomacy and warfare related to the society within which it was located, how they affected the relationship between that society and the state that governed it. This is creaky old diplomatic history as a chess game played by monarchs.

I did a lot of 18th-century European history in college, so much
of this was a story I've heard before, and one that I like. For some newcomers, it might be overwhelming; for others it will seem relatively pointless.

"It wasn't the army that protected Prussia for seven years: It was Frederick the Great." - Napoleon.

Frederick the Great is undoubtedly one of the most elusive characters of the 18th century: like Napoleon, historians and biographers will have to duke it out for a few more centuries before we can accurately assess who he was and what kind of ruler, and man, he was. Unlike Napoleon, he doesn't get a whole lot of attention (oddly enough, because hes been overshadowed by Napoleon). Who was Frederick? A philospher-prince, a diplomatic genius of the Enlightenment -- or a monster, an aggressor who tore apart continental Europe for his own ambitions on no legality other than "... he could" ? Obviously, the answer is likely neither. Since German unification under the Great Elector, Frederick has been seen, most unfairly, as the root of militarist Germany that dominated Europe in the period of 1870-1945. Most modern biographies focus heavily on rehabilitating his reputation, as this one does.

This isn't a very good biography in most regards: it is highly readable and written well, but it lacks in greater research and insight. Sir David Fraser, himself a military man, writes most uncritically about a man he clearly regards very highly. The account is bordering on obsequious. Nevertheless, we can be blessed that, because the biography is so old-fashioned, it spairs us the sensationalism of "psychological speculation," limiting the discussion of Frederick's sexuality and the other rumors of the period to a few pages.

I give this biography four stars for its outstanding military edge. With helpful maps of key battles, Fraser explains the events with the clarity that only an old military man could write with. Military administration is also handled extremely well. No small thing, the biography is well worth the read for this alone.

Not a great biography, but it has its strengths.

Frederick, King of Prussia, indisputably the greatest general/statesman of the eighteenth century, is also in many ways a more attractive warlord than some of his peers. Unlike Napoleon, he actually left his country in much better shape when he departed office than when he assumed it. Unlike Alexander - and numerous others of that ilk - he didn't murder folks he didn't like. Unlike Gustavus, he isn't associated with Protestant militarism. He was artistic, well-read and reasonably tolerant, by the standards of the day, and a sometime friend of Voltaire. In many ways his military and diplomatic expertise was self-taught - he could be said to be the last of the great "amateurs." Such is the portrait painted by Lord Fraser, who sidesteps discussion of the more intriguing questions about Frederick's private life, and struggles gallantly to excuse the great crime of Alter Fritz's career, the Partitions of Poland. And for all the German-language dropouts among us, a final consolation: Frederick's first tongue was French, and he hardly ever spoke German, a language he greatly disdained.

Let's face it, most people won't be buying this volume by choice--they'll buy it for a class. Still, it's good to know what you're getting into. This is a pretty good anthology of American literature, starting all the way back with Native American myths and Columbus's journals and continuing through Puritan, Enlightenment, Transcendentalist, Romantic, and modern periods of literature in America.

The introductions to the pieces are good--as good or better than Norton's--and the selections themselves are generally good. Still, though, there are a few notable things missing, but that is to be expected in any compendium, I suppose.

One of the highlights of this volume is the full reprints of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. If you have to buy this book, it should be useful and may even be worth keeping around after the class is over. I know I'm going to keep mine.

Few literary textbooks equal "An Anthology of American Literature" in length and dryness. While the book is a collection of mediocre stories who are now only seeing the light of day due to the baneful effects of political correctness, the editor of this work delves deeper to not include a single illustration that may have shed some light of this terrible experience of reading this collection of pointless stories,

I, on the other hand, think its a great collection of American literature, but maybe just a bit too pricey for what it offers. I would suggest it more as something to use as a reference than as something that should be read cover to cover, I mean, geeze, its 2060 pages long.

This huge textbook is a steal: hundreds of major works from the last century and a half, printed on quality paper, bound with a strong but flexible gum binding. If this were a hardcover, you'd pay twice the price for what it includes. It's thorough and scholarly, a tome that defines the Big League of anthologies. It's not for the shallow reader, though, who's accustomed to the sensuous audio-visuals of TV and the Internet. This is TEXT. Time to resuscitate the thinking mind, the patient intellect, the autonomous imagination.

The footnotes are numbered strangely and they don't elaborate on the footnoted item very well.

This was the textbook used in my American Literature I class last semester. Volume Two is being used in the second half that I am taking this semester. The book offers a good collection of American Literature from the earliest European Explorers to the late 1800's. The additional information offered in the introductions to each author and literary time period adds to the student's understanding of the works.