Colonel Joseph H. Alexander has brought forth an outstanding book on "The Battle History of the United States Marine Corps". His skill in writing is further enhanced by his selection of photos, maps, and sketches, and the inclusion of sidebar stories gives the reader more "meat and potatoes" in regards to the men and machines of war.

Col. Alexander's manner of writing and attention to detail brings you up close and personal without over-glorifying battle. The narratives as well as true-life events are quite captivating, and will hold your interest from beginning to end. It's refreshing to note that the book does not bog down in trivial detail, but keeps moving right along taking the reader from one account to the next.

Upon finishing I would recommend getting a copy of "A Fellowship of Valor" on VHS tape, to accompany the book. Both are extremely well done and give you the very essence of the USMC.

This one book says it all when it comes the United States Marine Corps!

This book is great. It doesn't have much technical info, but it more than makes up for that in the depth of the combat history of the Corps. Notice this book describes combat history, so you won't find a description of recruit training or anything, but you will find information on every Marine Corps combat action from when the first Marines fought(unnoticed by most)in the Revolutionary War to the Gulf War and beyond. Don't think this is just a general history book, because there are plenty of specific battles and actions described in good detail in this book. World War II is described more than any other conflicts, but otherwise all conflicts are described relatively equally.

This book is just great, it tells you everything you would ever want to know about the USMC, in just 1 book. This book tells you how the Marines fought, why they fought, how the fought, and where they fought. Its just a great book period.

Education program from the 60s still lasts From the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet 28 September 1999

In 1965, with anti-Vietnam demonstrations at their worst, philosophy professor Joseph Tussman began The Experimental College Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His goal, education for the sake of the individual and of society, sounds like a dream for the jaded higher education of today. In Habits of Mind: the Experimental College Program at Berkeley, Katherine Bernhardi Trow evaluates the program and its long- term effects. While evaluation of education generally focuses narrowly on the short-sighted and fashionable, this book's great merit is its description of the long term effects. Tussman College lasted four years, from 1965-1969. Some 300 students were chosen at random to participate. Trow interviewed forty students who completed the program, and she paints a vivid picture of how they were affected, what they learned and what positive influence it had in their lives. Tussman maintained that it was the university's fundamental duty to reawaken interest and get students involved for the sake of principles which are fundamental for individuals and for society: to develop an exercise of power built on rational, democratic and constitutional principles; to increase sensitivity to humanitarian values and fundamental human problems; to cultivate and strengthen ways of life and ways of conduct which make it possible for humanity to continue a war with institutions and with a spirit of rational discussion to find solutions to problems. Democracy demands of its citizens a political interest and active participation. To do this, according to Tussman, one must educate oneself in a fashion which before the breakthrough of democracy was reserved for members of the ruling class. Students probed deeply into fundamental problems. They examined the interplay between freedom and power. They were taught to be responsible citizens in a democratic society and custodians of western civilization. The program consisted of two parts: a syllabus and a pedagogical method. The syllabus focused on big problems and cultural crisis periods in history which had driven great thinkers to tackle fundamental questions. The reading list consisted of classics, such as the Iliad and works by Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Mill, and Marx, along with more current books, such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X. These were books by authors now viewed as "dead, white males." But students remember the reading as fantastic. Pedagogically, the program diverged radically from then-prevalent teaching methods. Teachers were recruited from various areas of study. All the reading material was read by both students and teacher, regardless of which subject the teacher normally taught. Lectures were held twice a week with all the students and teachers present, and smaller seminars were held. The students wrote essays every other week, and every day they jotted down thoughts and reflections prompted by books, lectures, seminars and discussions. These notes became an intellectual autobiography. The activities reinforced each other and formed a tight intellectual tapestry which stimulated and strengthened learning and education. It was, in short, a program which moved against the stream of mass education. The program seems even more radical if one considers that it, with its high standards, was established when the general trend was toward a relaxation of the demands on students and when Berkeley, like many American universities, was in a permanent state of uproar. What were the long-term effects? In the evaluation, the dense essay- writing comes out as highly valued and as a central force in the program-- at once challenging and entertaining. Essay assignments taught the students to think more analytically and abstractly. The students' linguistic ability was radically improved, in speech and in writing and as much in style as in grammar. The intense contact with the teacher, and the criticism the teacher provided in tutorials, played a constructive and crucial role. The lack of grades was positive. Instead of focusing on grades, one concentrated on the ideas and the knowledge for itself; competitive thinking was conspicuous in its absence. The important thing was to understand what one read and to be able to apply it in other contexts than the immediate one. It was not regarded as meritorious to memorize details in order to regurgitate them later. Tussman encouraged individual thought. The environment--a separate house and small groups --contributed to the feeling of a learned society and stimulated the students. The program helped students to grow intellectually and morally. Their ability to analyze, to adapt themselves quickly to new things, new environments and new problems and to view these from different perspectives grew. They acquired a better understanding of the world around them and a better ability to interpret and understand events in it. Empathy increased and led to intellectual satisfaction and a more content life, which is reflected in the professions in which the program's former students are now active: physician, journalist, attorney, civil engineer, etc. Why did the program cease if it was so good? The answer is brief: university bureacratic staffing problems and a certain amount of lack of interest in basic education at research-oriented Berkeley made the dedicated Tussman tire. The market has become an ideology instead of a means--even, with some exceptions, in academia. Students do not study to grow as a human being, but to satisfy the market. Within the not too distant future, perhaps we will hear a university or college president who, in a travesty of Kennedy's inauguration speech, will welcome novices with the admonishment: "Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market." Doris Lessing calls the product of this competence-fixation the well-educated barbarians; those who have gone to school for twenty years, have brilliant records, but never read a book, know no history, and care only about knowledge in their field. That group does not include the graduates of Tussman College.

An important study of the impact of an intense collegiate experience on students.

An exceptionally rich and multifaceted account of an experiment which occupies an interesting and important place in the history of American higher education.

This is a group effort from a trio of investigators at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, an institution whose researchers were among the creators of modern acoustic phonetics. It is almost a research monograph disguised as a textbook, published by a distinguished scientific publisher. This leads to frustration of the specialist reader at times, when one looks for technical summaries of the material which may be lacking. The book could be considered a complete revision of the classic Bell Labs book by Potter, Kopp, and Green (Kopp) under the title Visible Speech, published in 1947 and including with broader material on speech acoustics and its applications a 225-page description of the sounds of American English from an acoustic point of view.

The book is a systematic description of the phonetics of American English based on acoustic data from one male informant, a native of Pittsburgh, with limited data from a woman speaker. This is a weakness shared by most of the literature on speech acoustics; because the fundamental frequency of women's speech is higher than that of men, women's speech is technically more difficult to analyze precisely in acoustic terms. The limitation to one main subject is far outweighed by the precious systematic data which the book contains for most aspects of American English phonetics. Of course, it also suggests further investigation of the ways in which humans speaking somewhat different versions of the same language understand one another, which could be said to constitute the other, perceptual, side of the subject matter of this work. This aspect, by the way, is well reviewed in the excellent chapters on perception in J.M.Picket's revised book The Acoustics of Speech Communication (Allyn and Bacon, 1999).

The Bell authors provide valuable introductory chapters on basic concepts of phonetics and phonology, and speech acoustics. There is a growing literature on the basic concepts of acoustic phonetics, such as the new editions of the well-established books by Ladefoged (1996) and Kent and Read (2001), which some readers may wish to consult. Then follows a chapter on the static properties of speech sounds; many treatments of acoustic phonetics never get past this elementary level. However, the book by Olive, Greenwood, and Coleman makes a precious contribution in the systematic following chapters on the treatment of English sounds in context. Many individual aspects of this topic are well treated in the research literature, but
this comprehensive investigation of the speech of a single speaker is unique. There is broad treatment not only of formant transitions between consonants and vowels, but also of consonant clusters and interactions, contextual variants of sounds such as [l] and [r](using standard notation for phonetic units), and a long final chapter on acoustic variability of sounds and dialectal variability. A precious feature of the index is that it not only includes a detailed phonetic and technical listing but also gives the location in the text of treatments of individual sound sequences, shortening many searches.

Apart from its merits as a research monograph, this work
also works well as a classroom text. The reviewer has used it in a class on applied English phonetics with extensive spectrographic lab experience, in which the students studied their own speech acoustically and compared it to the results described by Olive et al. A particularly valuable role of the book is for non-English speakers who are able to use the objective character of the acoustic analysis to bypass the obstacle of uncertain perception of English sounds and assist themselves in improving their mastery of English phonetics. Elementary speech acoustics on this level is not difficult, and this aspect of the work was very much appreciated by foreign students in my class.

This is a work of enormous value to a variety of students and specialists, particularly in phonetics, linguistics, and speech pathology, but also for engineers and the increasing ranks of those working on speech recognition. The reviewer finds that he has had to gradually increase the number of loaner copies of this work on his office shelf, because the Olive book is not in the local library, and his students want prolonged access to a work which describes English acoustic phonetics competently and(within its limits)comprehensively. This book is is not as well known as it deserves to be.

The reviewer has some complaints. In general, the articulatory discussions are not as accurate or precise as the acoustic ones; of course, that is not what the book is about. If one must mention published collections of papers on speech acoustics, the indispensable book Readings in Acoustic Phonetics edited by Lehiste (1967 with several reprints) which preserves publication format is more useful than the one cited. It is regrettable and puzzling that there is not a single first-author work of Gordon Peterson in the bibliography. These are minor details. This work deserves to be well known, and to be in all major university libraries and institutions in which linguistic or clinical phonetics has significance, as well as in scholars' libraries. It should be read carefully and repeatedly until its pages are dirty and scribbled on, like my copy. The first acoustic specification of sounds of a language known to the reviewer was the publication of formant frequencies of whispered vowels published by Samuel Reyher in 1679. The book by Olive and his colleagues reflects a long and proud past, and its subject matter seems at present to be enjoying a deserved revival of interest.

Sadly, Amazon didn't post the full title of this book, so anybody who does a search for Alexander Winton won't easily find this book. The full title is: "Famous but Forgotten: The Story of Alexander Winton, Automotive Pioneer and Insustrialist."

In short, this is a biography of one of America's first automakers, Alexander Winton. Winton built his first car in 1896 after reading about the Duryea brothers win in the Chicago race of 1895. In 1897 Winton took his car on an 800 mile endurance run from Cleveland to New York to prove its durability to the public. The run was so successful that the Winton Motor Carriage Company became the leading U.S. maker of automobiles during the late 1890s (It was overtaken by the Electric Vehicle Company in 1899).

The Winton Motor Carriage Company continued making automobiles until the early 1920s. At that point the company was absorbed into the General Motors monolith, and the Winton name died. The company still exists as a division of General Motors, but today it produces only marine diesel engines.

This is a good biography of a man who deserves to be recognized alongside other early industry leaders like Henry Ford, Ransom E. Olds, and Henry Leland.

This book embodies what multicultural counseling is all about, the state of the art. Not only are the most recent empirical findings and directions presented, but we are also treated to the real life narratives of prominent multicultural counselors (in particular I really enjoyed Janet Helms and her sense of humor). In my opinion this is the perfect melding of head and heart/soul and represents both science and art. My gratitude goes out to the 85 people who have put this important work together. This book is a must have.

Sandy MacGillivray's in depth analysis of the life and times of pioneer Cretan archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans was a pure joy to read. The author's own experiences as a professional in the field on Crete add great weight to his arguments as he finds himself coping the Evans' legacy on a daily basis. I really got the sense that the author knew Evans, both the man and the scholar, through close attention to and extensive research on the amply available primary sources. This is a wonderfully scholarly, yet very readable and highly interesting book to both the professional archaeologist and interested armchair amateur.

Museum New York is a fresh look at the incredible variety of both cultural and artistic exhibits available in the New York area. I have visited NYC many times and seen many museums but with this book I was able to make informed descisions regarding where to spend my time. Delightful in its honesty and incredibly intelligently written, I beleive this book is a must for anyone visiting NYC.

This is simply a wonderful memoir by baseball's greatest manager. The converstational way he tells you his story, talks about strategy and compares the stars of his day is abosolutey charming.

To say that this book is powerful is inadequate. 235 men of Company K, 3d Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division went ashore at Peleliu in September of 1944. In June of 1945, after mopping up at Okinawa, only 26 of the original K/3/5 made it through. Note E. B. Sledge's integrity as an objective observer of war. Sledge, known as "Sledgehammer" by the raggedy-... Marines, tells his horrific story without whining or self-pity. Neither is he grinding an anti-war, "peace at any price" ax. His experience is of the face of battle reduced to its most sickening level. Never mind the position movements on maps at headquarters; the stench of battle prevails. From Sledge's viewpoint, grand strategy gave way to one-on-one enemy action in his sector. Fear and survival exclude swagger. Men in battle persevere to kill the enemy and to support their buddies. Naive expectations fade quickly as maggots infest the dead and torrential jungle rain fills the foxholes. Bloody Nose Ridge and the Shuri Line grind the Marines. The snap of bullets, the whine of artillery shells, and the agonized cries of wounded comrades are the only soundtrack. Mental and emotional fatigue takes a fearful toll, right along with bloody wounds and dreadful field sanitation. Sledge deplores the brutish nature of war, but recognizes its occasional inevitability, humanity's great dilemma. The privilege of freedom carries its own responsibilities. Heed the writing of a fighting man who knows. This book should be required reading for all persons on both sides of the war controversy. ;-)

I have been an avid reader of World War II publications for over ten years. My father served in the South Pacific at the War's end, and rarely speaks of the horrors of his experiences in World War II. Eugene Sledge recalls two of the most horrific battles American Marines fought in the Pacific Theater of Operations. What these men faced every day is almost incomprehensible. Having grown up in a strong Catholic family, I know all about Purgatory, Hell, and the Eternal Lake of Fire; Having read "With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa," I truely believe those men who fought in either of those two campaigns could write a book on those places mentioned.

Very few authors of books on the war in the South Pacific bring the vivid first hand experiences to light the way Dr. Sledge is able to do. He paints a picture that your mind and spirit is able to see as you read his words. He tells of the funny side of war, if there is one, the emense amount of hard work involved, and the brutality of war as he experienced it. The contrast of fighting on a barren coral rock, as was Peleliu, to the muck and mud of Okinawa is compelling.

As I have been a close personal friend of Dr. Sledge for over 30 years, I have heard many times in his own words the accounts of the battles fought on Peleliu and Okinawa. However, Dr. Sledge, in the words he writes is able to bring the battles to life, and involve the reader as if they were there. His story is so much like the man he is, strong, well prepared, confident, a believer in God, and willing to go to war for his country and "kill japs".

Anyone who wishes to gain insight into the nature of the war with the Japanese, and of war in general, needs to read this book.

I prefer war novels like "The Triumph and the Glory" to histories because fiction is capable of delivering such profound emotional effects on a reader. But the great history books, like "Utmost Savagery: The Three Days of Tarawa" are so powerful that they transcend genre or category and proclaim the truth of our past in a truly unforgettable manner. This is one of the best books about men in battle I've ever read.

This is one of those books that rates five stars for comprehensiveness of military history and battle analysis; it's probably a three for light readers. Overall, the account is very interesting and clearly written, with much detail about the scenario as well as the Marine and Navy personnel involved. The author brings the reader to the reef and the lagoon where the landing Marines are being shot one after another in a seemingly fruitless attempt to take this tiny little island. The account is well illustrated with easy to read maps. This is important because the island being invaded, Betio, is only one island in the Tarawa lagoon. If the reader is looking for a professional, well-researched account of this invasion, this is probably the one.

Col. Alexander has produced a comprehensive and thorough account, and a brilliant analysis, of one of the toughest battles of the Pacific War. In this inaugural amphibious assault against a strongly fortified beach, the Marines wrote one of the most heroic and traumatic chapters in the history of their corps. They paid a tragic price for the valuable lessons learned there, which were effectively applied in subsequent assaults. As one who went ashore on D+5, and spent the next two weeks cleaning up the battlefield and burying the dead, I stand in awe and wonder at the valor, courage, and sheer grit of the officers and men of the 2nd Marine Division, who had to go up and over the fortified wall fronting the landing beaches. A plaque at the main cemetery on Betio read: "So there let them rest, on their sunswept atoll, The wind for their watcher the waves for their shroud, Where palm and pandanus shall whisper forever A requiem fitting for heroes so proud." Alexander captures the essence of their awful struggle, heroic deeds, and costly victory.