Seve: Ryder Cup Hero, reads like a novel. Eloquently written this book is funny, touching, and very interesting.

If you enjoy the game of golf this book is a must. If you simply enjoy a good book it is a must.

This is an interesting eyewitness account of wartime China. This book is well-written and vividly portrays the author's experience with Naval training in Chicago, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, and ultimately his experience "behind the lines" with the US Navy in China.

Horton begins by briefly describing his experience of growing up in the Midwest, then of joining the Navy in 1940. Due to the rapid onset of WWII, the US Navy needed officers ...and fast. Therefore, instead of having all cadets spend 4 years at the Naval Academy, the Navy started a 90-day accelerated officer-training program in Chicago (hence the nickname applied to the graduating Midshipmen).

This is a well-written and engaging book, though it is also at times a bit dark and cynical. Horton describes his experiences vividly, but also spends a fair bit of time criticizing his American and Chinese superiors. His main criticism is that his superiors, for various reasons, repeatedly hindered his efforts to attack the Japanese. Although his complaints at times grow tiresome, his enthusiasm, patriotism, and resourcefulness cannot be questioned and his observations of wartime China and of the Chinese are thought-provoking. All in all, I found this book to be very informative, descriptive, and insightful.

Incidentally, my father followed in Horton's footsteps a few years later. Also a 90-Day Wonder, he was likewise sent to China and fought behind the lines, training Chinese guerillas with the 3,600-man Naval Group China, known as SACO (the Sino-American Cooperative Organization). My father shared many of Horton's opinions and experiences in this little-known theatre of war, including afterwards a lifelong fascination with China.

Other interesting books about this theatre include Mishler's "Sampan Sailor" (an engaging and uplifting, though at times anecdotal account of a sailor's experience in Southeastern China during WWII), and the definitive book, "A Different Kind of War" by Admiral Milton Miles, who led Naval Group China during WWII. Miles' fascinating and exceptionally-written book is out-of-print, unfortunately, but is a "must-read" for anyone interested in wartime China.

Among the more obscure campaigns and operations of the war in China were the seemingly incongruous operations of the US Navy in support of the Chinese Nationalist forces. One may quickly ask what were they doing so far inland from the open seas?
Well there were several reasons, one was to set up weather stations so that naval aviators could safely approach the coast and attack Japanese shipping, and American submarines could hide in the mists and rain while surfaced for recharging or lying in wait for the enemy.
Another major task was in support of the long range plans for the attack on Japan itself. The coastal zone north of Hong Kong though patrolled by the Japanese was not occupied and was a porous zone of smugglers and travellers back and forth between the two opposing sides. There were plans to land US forces there and build up for a western approach to Japan via Manchuria to squeeze the country against the approaching forces from the Pacific side.
The long range plan had to gather what is known as basic intelligence, that is, weather, climate, infrastructure, topography, the social situation, and any other information that could be used in campaign planning but which does not change quickly; the latter is known as Order of Battle and tactical intelligence detailing enemy dispositions and is gleaned from many of the disciplines, IMINT, HUMINT, and SIGINT.
Once gathered, basic intelligence remains more or less permanently useful except for the effect of major engineering projects such as highways, dams and reservoirs.
At the same time, Naval Group, China, was tasked with training and equipping Chinese tactical units intended for clandestine operations against Japanese internal garrisons and transportation networks. And finally with setting up observation networks to report on coastal shipping so that the submarines could be guided to attack positions. This book covers the author's activities with one of the Naval sponsored guerilla units.
Among all the writing on the multifarious naval activities in China, there is very little on the special operations except for a very scarce and long out of print book prepared as an official report in the forties and later privately published.
For other naval personal narratives of WW II China, see Wen Bon and Sampan Sailor, also reviewed on this site.

A Black Legend is a simplistic story about the good CIA boys and their efforts to fight those evil communists. The saintly chief of station won't even consider committing adultery. He is the kind of father that reads good books to his children before tucking them in bed at night. (I imagine he also is the kind of son who calls Mom on Mother's Day to thank her for all those apple pies and the immaculate, loving home she created. But at less than 250 pages the story doesn't mention those calls to Mom.) In contrast, those godless, motherless KGB people are so bad they are even capable of committing murder. Imagine that!

The only redeeming quality of the story is that it got the basic facts about Uruguay and Uruguayans right. Obviously, the author has intimate knowledge of that little country. What a pity that Norman Mailer, who wrote, shall we say, a more accurate portrait of the CIA in Harlot's Ghost, didn't even bother to get the basic facts about Uruguay straight. (In case anybody is wondering, I, too, lived in Montevideo for a while.)

The headline is not exactly accurate. Peirce is mentioned once on page 514. Otherwise the greatest contributor to American Philosophy (one of the greatest anyway) is omitted.

I trudged through this book and am better for having done so. But I can't say I would recommend it to a friend. I might recommend it to my insomniac patients because it has profound sleep inducing properties and might help those patients hit the hay. The book is a collection of 29 essays by multiple authors including four essays by John Dewey and three by George Santayana. Dewey is OK and, when at his best, makes sense. Santayana is obscure, exasperating, and irksome making little sense and raising my suspicions that he has a thought disorder. Others in this volume are just poor writers. One has a feeling that some of them might have something worthwhile to say, but they just couldn't get their ideas down right. They just couldn't communicate properly. Most of these authors would have vastly benefited from the kindly ministrations of a good editor. Perhaps the problem is that they are so used to lecturing to students who are immature and too inexperienced with life to question the bunkum. The best essay by far is by Paul Kurtz on Libertarianism: The Philosophy of Moral Freedom. Paul has something to say and he says it well. Thanks Paul for a breath of fresh air. The worse essay, in my opinion, is that by Peter Manicas. His Nature and Culture is mainly opaque nonsense. Here's an example: "Creatures which lack language nevertheless gesture. Thus the perception by a dog that another is ready to attack becomes a stimulus to change his position or his own attitude. He has no sooner done this that the change of attitude causes the first dog to change his attitude. "We have here," Mead notes, "a conversation of gestures." But it would be an error to say these acts have meaning for the animals. Dewey and Mead insist that "meanings do not come into being without language" and these creatures lack language... The plateau of coordinated animal response is not irrelevant to communication at the linguistic plateau even if it is not reducible to it." Ho, Ho, Ho. That is funny as a wonderful illustration of someone trying to look smarter than they are by pretentiously puffing and expanding language into a vaporous cloud of nothing much. What he meant was that dogs communicate by gesture but do not speak English.