This is the 2nd book i got hold after "Hard Curves". Fans of Julie Bell's fantasy art get to keep her prints in a single book. That's luxury! Profusely illustrated and a sure treat for fantasy illustration. Near flawless fantasy art collection in oil captured on prints. Perfect interpretation of human anatomy through her oil painting techniques. Definitely a must for fantasy art collector. One pity is some prints are printing over 2 pages and over time the paperback give way in the saddle and the prints gets torn out. Would have been better if it's a hardbound.

This book combines comments from Julie with a variety of her work from oil paintings to pencil sketches. Especially exciting is seeing some of her trading card art in a larger format. The only problem is the binding. It can be hard to view double page spreads, as part of it is obscured in the binding. This is a great, inexpensive way to get your hands on some of Julie's art.

written without any bias. You feel like living one the hitory's bloodiest campaigns, very well narrated.

great telling of the gallipoli campaign. steel's book focuses on the british role in the sequence of battles, giving the reader much information concerning both command decisions and troop experiences (the latter via letters home and diary entries). this truly is a wonderful "war book" in that it doesn't glorify war, but at the same time gives us a warranted respect for the sufferings of the warrior.

Nigel Steel and Peter Hart's third book covering the Great War deals with the Third Battle of Ypres, better known as Passchendaele. This book joins a long list of other titles covering this most horrendous battle of World War One. As in their previous books the authors utilize the accounts of many of the participants in this great struggle. From gunners and footsloggers to the men in the air trying to gain mastery of the airspace above the salient. Using first-hand accounts, interviews, letters and after action reports they put together a fairly comprehensive story of the fighting as experienced by British and Commonwealth soldiers. It must be said that there are very few similar accounts used in this book from the German side.

Overall they do reasonable well in presenting the story of the fighting in the Ypres salient from 1917-1918. However I feel that they may not have done as well as some previous books. At times I found that the narrative appeared to drag or lose its continuity. The authors have attempted to be very fair in their assessment of the British High Command and the involvement or lack of involvement of the politician's back home. The book does not appear to have an axe to grind in regards to any one person's culpability in regards to the tremendous casualties suffered for so little tangible gain. The authors simply present the facts and allow you, the reader, to determine who may be at fault for the loss of so many innocent lives.

I found that the authors offered a very good overview of the circumstances leading to this battle, the tactics used and the decisions of the Commanding Generals. Overall it's a very easy to read account of this battle and a good starting point for someone wishing to learn more about what the poor bloody 'Tommy', 'Aussie', 'Kiwi' and 'Canuck' suffered. I would also recommend for further reading Lyn MacDonald's 'They Called it Passchendaele', Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's 'Passchendaele; The Untold Story', and books by Philip Warner, Winston Groom and Leon Wolff.

I would like to finish up with an account from the book where a young British soldier was about to go 'over the top' during the offensive to take Pilckem Ridge on the 31st July 1917: "It was still dark but then suddenly it was illuminated by a line of bursting shells, but what was astonishing still was that we must all have been deafened by the noise. I looked at Herbert, I could see his lips move - I shouted but I couldn't hear myself at all. I wanted to tell him that we would keep together so I grabbed his hand and we went over together as we had gone to Sunday School - hand in hand." - Private Alfred Warsop, 1st Battalion, Sherwood Foresters.

This book is a major disappointment and it is primarily because of a misleading title (which does not read "Walking Gallipoli" on the cover). I assumed that this book was a standard title in the Battleground Europe series that would first cover the campaign in some detail and then provide a section on touring the modern battlefield. Instead, this book entirely consists of a battlefield walk made in 1988 and supplemented in 1998, with only the barest attention paid to the actual campaign. While the author does cover some incidents in detail, the primary focus is on the terrain walk.

This book is 215 pages of oftentimes rather boring travelogue on the sights and smells of the contemporary Gallipoli battlefield. I was disappointed that interesting incidents such as the loss of most of the 1/5th Norfolk Battalion or the decimation of the Australian 10th Light Horse were either ignored or given short shrift. The author promises to offer insights into the many non-ANZAC participants in the campaign but says very little about the French expeditionary corps. For historians, this book which lacks a chronology, order of battle or other data, will seem a waste.

The one value of this book over other accounts of Gallipoli is that it offers better insights into the effects of the terrain on the campaign. The author covers virtually every nook and cranny, every gully and hill, in great detail and supplemented with many then/now photographs. One finishes with the realization that the terrain totally favored the defense and that the failure to evaluate the terrain properly was a major cause of the ultimate British defeat. The one decent landing site - at Suvla Bay - was wasted. Unlike the Western Front, there was no "rear area" for Commonwealth troops at Gallipoli and even corps commanders had to live in the same trenches as their privates. There was no "chateau generalship" at Gallipoli, except perhaps for the commander of the entire force, Sir Ian Hamilton.

This book is useful for evaluating the campaign from the terrain perspective, but it fails totally as military history. Nor is this book particularly useful as a battlefield guild, since it is far too long-winded and the maps only refer to the 1915 battlefield, with no reference to modern cemeteries or monuments.