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)

One of the (If not the best war plays). Touching and humourous. Truly a maaaad play.

Mister Roberts had the right amount of amusement and sadness, which is the main reason I really liked it. At first I was not sure how I was going to enjoy it. The first chapter started out fairly slow, but this was just because it was an introduction of characters. The rest of the book was much clearer with this introduction. Throughout the entire novel there was a lot of humor. It was a fast read with all this comedy. I really admire Heggen's writing style because he incorporated wit with war. Heggen gave a more amusing account of the war than other factual book could have.

This is a fabulous story. Heggen expertly captures the monotony, the cynicism, the bravado and depression of life at sea. The story ranges from hilarious to heartbreaking, and it's sad Heggen ended his own life before writing again. I find it amazing that this book is not on the CNO's professional reading list.

I read this book several years ago and it taught me so much about art, life, love and passion that Sweetman's biography resonates in me still. Vincent is the most famous artist on the planet today and so much has been written about him. But David Sweetman really took the time to update so much information - just as he did in Gauguin's biography - that you learn so much more by reading this book. I recommend it to everyone who wants to understand about mental illness and all the stigma that goes with it. Vincent was very brave to rise above his pain and blessed the world with so much beauty and colour. This text refers to the hardcover book.

If you want to know Vincent... this is the best book out there. Sweetman is thorough and empathetic and like the Don McLean song, lovingly writes through Vincent's eyes.

The review above is absolutely right. This is one of the best biographies of Van Gogh out there. Sweetman's approach is thoughtful and well researched. This biography has proven to be an invaluable reference for my own Van Gogh research. I hope that the publisher of this book will consider reprinting it. It's a real shame that Sweetman's excellent book isn't easily available to anyone interested in Vincent van Gogh's life and art.

Mary Renault, with her delicate handling of alternative sexual interests, touched a chord in a lot of people, whatever their orientation. This is the story about how little Molly Challans (with her love of cowboys and books) because the best selling author of historical novels set in both Bronze age and Classical Greece, Mary Renault.

One might almost have predicted the loveless marriage that produced her. Her mother's least attractive qualities seem to resonate in the character of Olympias (Alexander the Great's mother)in her later series (written after her mother's death and final betrayal). The absent or ineffective fathers in her books reflect her other father's physical and emotional distance from his family.

And around her momentous events of the 20th century occur-- World War I and II, the rise of the Nationalist Party in South Africa, the liberalization of sexual mores in Britain and the United States, and the struggle against appartheid.

This linear story is probably where the reader should go who wants to know more concrete facts about Mary Renault's life (she pronounced it Ren-olt not like the car). The author at times dips into analysis but doesn't linger there. His main informant seems to have been Mary's lifelong companion, Julia and at times the book seems to be as much about Julia as Mary-- he notes at one point that a friend referred to them as M & J rather than separately.

I'm still waiting for the definitve evaluation of Renault's novels but until it arrives this book is well worth reading if at times a little on the thin side.

Mary Renault's wonderful novel, "The Last of the Wine," was a major influence on me as a young man. As the years went by, I read everything I could find by her, including the early novels, such as "Promise of Love" (in England, "Purposes of Love") and "Return to Night." I found that everything she had written was good.

But who was Mary Renault?

In the days when I worked with the Gay Academic Union in New York, I learned that she was "a lesbian whose real name was Mary Challans." This was interesting, but not nearly enough information!

This well-done biography gives us a very complete portrait of Mary. She was a genius of the first water, whose parents totally failed to understand or appreciate her. ("Mary! You must dress up pretty to attract a husband" was the never-ending wail of her mother.)

In fact, reading this biography provides an irony: so many parents want their children to be "gifted," to be "geniuses." And then, when they get their wish, they wind up hating the genius child, because (duh) the genius child has a mind of her own!

Mary's course through life was perilous and interesting. Having sworn never to be condemned to marriage or teaching, she wound up choosing a career as a nurse. She wrote her fingers off. Finally, at the end of World War II, she got a huge, good surprise. She won the MGM Prize, at that time worth $150,000!!
She was rich! Alas, the British supertax took 80 percent of that amount, leaving her with a mere $30,000. (Hey, government bureaucrats! Do we want to encourage artists, or not?)

But that "small sum" of $30,000 was enough for Mary to relocate to South Africa with her lover, a wonderful woman who had been sharing Mary's life for a decade already. They ran through the money, being duped and bled by dishonest gay men (!), until it became clear that both of them would have to go back to work.

Mary produced "The Charioteer." It was the outstanding gay novel of its time, deeply imbued with Platonic philosophy.

She went on to write "The Last of the Wine" and "The Persian Boy," among many other classics.

Her parents never appreciated what she had done. They never understood that their baby girl was a genius, who played no small role in the sexual revolution of the twentieth century, and in the more important ongoing search for truth about human nature.

Very highly recommended!

I've long been an admirer of Renault's novels; her muscular prose, idealistic philosphies, model heroes, and her affection for gay male characters have struck a very resonant chord in me. After reading Sweetman's biography, I am now very much an admirer of Renault herself: intelligent, talented, courageous and strong. Once she wrote to a friend, speaking about feminists and women in general [she had a lifelong distaste for women, a point on which I now find myself differing]: "..the truth obviously is that [they] do seem to have, as men, some extra reserve of neural strength, some capacity for sustained intensity and inner drive, which women do not possess. I will believe otherwise when given evidence," rather selling herself short, I think, by not recognizing that very intensity and drive in herself.

Highly recommended for any fan of Renault's.

I am a voracious reader with some knowledge of art history, but after attempting to read this book for the last six months, I am finally stopping at the half-way mark. It is certainly full of new facts and demonstrates an exhaustive amount of research, but I find Sweetman's narrative plodding and unorganized. Also, the book pre-supposes the reader's depth of knowledge on the subject -- the lack of which is quite obviously my problem in enjoying the book.

Brilliant biographer David Sweetman has created a masterpiece with his biography of Gauguin. I don't know how he did it; but I was in awe throughout the reading of this well-thought-out and researched book. Gauguin was a complicated man; and through his exhaustive research, Sweetman gives us the rare opportunity to journey with one of the most colourful and oft-misunderstood artists in history. There are so many new facts uncovered in this book... I could feel the spirit of Gauguin rise up and rebel... http://www.mystic-art.com

I am disappointed to see that this book is out of print but if you have any interest in Gauguin whatsoever, you should try to get your hands on a copy. This is such an excellent book! Mr. Sweetman has clearly done his homework and he writes beautifully. By the time you finish this book you will feel as though you knew Gauguin for, as much as such a thing is possible, Mr. Sweetman gets you inside the artist's head so that you know what he was thinking and what he was feeling at all the important points of his life. The author gives a very balanced view of Gauguin and of the important people in his life, including his wife Mette. Gauguin is not portrayed as a saint. Mr. Sweetman does not let him off the hook for the shabby way he sometimes treated his friends and family. In other words, this behavior is not excused just because Gauguin was a brilliant artist. On the other hand, Gauguin is not demonized for his irresponsible behavior either, as he sometimes could be a caring person and a good friend. Gauguin left notebooks and correspondence, so when Mr. Sweetman gives you his interpretations of the meanings of some of Gauguin's greatest paintings he is not whistling in the dark. Gauguin himself is oftimes present to tell you what he was trying to do. One of the nice things about the book is that it does not focus exclusively on Gauguin. You learn what what was going on in the Paris art world. There is interesting information given about other artists, such as Camille Pissarro and Emile Bernard and you also learn about some of the art dealers, such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard. You are given in depth information of what was going on in the French communities on Tahiti and in the Marquesas. Mr. Sweetman also provides a sympathetic and reasonable explanation for Gauguin's behavior following the death of Vincent Van Gogh. As Mr. Sweetman says in the book, the picture most people have of Gauguin is based almost completely on the portrayal by Anthony Quinn in the 1950's movie "Lust For Life". If you read this wonderful book you will get a much more well-rounded picture of what this very complicated man was truly like.

Excellent and engaging, though it covers a very wide scope. Be forewarned, though...it is the same as "Explosive Acts" by the same author...just a different title!

this book is simply wrong. not just details, but the big picture. the anarchists weren't like that. the artists weren't like that. these people lived in a ferment of intellectual and moral commitment. i didn't feel the author was 'sensitive' to them at all: very much the opposite. i felt he was dismissive and patronizing.

There's a difference between nitpicking over minor historical innacuracies and making up nonsense out of whole cloth. This unfortunate book is of the latter sort. It's distorted by what the late Hal Draper called "falsifictions": self-invented statements uttered with an air of scholarly objectivity. The work will indeed transport one to another world: naturally so, because it isn't real.

Fortunately there are alternatives which are vivid, entertaining, and careful with the facts. Richard Ellmann and Barbara Belford have excellent, colorful biographies of Wilde. June Rose has a very fine biography of the fascinating Suzanne Valadon. Alexander Varias has a good account of the fin-de-siecle anarchists. Roger Shattuck has a truly superb book on the rich artistic ferment of la belle epoque, the 30 years or so before the first world war: "The Banquet Years". Shattuck's book is at once a definitive work of scholarship and a hugely fun read. Sweetman's is neither.

Incidentally Sweetman's bio of Gauguin suffers from the same tendency toward posturing. Whoops!, suddenly we're in the midst of detailed technical excursus into problems of large-scale engineering, or of epidemiology. (Gauguin tried to live in Panama at the time of the digging of the canal.) Is the author expert in these subjects? He certainly seems to want us to believe that he is. Nevertheless one doubts and, in doubting, questions his expertise on the subjects of art, literature and politics as well.

If you're looking for an entertaining experience from the pen of an expert, read Ellmann or Rose or especially Shattuck. Give Sweetman a rest.

Great read, but it's the same book as another by the same author that is under a different title

Based on the publisher's synopsis, one would expect this book to be elucidating, interesting, and entertaining. It is nothing of the sort. While the descriptions of the multitude of Irish castles are organized by structural type and era (i.e. ringworks, stone fortresses, hall houses, etc.), the text within each chapter comes across as almost random. I struggled through the first two chapters twice each, frustrated with nearly every page. The chapters I finished did not provide overviews that invite the reader onward. The author assumes that the reader is fimiliar with technical terms without defining them well or at all. The reader must often refer to the glossary for definitions, yet many technical terms are not included in the glossary. The second chapter on early medieval stone fortresses addresses a number of noteworthy fortifications. However, the chapter is organized by castle features rather than the castles themselves, so one must read in turn about the siting of all the fortresses, then their various perimeter walls, then their keeps and donjons. The illustrations are scattered throughout the chapter rather than being aligned with the text. One must pour over the chapter to try to glean points of interest, recall (or highlight as I did) features of each castle, and out of this mental stew put together a picture of any particular location. The book seems to have been prepared as a series of lectures or a technical paper which someone decided to sell to the general public without editing it to suit its audience. There are certainly other books on the market on the same subject that will hook the reader's interest much more successfully. Having struggled through a good portion of this book, I would certainly not recommend it.