10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Choppy writing, great subject, August 4, 2006
This review is from: Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945 (Hardcover)
This is a fascinating subject. The sacrifices made by the merchant marines in WWII deserve to be remembered and honored. David Fairbank White does this.
However, I found his writting style to be choppy. Many times he revisits topics with almost the same wording he used in previous chapters. The flow of the narrative was inconsistent and at times when describing incidents or battles he takes off on tangents describing the future careers of the naval officers invovled that disrupt the flow and also clearly reveals the outcome of the battle before the narrative gets there.
I would expect better writing and story telling from someone with Mr. White's credentials.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Overflowing with Adjectives, July 16, 2007
This book relentlessly pummels the reader with powerful uppercuts of adjectives and vicious jabs backed by adverbial power. The author, a former NY Times reporter, seems to have felt constrained for years by the drab objectivity required of print journalists, and here he is relishing in his new freedom to express himself in an overwhelming outburst of descriptive clauses.
Consider two paragraphs on page 7 devoted to the merchant ship SS San Demetrio. In just a handful of sentences, the vessel alternates between plodding, pushing, nudging, chugging, and drifting. It only lacked the ability to lunge, which ships frequently do in this narrative. Pretty much, Mr. White employs the "more cowbell" theory of writing. One can picture him agonizing over a sentence such as "The sea was vast, cold, surging, a bleak expanse of empty slate-grey, pitiless in its epic expanse", and wondering how to cram in more words such as giant, frigid, remorseless, wind-whipped, and perhaps ineffable.
For all its flights of lyricism, the book sadly suffers from a significant degree of repetition, as if the various chapters and sometimes individual paragraphs had to repeatedly carry the entire weight of the story and recapitulate its hight points again and again. Sometimes the same point is made three times on the same page, and we almost reach the level of "The Germans were determined to destroy the convoys. Determination was perhaps the key attribute of the Germans in their battle against the convoys. Determined, those Germans were, in their efforts to sink the convoys. Were the Germans determined to annihilate the convoys? Many suspect the answer was yes."
As to strong points, the author supplies a wealth of information and provides an excellent bibliography, set of chapter notes, and index. The selection of photos is superior, with some coming from his own collection. Maps are plentiful. Mr. White also conducted an enormous amount of research and a lot of personal interviews with surviving combatants of both sides, and I feel the book would've been far stronger with more of these oral histories.
A stronger editorial hand would also have been advised, but still, this is a serviceable account of an important chapter of WWII, and possibly just the thing for readers who like their books bursting with flavor.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must read!, May 15, 2006
This review is from: Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945 (Hardcover)
No WWII buff, no naval history aficionado should miss this superb and exciting history of the battle for the Atlantic. As riveting and intimate as Walter Lord's "A Night to Remember," "Bitter Ocean" places you on the bridge of merchantships hunted by wolfpacks and in the CIC of German U-boats as they hunt down their prey. Don't miss this excellent history.
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