Customer Reviews

Gulf War Debriefing Book: An After Action Report

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After checking out the author's Web site, I decided to buy the book. I was very nicely surprised. The book adds a lot to the information. A nice layout, a good read for anyone who served, anyone who knows anyone who served, for anyone who has an interest in the Gulf and the war of in 1991. My recommendation is, skip the Clancy book and go for this one!

This book is terrible!!! Half of the pictures are too dark to see, the rest look like they were drawn with blocks. It is littered with typos. It has speeches by President Bush, but the speech at the beginning of the air war is the wrong one. It also has great lines like "Killed when his tank was hit by a mine". Must be one of those high-tech mines that sees you coming and jumps out of the ground. Don't waste your money!

OK...there is little "opinion" in this book and I suppose thats a good thing given its a non-fiction book. I did expect however a little more than a regurgitation and reprint of facts and figures that are all readily available...I expected a book of this size to tell me something I didn't already know...It didn't...and what little info it contained that was not filler (do we need 50 pages of double spaced, large print listings of each individual unit that participated??) was filled with typos and grammatical errors....I don't know if these are the author's or the editor's errors but it makes an already lacking book even that much more irritating to read through...It rises above the single star level in that it DOES provide a somewhat useful overview of the day by day events of the war and copius lists of SOME relevant information...Unfortuneately it provides only such a global view of events, facts and figures that it does not help you understand the what, whys, and hows of the war in any way....

I was working on a paper on Middle East history and found this book extremely helpful. It packs a slew of information into a few select pages and is loaded with essential facts and figures on the Gulf War. It's not the sort of book you read cover to cover, but is a great reference for finding out specific nuggets of information about the war.

The only errors I've found were in some photo captions, but when I contacted the publisher they said many of those were fixed following the first printing. The publisher noted this was the first military book ever published by Hellgate Press and it was a bit of an adjustment going from editing business "how-to" books to editing military history.

The website also has some good information if you aren't sure you want to buy the book.