17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book to read to prepare yourself for Military TRaining, May 2, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Real Insider's Guide to Military Basic Training: A Recruit's Guide of Advice and Hints to Make It Through Boot Camp (Paperback)
It was a good book, I've had it for 4 days now and I've already learned a lot about what to expect at Basic. I've also memorized key terms and regulations to prepare myself for basic. I give it 5 STARS, Cause its one of the best books I've ever bought, it really helped to answer my questions and feel more confident about what to expect at MIlitary Basic Traning.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
over-priced, repetitive and chock full of typos, January 12, 2002
This review is from: The Real Insider's Guide to Military Basic Training: A Recruit's Guide of Advice and Hints to Make It Through Boot Camp (Paperback)
September 11, 2001 really lit a fire under me and when I found out that I could get into the Army National Guard up until age 35, I was relieved I wasn't too old to serve my country just yet.
I ordered a bunch of books from Amazon at the same time, all about getting ready for Basic Training, what to expect, etc. This is the first one I've finished... and what a bomb this thing is.
The cheap clip-art flag on the cover should have been a tip-off, but I sadly resisted the urge to judge the book by its cover.
I am not an English major and I am normally forgiving concerning typographical errors, but there is nearly one major typo, wrong word, or grammatical error on every page. It is very distracting, but just one of the problems I had with this highly over-priced book.
Remember when you had to write a term paper in middle school and you set your typewriter (or word processing program) to 2.5 spacing instead of just regular double-spacing and added 3 spaces instead of just 2 at the end of periods just to make the 10-page minimum required? That's how this book is written. The text is large, every paragraph is indented and it looks like each line was double-spaced... making the book 144 pages long instead of the obviously much shorter length it would be if it wasn't written like a kid's book report... of course, if it was only a 50 or so page book, they'd have a harder time selling it for twenty bucks.
Each chapter has a summary, which seems like another overt method of bloating the book's volume. Considering the brevity of the chapters, the summaries are ridiculously unnecessary.
The title of the book, "The Real Insider's Guide to Military Training" misleads the reader that you're going to get information not attainable elsewhere... this is simply not the case. The same information is repeated many, many times throughout the book. A book this small does not need the statement "you get free room and meals" repeated 20 times... everyone on the planet knows that you do not pay to eat when you're in training... it's one thing to cite some of these types of statements once, but to do so over and over again is just a waste of paper.
There is really only one chapter (albeit the largest one) that actually covers basic training, and it is less than 50 pages.
The title is also misleading in that it implies that it's an insider's guide to Military Basic Training... it is instead only a glimpse of Army Basic Training. The author states (several times, I might add) that Navy and Air Force training is probably different, but he did not state how. He also said that while Marine Basic Training would be very similar to Army Basic in some ways that it also differed in many ways, but the author obviously never investigated the differences in the branches and therefore gave a misleading title to his book as "military" implies all branches.
There is no index, but if there was one, there would probably only need to be 20 or so entries, each entry with 20 page references... there is that much repetition.
There is no mention of the differences between women and men in regards to number of push-ups, sit-ups, miles, etc. There is a lot of simple, basic info that I've read on web sites that is not in this book.
If the repetitions were removed, the lines single-spaced and the text proofed by a good editor, this could easily be condensed into an inexpensive booklet for potential Army recruits that I would probably recommend... but as-is, this book is a big loser.
It would have been nice (if not expected) for a book of this description (and price) to have drawings (if not photos) of rank insignia, proper saluting, locker set-ups, correct methods of doing push-ups and sit-ups (for both male and female), etc... but there are no drawings or photos in this book.
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