Unevenly researched book with appalling errors.
598200
Unfortunately, the research is very uneven.  There are chapters that provide well source research that are interesting.  Other chapters have very few sources and contain obvious factual errors.  The worst part is that these errors are used to support the authors thesis, but instead undermine his credibility.
4072398
This book is a mishmash, and is poorly named, particularly the subtitle (maybe the publisher chose it?).  It's interesting and heartfelt, and obviously the author cares a great deal for the subject.  But it wanders back and forth.

She makes some errors that would be astonishingly easy to have corrected.

As someone else pointed out, the Immaculate Conception is Mary being born without the taint of original sin, not Jesus's birth.  That's the Virgin Birth.

The word "discalced" does not mean anything "literally" about poverty.  It means "shoeless."

The correct name of the high school in Seattle is not "Blanchette" but "Blanchet."

She has no bibliography and cites no sources for her information.

Interesting and heart-felt, but not a work of scholarship, which is a pity.
66466
I picked up this book expecting it to be an interesting and light introduction to Alexander the Great. A few pages in, I encountered too many obvious errors to continue. On page 3, Cantor summarizes the period of classical Greece, describing how the Greek city-states were in a state of perpetual war. He then points out some exceptions to this general rule, saying that,

"One was the period in the later fifth century BC when Athens and Sparta united during the Peloponnesian War against the menace of the Persian Empire coming over from Asia Minor."

As is commonly known, the Peloponnesian War was fought between Athens and Sparta, not against the Persian Empire. In the very next sentence, Cantor goes on to say,

"The alliance of Athens and Sparta defeated the Persians in the famous Battle of Marathon in 490 BC."

This is incorrect. Sparta did not fight in the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians asked Sparta to come to their aid, but the Spartans were observing a religious festival, and set out several days too late, arriving after the battle had already been won. Next sentence:

"After the war had dragged on for almost ten years, the Greeks forced the battle by advancing full force toward the Persian army and surrounding it."

This is clearly a description the Battle of Marathon, but the battle was not fought after the war had dragged on for ten years. Rather, the battle was fought, the Persian army defeated, and then ten years later a new Persian army came back and was once again defeated.
This paragraph goes on to describe the Battle of Marathon, concluding by saying that,

"Phidippides ran the distance of twenty-six mile in three hours (this was the birth of the marathon), delivered the message to the waiting city, then promptly died from overexertion."

Here he is perpetuating an incorrect myth that developed in later Roman times. Phidippides actually ran from Athens to Sparta, and back, to request military assistance against the Persians, and there is no evidence that he died afterwards.
With all of these errors in one paragraph, the accuracy of the rest of this text is called into question. I understand that this is a text on Alexander the Great, not on Classical Greece, but these errors still show a disturbing lack of basic research. If you want a light and quick summary of Alexander the Great's life, unfortunately this is not it.
1699528
This book covers many interesting topics and could have been extremely interesting. Unfortunately, it is very poorly written and contains many misleading typographical errors and inconsistencies. More seriously, the author freely adorns his text with the jargon of fibre bundle and frame bundle theory without ever explaining in detail what that jargon means. He also keeps referring to pullbacks and pushforwards without defining what functions are doing the pulling back or the pushing forward, or what are the domains of these functions. This is most unfortunate and extremely frustrating for someone interested in getting a detailed understanding of this fascinating and important theory. Some of the sections, which ought to have been the most interesting, degenerate into a garbled string of indecipherable assertions. It is almost as if the author has been "baptized by the spirit" and feels compelled to speak to us in unknown tongues. The nett effect of these episodic breakdowns is that this book teaches us how to sound like experts without providing us with any expertise of substance.

That said, if one first learns the theory of frame bundles from a superb book like Lawrence Conlon's Differentiable Manifolds (get the superior 2nd edition), one may be able to derive some benefit from Vargas' insights as to how Cartan generalized the Klein geometries to manifolds and developed his own unique (but generally ignored) approach to geometry.
275779
The Kindle version of this book is riddled with errors.
2226797
Jack McDevitt's work is clever. It addresses issues of paradox rather originally, as far as I've seen, and offers some insight into an eternal view of history.

However, the work is plagued by a number of errors that, I imagine, only experts could discover. His Greek transliteration is poor, writing iotai as Ys and upsila as Is, and ignoring rough breathings here or soft breathings there. His grasp of Greco-Roman culture, especially religion, is tenuous at best: Jupiter is the Roman king of the gods, a name which would not be applied in Alexandria (officially or otherwise) for at least seventy years after the visit by Shel and Dave in the story... and he certainly would not be associated with Hera, the Greek queen of the gods (whose Roman counterpart was, rather, Juno). Further, prayer in ancient culture, certainly not at the time of the Trojan War, never involved kneeling or bowing before the gods, and a classicist like the character Aspasia would have known that.

McDevitt's view of religion in general is remarkably one-sided, only offering a small potential that any good could come of it at all, and then only if religion were libertarian politically - a small group led by a single individual. By implication, any religion that suggested authority was authoritarian, corrupt, and damaging to society. His history of religion, too, has holes large enough to drive a Buick through.

I am not an expert in every historical era and political issue that McDevitt addresses in this ambitious work, but of those things I am knowledgeable about, McDevitt's attempts are sloppy at best and flatly ignorant at worst.

On top of all of that, McDevitt's - as I said earlier, rather original - approach to paradox hinges upon a significant flaw of reasoning: McDevitt indicates that any event which is KNOWN in history cannot be altered. By that measure, someone completely ignorant of history, or someone misled about the details of history, could travel to any time and do anything at all - including things that would be paradoxical for a more knowledgeable person.

My final complaint: the encounter with Socrates is notable, not because of its moving speeches or discussion, but because it is markedly absent from the problems that plague Shel and Dave throughout the book: no one knows exactly when Hamlet was first produced, or what exact date Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses, but Dave can show up at Socrates' death with precise certainty? The death of a man some scholars believe never to have existed? It is surprising, at least.

This book had a great deal of potential as I went into reading it. It got my hopes up, that someone might have done a grand time-traveling adventure through history with precision alongside a riveting original tale. But the simple errors that riddled the book compelled me to read the last ten chapters in one sitting, just to get it over with.
2304422
I find this book to be poorly research with conclusions drawn without factual evidence and numerous statements made by the author simply make no sense.
2224065
The book has a number of errors in it, some from bad editing, others from sloppy research. I used it to try and piece together what happened when during the battle, and found it very confusing. I'm a fan of the Osprey series, but unless you like the maps in this book, you'd be best to look elsewhere for information on the battle.
1147579
If you are interested in serious history do not buy this book.  It is filled with unstated assumptions, undocumented assertions, and flat out inaccuracies.  The chapter on the Earps is one sided sensationalism that could have been easily avoided by scholarly effort.  Most of the subjects covered are ones that cannot be tied down with anything near the precision the author claims.  A rip off.
4412946
I know very little about Iran and Turkey and so I got this book to provide a base of knowledge, especially in geographical context.  However, throughout the sections where I feel I have a pretty good understanding of the history (I have lived in Central Asia for most of the past 4 years) there are enough strange errors that I can't find myself vouching for the author's reliability. There is nothing egregious, but bits here and there that suggest a lack of research or exposure.

 -The first is his labeling of those living in Kyrgyzstan as 'Kyrgyzes."  Never have I heard of this label before, talking to both foreigners and locals while in Kyrgyzstan.  A better term would simply be "the Kyrgyz" or "Kyrgyz people."  Could he have written the book without traveling there?

 -a statement like: "The endless empty spaces of the steppes of Kazakhstan provided the Tsar with an opportunity to channel ethnic Russians and Cossacks to the area and encourage them to grow crops, particularly much-needed cotton.  In 1891, more than a million newly arrived Russians and Cossacks took to farming land in Kazakhstan adjoining Siberia" suggests that Russians and Cossacks were sent to northern Kazakhstan to grow cotton.  Cotton has never been grown that far up in the country, and much of that land wasn't really claimed by Kazakhs anyway.

-placing Astana along the irtysh river.
-suggesting sausages play a significant role in Kazakh cuisine (I've never experienced an indigenous sausage in all my years there, both in rural and urban settings throughout the country.)
often referring to Russians/Slavs in a slightly derogatory manner, ie "[following the breakup of the soviet union] The disheartened Slav settlers came to accept stoically their secondary position."  Can a second or third generation immigrant still be referred to as a settler? Are most Americans still "settlers"?
-The irritating trope of referring to the United States plainly as the superpower "America"

These may seem like petty concerns.  But because there are so many of them I am inclined to believe that at least when it comes to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the author doesn't know what he is talking about.  I assume he is an expert in Iran and Turkey, but do those sections have the same errors as well?  I have no idea! I suppose one can conclude that this book is a good exercise in questioning the validity of everything you read.
776344
The author provides an interesting insider's view of von Braun's rocket team. However, the book suffers from poor editing: names of cities in Germany and Belgium are quite simply incorrect. It also seems to me that the measurements of the missiles mentioned in the book cannot possibly be correct; they are given as metric, but are no doubt recalculations of English engineering units. The results are ludicrous. Range of the A4 is given as a convenient conversion of miles; engine diameter is a conversion of 1 foot, etc. If you are interested in a good read you will find lots of hard to find historical anecdotes in this book, but for me the story is spoiled and seriously flawed due to the aforementioned inconsistencies. Unfortunately this is not atypical for these kinds of histories. Some serious editing required!
2966285
Sloppy research ruins a good topic. The writing style is smooth. I like how the story of Soviet spies is confirmed by the Venona papers.

HOWEVER, the research is sloppy. If the publisher had a fact checker, he or she should have been fired.

Inexcusable errors. The CPUSA slogan was "Communism is 20th Century Americanism." Morgan says "Communism is Americanism."

It is Moiseye Olgin (variation of Moses), not Misha Olgin (variation of Michael).

Harry Gold lived in a house on Kindred Street with his father and brother. He did not live in an apartment.

The Federal women's prison at Alderson is in West Virginia, not near Seattle.

With mistakes such as these, can anyone trust the details in this book.

Shame on the writer and the publisher
3078887
I looked forward to reading this book and it is in fact an enjoyable read. But...

You may know that Anheuser-Busch owned the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team for over 40 years. There are of course many references to the team in the book -- how its purchase came about, the players, the successes, the flops. And as a baseball historian, I'm fairly familiar with much of this part of the story.

So it bothers me as I read the book (halfway through) to find errors among the most simple things. The author calls outfielder Curt Flood a Hall of Famer. Curt Flood is NOT a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The author also spells Dal Maxvill's last name "Maxville" and calls him a second baseman (both in the same sentence). Maxvill played only 185 games at second base, 1,207 at shortstop.

These are simple things, easily researchable and verifiable. And you may think I'm nitpicking. But when I find errors about the things I KNOW about, I start to wonder what errors are in the other 95 percent of the book in regard to subjects I'm not as familiar with. How many mistakes are there in the references to the running of the brewery, and people's private lives?

I find this more and more in non-fiction books these days. The author doesn't do his or her homework and the editors don't do their jobs.

As a point of reference, the copy I'm reading is a first edition and you can find the errors referred to above on pages 81 and 111.
1929217
Other reviews of this book have documented extensive errors -- many of which were apparent even to the non-expert inasmuch as the events described were simply physically impossible.

Given the anecdotal nature of the book, the obvious failures of documentation, and the somewhat "gossipy" approach of the author, it is very difficult to determine which parts deserve credence and which do not.

Frankly, it is not even a good read, the structure being very loose and -- as mentioned -- anecdotal. This is certainly a subject that deserves better treatment and which has received better treatment elsewhere.

I am sorry to have to write a negative review of a book that features the author's father in significant parts and which is autobiographical in others.  Nonetheless ...
2418433
I regret to say that I was disappointed with this book.  Initially, I was confused.  The dust jacket and the product description stated that it included 5 British admirals, 5 American, 3 German, 3 Japanese, and 2 French.  In fact, it includes 7 British admirals, 5 American, 2 German, 6 Japanese, 1 French, plus 1 Dutch, and 1 Italian.

Attempting to cover 23 admirals in 190 pages while also devoting the first 35 pages to summaries of the Atlantic and Pacific "Wars" is a big part of the problem with this book.  The coverage of some of the admirals is so cursory as to be of little value.  Spruance is given barely over a page.  The Wikipedia entry for this important commander is more informative.  The author's peculiar definition of who qualifies as a "fighting" admiral is also never made clear.

There are a number of errors as well.  Admiral Fletcher was not Jack Frank; he was Frank Jack.  The cruiser that dispatched Bismarck was Dorsetshire, not Devonshire.  In the 2 pages of text assigned to Admiral Fraser, he is referred to once as Fletcher.  On the first of the 2 pages alloted to Ozawa, his year of death is given as 1963; on the following page, it's 1966.  Wragg does include the marvelous story about "Fancy, twice a knight and at your age."  However, he recounts it as a message of congratulations from Sommerville to Cunningham.  John Winton's authoritative biography of Cunningham has it going from ABC to Sommerville.

Finally, the quality of the writing itself is mediocre.  There are irritating repetitions of words and phrases -- sometimes on the same page and sometimes in the same sentence.  One of the repeated statements is that the British Pacific Fleet was "the largest and most well balanced fleet the Royal Navy ever created."  No explanation or citation for this questionable statement is offered.  I finished the book believing that it had been rushed to publication.  It would have benefited from more careful editing and more thorough coverage of the subject matter.
4504714
Very disappointing.  The book is touted as "based on exhaustive research" but in reality is a compressed history of WW II with a slight emphasis on the role of George Marshall.  If you are looking for a good biography of Marshall this is not it.  Moreover, the authors criticisms of Marshall are often offered in general terms without good substantiation or context.  The credibiltiy of the book is further undermined by at least one very sloppy citation of a secondary source (after which I stopped reading).  On page 175 the authors note that in 1942 Marshall appointed Eisenhower  to the "grand title of Commanding General, United States Forces, Euopean Theater" despite his lack of prior combat experience.  So far, so good -- a story that has been told many times.  But then the authors state: "A recent biographer of Eisenhower believes that the choice was an empty guesture: Neither Marshall nor Secretary Stimson, says Jean Edward Smith, 'believed the new operation [the cross-channel attack] would ever take place,' given the president's recent drift."  But read in full context, the "new operation that Smith was referring to was the invasion of North Africa, not the "cross-channel attack" inserted into the quote by the authors. Indeed, the very next sentence in the Eisenhower biography states that Marshall, King and Stimson "were determined to prevent it [the new opreration]."  More in the nature of a nit, I also a bit confused at times by the authors' choice of words, e.g., at page 144 they describe Marshall as "quiet" and  "stangely indecisive on the issue of North Africa" at the Arcadia conference, with the exception on an instance where "he did directly object, but obliquely...."
1477132
I was sorely disappointed when a glaring error surfaced.

At first I thought perhaps the blurb on the back cover had been in error, and that the year really was 1964 or 1965.

However, when reference was made to the effort to get Kennedy elected as the first Catholic US president, I knew the 1960 indicator was correct.

But when a red Mustang convertible pulled into a gas station, I lost all respect. Mustangs weren't produced until the first one, the 1964 and 1/2, and certainly weren't around in 1960.

This is one of those research items that the author or an editor should have caught. I'm so disappointed that this error made it into print, not to mention the gross amount of misused homonyms and misspelled words.

The story is convoluted but very indicative of real life. Perhaps there are too many characters but they all do connect together, and a domino effect is evident in certain events.

Still, I'm disappointed.