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- A good start for PARENTS!
- excellent overview from a professional viewpoint
- Informative and enlightening
- A Reassuring Guide for Parents and Grandparents
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A Good Start in Life: Understanding Your Child's Brain and Behavior from Birth to Age 6
MD, Norbert Herschkowitz , and
Elinore Chapman Herschkowitz
Manufacturer: Dana Press
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ASIN: 0972383050 |
Amazon.com
New parents can end up with too many choices, and it seems like a separate book exists for every stage of life--which can be overwhelming when one's reading time is limited. A Good Start in Life aims to reduce the stress, compiling basic information about child development from conception to age 6 in one concise book. Written by a neuroscientist and an educator, you'll find easy-to-digest information about the physical stages of early childhood, as well as straightforward suggestions that make parenting a little easier as your child grows.
In each chapter, you follow a small girl through her life changes. Her second birthday party is a typical madhouse, while by her sixth you can see all types of developed personalities and interpersonal skills at play. Each party is used to demonstrate specific developments, and it's both entertaining and educational to see the kids evolve from playing separately to choosing up sides for a baseball game. Pictures and charts of developmental milestones are included for quick reference, and topics like building security, setting limits, and preparing for school are addressed clearly and briefly. While no special situation is discussed in depth, parents will receive an excellent general overview of what they can expect from life with a little one. --Jill Lightner
Book Description
The social and cognitive development of children is a complex yet crucial process for parents to understand, and though there are numerous books on child development, A Good Start in Life stands out from the rest as an acclaimed and important work on the connections between childhood brain and behavioral development.
This new paperback edition, updated with the latest information and new material, offers parents and educators a rich and invaluable resource on how children learn to live in family and society from birth to age six. Norbert Herschkowitz, MD, and his wife Elinore Chapman Herschkowitz draw on their lifetime of experience in studying infants and children to explain how brain development shapes a child’s personality and behavior. Organizing their narrative by age, the authors examine a wide range of social development issues, from appropriate rule-setting to the development of key character elements in a child such as moral sensibility, temperament, language development, playing, aggression, impulse control, and empathy.
Some of the most popular features of the hardcover edition are retained here, including the question-and-answer section that concludes each chapter with real questions posed by parents to Dr. Herschkowitz, as well as brain maps and charts that display milestones in the development of various skills. Additional new material addresses concerns about prematurely born babies and the issue of resilience in children.
In today’s world, children grow up in an incredibly complex and highly sensory environment. A Good Start in Life offers a clear, concise, and richly detailed guide infused with warmth and encouragement that enables parents and educators to constructively stimulate and shape their children’s cognitive and social development.
“A must read . . . a gift to all parents.”--Rosemarie T. Truglio, vice-president, Education and Research, Sesame Workshop
“Do the first three years of life represent a critical period for all aspects of development? Are we the product of our genes or of our environment? Does early exposure to Mozart make for smarter babies? The answers to these and other pressing questions are skillfully and elegantly answered in this wonderful book, which I enthusiastically recommend.”
--Charles A. Nelson, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Child Psychology, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics, University of Minnesota
“This delightfully written book . . . is not merely a how-to book, but a book about understanding how a child truly grows.”
--Guy McKhann, MD, The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Customer Reviews:
A good start for PARENTS!.......2007-05-17
I really think that all parents should get to know their child from the brain perspective. This book provides a thorough and easy-to-follow overview of the child's growing brain. The idea of brain-based education is really catching on these days. Why not brain-based parenting? See also Power Brain Kids
excellent overview from a professional viewpoint.......2007-03-12
I was really impressed with this book because the information is all based in scientific fact AND it's a quick read. It's refreshing to be reading about the results of scientific studies from authors that are compelling writers and have a sense of humor. To summarize the content, child rearing is about common sense, but the gems in this book are the descriptions of scientific studies that explain the reasons why parents and children do what they do. There are a lot of passages worth quoting to a fellow parent! I highly recommend this book.
Informative and enlightening.......2003-06-15
Norbert Herschkowitz's book may not be as inspiring a read as The Prenatal Prescription by Peter Nathanielsz, but it's filled with valuable information on giving your baby the healthiest start in life, both prebirth and after birth. The information on how a baby's brain works (e.g. language acquisition) is particularly interesting.
A Reassuring Guide for Parents and Grandparents.......2002-08-20
I wish I had already had this book when my own children were growing up, but now I can consult it to follow and understand the development of my grandchildren. The authors' vast expertise has not kept them from writing a parent-friendly, easily-accessible-for-the-layperson book that answers the questions we all have as we watch our children progress: Are they developing as they should, according to the proper timeline? Am I being too demanding? Not enough? What makes it all work? We know our children are miracles of nature, but the text gives us a wider understanding of why and how. It quells doubts and cheers us, as we watch the "sample" children, so like our own, change from day to day.
Book Description
A German survivor of the Allied air campaign in World War II provides a unique and thought-provoking perspective on strategic, wide-area bombing.
Herman Knell was nineteen and living in Würtzburg in March of 1945 when hundreds of Allied planes arrived overhead, unleashing a torrent of bombs on the city. Würtzburg's tightly packed medieval housing exploded in a firestorm, killing six thousand people in one night and destroying 92 percent of the city's structures. Despite the fact that Würtzburg had no strategic value, the city emerged from World War II second only to Dresden in material destruction inflicted from the air. The experience led Knell to years of research on the history, development, and effects of the strategy of area bombing.
To Destroy a City is the result of the author's long and unrelenting investigation. His analysis of this form of warfare, which reached its zenith during World War II, covers the history and the development of wide-area bombing since 1914, examines its wartime effectiveness and the consequences. But the extra dimension that Knell's book offers is his firsthand experience of the tension, fear, tentative defiance, and, finally, utter catastrophe of being on the receiving end of overwhelming air power. For Americans, who fortunately did not experience bombing during the war, this is essential reading.
Customer Reviews:
The myth of the 'good German' is destroyed, too.......2006-12-25
Up to late 1944, Hermann Knell, a teenager too young to be drafted, was having a comfy-cozy war in his hometown of Wurzburg, a small city in Bavaria. His family was burgerlich and the fighting fronts were far away. If the Germans were burning down 20,000 Russian villages -- frequently with the villagers still alive inside them -- well, what was that to him?
But when the Royal Air Force finally got around to Wurzburg and the Knells lost most (bur far from all) of their property, then that was a crime that deserved exposing. Many years later, after an adult life spent in free countries (which evidently didn't rub off on him), Knell proposed to explore the origin, effectiveness, legality, morality and suffering of strategic bombing.
This is ground that has been plowed before. Knell has very little new to offer, despite spending much time in the operational archives of the bombing forces. And the old he recycles is, too often, mistaken or, sometimes, deliberately dishonest.
Sometimes it is hard to guess which. It seems pointless to lie about the destroyers-for-bases deal and call it clandestine. An examination of contemporary newspaper files reveals the error. But if not deliberate, it was a very strange mistake to make.
Other misrepresentations cannot have been mistakes; they must have been deliberate. The most egregious example is his statement that the Germans accepted Hitler to solve their domestic problems, but without enthusiasm. We've seen the newsreels. We know how enthusiastic they were. The comfortably middle-class, like the Knells, disliked Hitler personally as an upstart, who spoke uncouth German and was an Austrian, too. But they loved Hitlerism, at least as long as the fighting was far away.
In his summation, Knell becomes quite upset that the bombing of Wurzburg may have violated conventions of war. You would think that Germany adhered scrupulously to those rules, from anything in "To Destroy a City" to the contrary. Occasional lapses, like the pointless bombardment of Paris by V2s, are shrugged off: "Why Paris had to suffer again as at the end of World War I, no doubt adds to the idea of German Schrecklichkeit."
No doubt.
(Knell leaves Schrecklichkeit untranslated. It is the same word that gave us the name of the movie cartoon character Shrek and translates as "frightfulness." No other language has such a word. The Germans invented it, well before the Nazis, to inform the Belgians, who objected to having the country invaded and ravaged for no reason, that the Germans could be a lot worse than they had been up until then if the Belgians did not knuckle under.)
Knell proves, again, what was already well known: the strategic bombers vastly overpromised the military effectiveness of their method. For someone so concerned to distance himself personally and the Germans collectively from the Hitlerian crimes, he makes an odd argument.
This is that the morale argument was even-steven. The British argued that their population would not crack under bombing, but the Germans would. This, if you accept Knell's position that the Germans were unenthusiastic about Hitler, should have been a correct argument: a population of free men and women fighting for liberty ought to have had higher morale than an oppressed population restive under the hobnailed boot of (to say the least of it) militarism.
That, in the event, the German morale proved as unshakable as the British suggests that, in fact, the Germans had no problem with Hitlerism. Plenty of other evidence points the same way, but Knell seems oblivious to the import of his own words.
Because of the numerous misstatements -- whether they arose from carelessness, ignorance or dishonesty -- I cannot recommend this book to anyone who is not thoroughly familiar with the history of Germany and of military affairs between 1914 and 1945.
However, to the sophisticated reader, "To Destroy a City" can go on the shelf with the other books that are useful in destroying the "good German" myth.
One last point. While it may be true that Knell was studying Shakespeare when the bombs fell, I do not believe he was studying it "from a beautifully printed and leather-bound volume . . . Printed in London in 1623." Which was burned by the RAF. No, I do not believe he was reading a First Folio.
Another apology for the Third Reich.......2006-07-23
This is a deeply flawed memoir by a German who has yet to acknowledge the responsibility that Germans had for bringing about the Second World War. The first 48 pages, which is all the memoir that Knell gives us, provides some insight as to what his remembered experiences of March 16-17, 1945.
Had Knell stopped there, this would have been a short personal memoir of life and death in Wurzburg. But Knell plows on for another 286 pages. He presents us with an incomplete and idiosyncratic view of aerial warfare in World War One, a history of the development of the theory of bombing, tactical and strategic, during the world wars that is cartoonish in its naivete, and a long jeremiad on the evils of the strategic bombing offensives by the RAF (mostly) in Europe, and the USAAF in the Pacific. Along the way we are treated to such venerable chestnuts as his contention that the Allies at Versailles paved the way for the ascent of Hitler (did they also pave the way for Mussolini, whose Italy happened to be on the winning side in WW 1?), and that the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a pre-emptive strike against Soviet invasion armies massing on the Reich's easter border.
Knell mourns the loss of Germany's cultural heritage, while he notes primly that the Wehrmacht did not shell the cultural treasures in Leningrad during theie siege of that city. Knell should be reminded that approximately the same number of civilians died in the siege of Leningrad as died in the entire Allied air offensive against Germany. I hope some day that this unreconstructed Nazi can visit St. Petersburg and drive out to Piskaryovka Cemetery where over 600,000 victims of the Nazis/Germans are buried in mass graves. Or should he prefer to stay in Germany, I'd suggest a trip to Dachau, Sachsenhausen, or Ravensbruck to jog his memory since he seems to have forgotten how evil the Nazis, and the German state at that time, were.
Was the Allied air offensive justified? I suggest an affirmative answer, and note that a greater immorality would have been committed had the Allies not done everything in their power, in Europe and in the Pacific, to defeat Fascism, Nazism, and Imperial Japan.
Good memoir, but fails as a scholarly work.......2005-09-22
Herman Knell's To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and its Human Consequences in World War IItells two stories: the personal story of the author's survival of the bombing of Würzburg, Germany, in March 1945, and the general history of strategic bombing during the First and Second World Wars. Knell's personal account of his survival in World War II, while not overly dramatic or filled with amazing tales, is a fascinating read and gives the modern reader a glimpse of life in wartime Germany. Knell's history of strategic bombing, based heavily on archival research in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, is a critical and condemning look at one of our civilization's more brutal methods of warfare. As with most works that attempt to do two tasks, To Destroy a City does a fair job with both tasks but excels at neither.
Knell lived in Würzburg, Germany, a city of about 100,000 along the Main River in northern Bavaria. Although he was in his late teens in 1945, the aftereffects of polio spared him service in the Wehrmacht during World War II. His condition did not spare him from the horrors of war, however; on the night of 16 March 1945, he was a witness to and victim of the bombing of Würzburg by the British Royal Air Force.
For most of the war, the RAF and United States Army Air Force had largely ignored Würzburg. There were a couple of minor nuisance raids during the first months of 1945, but most of the Allied attention was focused on cities such as nearby Schweinfurt, with its military barracks and vitally important ball-bearing plant. However, on 16 March 1945, RAF Bomber Command dispatched 236 strategic bombers (Lancasters and Mosquitoes) to Würzburg, and in 17 minutes of bombing destroyed 89% of the city, killed 5,000, and "dehoused" (the contemporary euphemism for making homeless) another 90,000.
Before the bombing, Knell and his father, wary of the increasing Allied "nuisance" raids on Würzburg, had moved out of downtown to their garden cottage a few miles from the city. The sound of hundreds of bombers roused Knell and his father from their beds, and they ran outside and saw the "Christmas trees"-air markers dropped by the pathfinding airplanes before a raid-over Würzburg. They watched, frightened, as an "endless" stream of aircraft passed over Würzburg. After the 17-minute bombing raid, Knell and his father tried to enter the city as time-delayed bombs went off and a firestorm began. They could not get any farther than the Ringpark that surrounds the Old City, a refuge for thousands of Würzburgers fleeing the burning inner city. There they discovered from neighbors that their home and family businesses were destroyed by fire.
Knell could not answer the question of why Würzburg was targeted simply based on the targets hit, so he then examined the targeting process-if there was no real answer to the for-what-reason "why," then there may be an answer to the how-did-it-happen "why." Knell uses just a few pages to explain the targeting procedure for Würzburg-how it came to be on the target list-but then uses the rest of the book to give the overall background behind strategic bombing during the first two world wars. This is the real substance of the book.
In many places, Knell's thorough research shines. His archival research in the United States, Britain, and Germany unearthed documents that shed light not only on the strategic bombing campaigns, but also on the decision-making process that led to these attacks and the target selection. He shows the dichotomy-or hypocrisy-between what the governments of Britain, Germany, and the United States were saying and what they were actually doing. To Destroy a City is replete with statistics about the number of bombers on a mission, the percentage of losses, and the tons of ordnance dropped on targets. These elements add depth to his observations and conclusions.
Knell also adds some new insight and perspectives into the strategic bombing campaigns. Based on the accuracy and survivability of the British Mosquito fighter-bomber, Knell posits that, had Britain concentrated on using these planes for strategic bombing instead of the larger Lancasters, the strategic bombing campaign would have been both much more effective and much more humane. Knell also discusses the civil defense systems in Germany (extensive and locally controlled), Britain (lacking and controlled by the Home Office), and Japan (virtually non-existent), and discusses the burdens that were placed on the local governments and the individuals under these systems. Knell's chapter on the psychology of the strategic bombing focuses not only on the victims of the bombing but the psychological price paid by the air crews, with their harrowing and nerve-wracking missions and low chance of survival.
Knell criticizes German strategic bombing, British strategic bombing, and American strategic bombing. He criticizes the Nazi path that led to war, and he criticizes the Versailles Treaty that he says gave rise to the Nazis. He praises the "heroic efforts" of the Bomber Command crews and criticizes Germans who lynched downed bomber crews. He excuses most of the Allied leaders of the bombing campaign for either following orders or doing what they truly believed would win the war. From out of all of this, Knell draws only one clear conclusion: the area bombing campaign that destroyed many German cities was a tragedy.
Knell's conclusion is based on the premise that the area bombing campaign was not a military success. Although he admits that the economic cost to Germany was high, Knell focuses on the failure of the morale bombing campaign: "Though area bombing was to result in the defeat of enemy morale and cause the overthrow of the enemy political systems, that effort did not produce the desired result." Instead, the losses from this campaign were "unnecessary" and "cannot be excused."
While Knell can justifiably claim that the morale bombing campaign was a failure, his focus on the civilian area bombing causes him to miss the larger picture. Certainly, the morale bombing did not cause the collapse of the German society or rebellion of her people, just as it had failed to do the same against Britain earlier in the war, but the morale bombing of the Japanese cities, culminating in the two atomic bombs, was the direct catalyst for the capitulation of Japan. In To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and its Human Consequences in World War II, Knell focuses on the destruction of the cities and the human consequences, but he fails to consider adequately the entire strategic bombing offensive aimed at the military and economic systems of Germany. The overall campaign did succeed in tying down an enormous fraction of the German war effort, slowing the development and production of German war materiel, and crippled the German military by degrading oil production. Strategic bombing's contribution to the war effort has been debated and questioned since the war, but no one can justifiably claim that the overall campaign was "unnecessary" or that its losses "cannot be excused" simply because the morale bombing failed to win the war single-handedly.
Fortunately, though, Knell never takes his criticism to its extreme, as some modern German historians have done, and likens this campaign to the Holocaust. In Der Brand, Jörg Friedrich calls the burning cellars underneath the bombed cities "crematoriums" and refers to the bomber squadrons as "Einsatzgruppen." Friedrich also ignores the contributions of the bomber offensive to the war. Another German historian, Klaus Rainer Röhl, compares the Allied attacks on German civilians to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. This new historiography has increasingly painted the German people as victims of World War II. While Knell does recount some of the elements of this when he blames Versailles for World War II or claims that Operation Barbarossa was simply a pre-emptive strike against Soviet Russia, in no way does Knell embrace this new emerging consciousness of German victimhood.
Knell's work has many flaws, but it has a certain poignancy and a perspective found in few other works. Knell could have easily taken a partisan approach and condemned the entire campaign, its architects, and its warriors, but sometimes Knell goes out of his way to forgive or to justify their actions, even when he condemns the overall campaign. Knell's analysis of the campaign is sometimes flawed, and the reader looking for an insightful and balanced analysis of the European strategic bombing campaign should look to Alan J. Levine's The Strategic Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945. But while To Destroy a City fails as a piece of scholarly history or in-depth analysis, the personal touch in this survivor's tale makes it a worthwhile read.
A useful book, a labor of love for humanity,and hatred of evil.......2005-06-30
Hermann Knell is not a professional writer, not an academic, not a military man. Instead, he is a concerned victim of bombing in World War II, a victim of the terror bombing that destroyed his home town, Wurzburg, Bavaria in 1945. From his adolescence in wartime Germany to his present life in Canada, Knell has struggled to find why such bombings took place. Though he is not a professional scholar, this book is the product of research at libraries, government and military archives, and of interviews and discussion with scholars, military leaders, and experts in the Canada, the US, the UK, Germany, and several other countries. This is a life quest.
The book uses the Knell's own experience in Wurzburg as its center. Why was this small city bombed, why was it hit with a firestorm that destroyed 90 percent of it, a bombing that killed a higher percentage of its inhabitants than the terror bombings of Dresden and Hamburg?
The answers Knell finds are simple and chilling. The city was there, other targets in Germany had been demolished, and the British and American bombers were pretty much unopposed by serious flak or fighters. Simply put, the British and American bombing campaigned aimed to produce the results scored at Wurzburg, Hamburg, and Dresden almost every time they organized a major bombing of cities small, big, or whatever. The several cities where weather, lack of opposition, and layout of the city permitted this were the firestorm cities. Most other cities were the sites of attempted, but failed or partial firestorms. Nothing was special about firestrooms. They were what Washington and London aimed to do to all German cities. Wurzbug was bombed because it was a German city. Whatever other military or economic questions involved were secondary.
The firestorms were produced by dropping millions of small incendiary bombs, that would light a city on fire, often after dropping heavy explosive bombs to blow open buildings so the fires could start inside of them, but still get plenty of air to spread and grow. If successful, the fires would grow so concentrated that their heat and the explosive force of their consumption of oxygen became more destructive than the worst explosive bombing. The British and American often mixed in delayed action bombs or had several waves of bombing timed so that fire fighters and and other rescuers would be stopped or killed if they attempt to wrestle with the firestorms.
The result, when successful as in Dresden and Wurzburg, was a huge explosive fire that sucked all the oxygen in huge areas of cities. People were incinerated, buildings sometimes exploded as the air was sucked out of them, people were cooked in their own skins, and even shelters that were safe from bomb blasts and heat would lose all their inhabitants to the air stealing fire.
These raids proved the most disastorous forms of murder in human history. In fact, the great firestorm raid on Tokyo in 1945 killed at least 100 thousand people, many more than the use of the Atomic Bomb at Hiroshama or at Nagasaki. And this was the first of many such raids against Tokyo!
The author attempts to deal with larger questions by going through the history of aerial bombing centering on the reasons for the Allied campaign of "area bombing" in World War II. Area bombing is the bombings whose targets were largely the populations, the centers, and usually the working class districts of cities. It was largely promoted by the British and practiced, but not preached by the USAAF during the in the European war, and practiced with a vengence by the USAAF against Japan, The racist tinge of the American war against Japan made open espousal of terror bombings up to and beyond the Atomic Bombing of that country a public and popular policy in the United States even though they felt they had to mask such bombing in Europe with the rhetoric of being "precision" bombing of specific targets.
One of the more interesting things Knell brings out is that British terror bombings and strafing of defenseless Arab, Afghan, and Indian villagers help set the tone for British bombing in world War II. Knell also shows that the US and Britain were prepared to wage gas warfare against Germany and how US military leaders came close to using biological warfare against Japan.
Knell's major point is that the strategy of "strategic" bombing was the idea that German resistance would "crack" after a certain weight of bombing. He points out that the planners of British bombing and later American bombing rejected proposals that they go after the transportation or oil systems of Germany. They chafed at the bit whenever their bombings had to be associated with direct military operations. THEY SAW THEIR TASK AS MURDERING AND "DEHOUSING" MILLIONS OF PEOPLE, even though every form of analysis showed that such bombing whether against Britain, Japan, or Germany would not produce this effect. Arthur Harris, commander of the UK's Bomber Command actually believed all other military activity was superfluous. The war could be ended if enough Germans were killed by his bombers!
Knell's states that even from the point of view of Allied or German military objectives, bombing civilians was simply not efficient, although it is obvious his concern is not military efficiency, but at stopping the destruction of cities and the murder of innocent people. He implies that aerial bombing is a violation of international law. He suggests that in a just world the commanders of the British and American air forces in WWII should have been tried as war criminals.
In the course of explaining the history of bombing, Knell produces a very interesting history of the years between the turn of the century and the Second World War, sparing neither the Allied or Axis governments for their roles in fomenting the war as well as the failure of various disarmanent schemes.
At times, Knell gets beyond his depth discussing questions of internetional relations and history that he is not familiar with. Likewise, his prose is not that of a professional writer and the publisher did not devote sufficient resources to copy-edit this book well, an increasing problem in the publishing industry.
I would have been happier if there were more evident documentation and examples of what Knell discusses in the abstract. While he refers to firestorms throughout his book, Knell never explains how the firestorms were created. Much of this book might be confusing to someone who had not learned this elsewhere.
However, the bigger question is posed about the origin of the horror of the area bombings that he justly condemns. Its useless savagery comes out of the equally savage rivalries between the big business cliques that run the imperialist countries of Western Europe, Japan, and America which flared in totwo World Wars so far and could flare up again should crisis conditions like those in the 1930s return. The military and the billionaires they serve still have complete disregard for the great majority of working people, youth, farmers, and other regular people that lead to millions of deaths in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afganistan, Iraq, and other wars.
After all from area bombing, they went on to nuclear weapons whose task was not just to destroy a city, but to destroy the world. Chiding them about the savagery of the bombing, mourning the innocent victims of the wars, and proposing international law is not enough. The disease must be cured at its root. Production and government for the profits of the wealthy must be replaced with production for the needs of the producers and the people of the world, and government by the workers and the farmers.
Poorly Written Except In Personal Memoir.......2005-01-09
"To Destroy A City" by Hermann Knell. Subtitled: "Strategic Bombing And Its Human consequences In World War II" Da Capo Press, 2003.
If the author, Hermann Knell, had stopped with the personal memoir of the bombing of his home town, Wuerzburg, Germany, this would have been a good book. Knell, however, stretches out to encompass the development and implementation of the bomber as a strategic weapon, and, in so writing, he lacks impartiality, in my humble opinion. Many of his chapters address the air war in general, its morality and its effectiveness. While I was working on an MA in History, there were a few class sessions dealing with the effectiveness of Air Power, and whether or not Sea Power or the Infantry won the Second World War. Knell adds nothing new to those arguments/discussions.
The chief difference in this book can be found in the chapters dealing with the actual horrors of the actual raid on the city. The author examines how some German people felt as they realized they had survived while others had died. Obviously, the author's experience helped him to present a more human side of the event.
Knell's book, as with most books from the "West", hardly deals with what the Luftwaffe did to the Soviets. In Frederick Taylor's book, "Dresden", in the chapter entitled, "The Sleep Of Reason", on page 411, the author states, "It is rarely mentioned that almost exactly the same number of Soviet citizens died as a result of bombing during the Second World War as Germans: around half a million". Then he recounts the Luftwaffe's "thousand-bomber raid" ...on Stalingrad. The Luftwaffe performed as capably as the combined forces of the RAF and the USAAF. Although the German Dorniers and Heinkels may not have been as excellent a bomber as were the British Lancasters and the American Liberators, the Luftwaffe killed as many people as did the Allies. Further, Knell laments that the bombing raid against Wuerzburg was so late in the War. Did it never occur to him that the bombing raid might have been avoided if the Third Reich had surrendered sooner?
Hermann Knell's book would benefit from another round of competent editing. He uses "effect" as when he wants the verb, "affect". On page 321, he writes, "..."For my five cousins and I"...when, of course, the correct English is: ..."For my five cousins and me"... And, in general, the book would benefit from a "tightening up". Four stars for the personal memoirs, one star for the writing and one star for the somewhat rambling examination of strategic bombing, for an average of two stars.
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T.E. Lawrence: Biography of a Broken Hero
Harold Orlans
Manufacturer: McFarland & Company
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0786413077 |
Book Description
Lawrence of Arabia, as adviser to Prince Feisal, led camel-riding Bedouin in a guerrilla war against Turkey from Arabia to Damascus. The great British hero of World War I, he helped Winston Churchill draw the map of the modern Middle East, creating Jordan and making Feisal king of Iraq. Then, in 1922, he shed the rank of colonel and his name to serve as a private in the Royal Air Force until shortly before his death in 1935 at age 46. Lawrence has been characterized as a man with extraordinary powers and as an imposter who manufactured his own legend.
This careful study, based on virtually all published and unpublished English-language sources, sides neither with Lawrence's eulogists nor with his denigrators. Presenting a fair, balanced picture of his life, it shows the lifelong continuity of his puzzling conduct: the often needless deviousness that troubled even close friends; the self-hatred and savage masochism that cursed his adult years.
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