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      by  Number of Views: 1806 
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      This book is a record of Soviet/Russian involvement in Afghanistan. It starts with the history of Russia’s involvement in the area, goes into more detail from the ‘70s onwards, then concentrates on the period of Soviet occupation from 1979-89 and its immediate aftermath. This occupation period is the time that made most leading Afghan figures what they are today, and what happened then still profoundly affects Afghan attitudes to Russia and the West.

      Written so as to be accessible to all, by someone with an obvious affection for and great familiarity with Russia, this is a thoroughly excellent book. Sir Rodric Braithwaite was HM Ambassador to Moscow from 1998 – 1992, during the period of turmoil that included the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the collapse of the USSR. He thus knows a great deal about what he writes. Coupled with his ability to write understandable English without dumbing down to his audience, this makes for a most readable and informative tome.
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      by  Number of Views: 1526 
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      The Afghan Solution – The inside story of Abdul Haq, the CIA and how western intelligence hubris lost Afghanistan – by Lucy Morgan Edwards

      Afghanistan and the UK involvement in current operations is a constant subject of interest to ARRSE regulars and like many who have served there I have an interest in understanding why we are there, what we are really trying to achieve and more importantly how we’re going to get out. So with that in mind I jumped at the opportunity to review this book, written by someone with a long history of living and working in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

      Lucy has created 300+ well researched and documented pages, presented in such a way as the reader is given a wider understanding of the whole Afghanistan problem. I have to add that personally despite have a real interest I still struggled to get into the book. It is by no means an easy read and certainly isn’t beach reading material, being very heavy going in many parts.

      A quick recap on recent Afghanistan history sets the context: 1989 Soviets leave, 1992 Mujahedeen take Kabul – inter factional fighting starts. Rise of the warlord. 1994 Taliban emerge “to bring control back to Afghanistan”. 2001 September 11 attacks – evidence of Al Qaida, operating with Taliban in Afghanistan. US launches offensive operations – allies with Northern Alliance. Kabul swiftly falls to NA. At the end of the year ISAF deploys troops, the mess begins.
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      by  Number of Views: 1654 
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      2. Non-Fiction,
      3. Memoire/Battlefield Memoire,
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      Ed Stafford was an army officer who got bored and moved on. He took to expedition leading and eventually decided that he wanted to walk the Amazon from source to mouth.

      The book intrigued me because as a child living in South America, I'd been given a copy of Exploration Fawcett about a Lt Col PH Fawcett RE (see wiki) who spent some twenty years in the first quarter of the twentieth century exploring South America before disappearing without trace.

      Coincidentally, the day I started reading the review copy of Walking The Amazon, a two-part documentary popped up on TV. If you have watched the documentary, you have only seen half the story: it's all action and no content (but it was worth watching).
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      by  Number of Views: 791 
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      'Minefields of the Heart' is an account of war told from a mother's perspective; in this case, Sue Diaz, an experienced journalist and writer. What makes this book compelling reading (beyond the content itself which I will get to later) is that Sue Diaz's son, Roman Diaz, was a member of the now infamous 'Black Hearts'. Having just reviewed Jim Frederick's 'Black Hearts' for this site, the author thought I might be interested in this alternative view of events.
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      by  Number of Views: 1913 
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      On her kidney, her kidney, was a bird’s eye view of Sydney! ..
      BPF song, ‘The Much Tattooed Lady’

      Hobbs was thirty years a Fleet Air Arm aviator and for many years ran the Fleet Air Arm museum. It would be difficult to find anyone better qualified to write up the high noon of Britain’s naval air power, the Fleet Air Arm’s Annus Mirabilis 1944-5 when the Royal Navy fielded, far-flung off the coast of the Japanese Empire, the largest fighting fleet it has ever put to sea.

      By the end of 1944 the Royal Navy had expanded to a total strength of 800,000 including Royal Marines (about 10%) and WRNS. If discharges and casualties are included, that means that close on a million people had worn those uniforms in World War II. The hugely successful management of such an expansion says something remarkable about the pre-war Officers and senior ratings including the many recalled to service from civilian life, and particularly about the Dartmouth process - Admiral Twiss, released from Japanese confinement as a Lieutenant, when asked how it was, is supposed to have remarked to the effect that after Dartmouth it wasn’t so bad. By 1945 the thousands of wartime reinforcements had produced Commanding Officers of ships, submarines and particularly Fleet Air Arm squadrons; the Branch had suffered appalling attrition through the early carrier losses and in combat and accidents. By the end of the war 14 out of the 31 FAA squadrons in the BPF were commanded by RNVRs. 15 COs were RN ‘Air’ Branch and only two were career naval officers.
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      by  Number of Views: 1226 
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      I did this one for RP, but it may appeal to those arrsers interested in Tudor History as well.

      This paperback is a fictionalised story based on real people and events during the political storms of the Tudor period. It covers the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane Grey, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth Tudor - lots of monarchs, events and people trying to grasp power and hold it!

      The 'Governess' of the title is Katherine Champernowne, who cared for and taught Elizabeth Tudor after the death of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Her story is based on documents and diaries, and the author has done a great deal of research into the people and events of the time. The tale she tells is plausible, the characters well-drawn, and the major events, arrests, executions and power-plays are woven into an interesting tale which cracks along at a good pace. I read it in two sessions (OK I was in bed with tonsillitis so had no distractions, but would have read it very quickly anyway because of the pace of the tale, which held my interest).
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      by  Number of Views: 1184 
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      3. History,
      4. Humour,
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      The RN only took about two thousand National Servicemen per year but was oceans more popular as a choice than the Army; this meant the RN could pick and choose. We should remember that ‘Join the Navy and See the World’ was a pretty fair boast in the days before the Boeing 707, even if what some of the RN NS saw was Korea, through a Firefly’s gunsight.

      Two of my (regular) contemporaries - one eventually a Commander, the other a Captain - started as National Servicemen. One of my recent neighbours had spent his NS time in an Admiralty ’fishing vessel’ in the Baltic scribbling down Russian. But about 500 a year were brought in as Stokers, which was a 1950s shortage category.

      In 1955 Perris had just failed his first year as an electrical engineering student. This meant two things. One, a brown envelope calling him up as his deferment had lapsed; two, his entry qualifications for further education mean that he was possibly commissionable.

      He has now published his experiences, a polished version of a work written for his own amusement some years ago. He takes us through basic training (including ploughing an Interview Board for a commission) and on into the Reserve Fleet and an aircraft carrier from which he escaped into submarines (thus missing the Suez adventure), before emerging two years older, perhaps wiser, but no richer having invested enthusiastically in the drinks trade at home, in the Baltic and in the Mediterranean.
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      by  Number of Views: 1001 
      1. Categories:
      2. Non-Fiction,
      3. History,
      4. Non-Military
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      Why the West rules – for now: the patterns of history and what they reveal about the future. By Ian Morris.

      I will be completely honest. I have not read the whole of this book. That is not because it is a bad book, far from it, but because it is 645 pages of fact-dense, sophisticated historical analysis, and in order to get this review out before Christmas, I admit to having skimmed parts of it.

      Ian Morris got his PhD in Ancient History at Cambridge, and, apart from a brief spell as a heavy metal guitarist, has risen steadily through the academic hierarchy to become Professor of History at Stanford University, and you don’t get much higher than that. So with credentials firmly in place, he sets off at a gallop to take the general reader back to the beginning of history, and from there at the same pace forwards into the near future, considering the thorny problem of what and where is ‘the West’ (and ‘the East’) and why this portion of the globe has, for now, come out on top.
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