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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
Aircraft Carriers of the World, 1914 to the Present: An Illustrated Encyclopedia
My son David went through a phase of being very interested in aircraft carriers, and he has several books on them. This is the one I like most. Even for people who think they couldn't care less, it contains a surprising number of memorable facts. In particular, aircraft carriers underline what a huge military superiority the US has, primarily thanks to the fact that it's been the world's largest economy for a long time. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and got the US into WW II, Churchill commented that he couldn't see this as anything but a strategic blunder: you only needed to look at their relative production of steel. The later course of the war proved him correct. On Dec 7, 1941, the US was behind Japan on aircraft carriers, with 8 against 12. Then the US switched over to war production mode; by 1945, they had a hundred of them, and just about all the Japanese ones had been sunk or crippled.
The US has actually increased its aircraft carrier superiority since then, and now has more carriers than the rest of the world combined. In terms of acreage of flight deck, they have about four times the combined resources of the rest of the world. Without wanting to belabour the point, aircraft carriers are just about the most useful resource you can have if you want to maintain an aggressive military foreign policy.
