Cargo

If you are a geek like me, Explosive Cargo will at times make you laugh till milk squirts out your nose. Other times, the author is sentimental, wistful...

Just plain a good read, IMHO.

I recommend this book to any aircraft enthusiast. Filled with pics of cargo planes from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Desert Storm, and featuring specifications of each kind of cargo jet and special coverage of AMC's Airlift Rodeo, this book will NOT dissapoint plane lovers!

Thank God for academics like Dr. Layton. I took his Anthro Class many years ago and soon loved Thursdays. His class was the highlight of my day. He writes as wonderfully as he lectures. It is always a gift when a professor makes a difference in your life. BRAVO!

This book is very simple and told what so called human can do with other true human for sake of few pennis ,rather than going in to too much doctarial technicalities i can say that during bomb attack by islamic terrorist on you people in 2001, your EX-president bill clinton once said that what we can expect from future of country where about 400 years humans are ill treated or given a treatment which is brutal than animal ,in short going thorugh this book you can realised the fact that

GIVEN THAT YOU PEOPLE HAVE ACHIEVED THE HIGHEST FEET IN EACH AND EVERY DEPATMENT OF EARTHLY THINGS , I MUST HAVE TO SALUTE YOU PEOPLE FOR YOUR TREMENDOUS DEDICATION FOR THAT FIELD AND
YOUR TRUE LOVE FOR YOUR COUNTRY ,WE ARE LEARNING LOTS OF THINGS FOM YOU ,THANK YOU FOR THAT BUT MAIN THING IS THAT YOU HAVE CONSTRUCTED A SKYSCRAPER ON VERY VERY BRUTAL AND IMBALANCED BASE.
I AM SORRY BUT ALL YOU PEOPLE POTENTIAL AND YOUR ENERGY YOU ARE WASTING IN CONSTRUCTING A CASTLE IN AIR ,IN SHORT WHAT LUXRIES YOU PEOPLE ARE ENJOYING TODAY ARE BASED ON THE SACRIFICE MADE BY THOSE BLACK INNOCENT SLAVERS (HUMAN) ,AND HISTORY IS SHOUTING LIKE A LUNATIC ANIMAL THAT "WHENEVER THERE IS IMBALANCE CREATED BY EARTHLY THINGS IT IS NOT GOING TO LAST FOR
LONG TIME " OUR OWN VEDIC CULTURE IS GOOD EXAMPLE OF THAT
LASTLY THIS BOOK IS A VERY GOOD ONE AND READ IT WITH NOBLE INTENTION.

Take one look at this book and you know that Eric Hirsimaki really loves and understands Great Lakes ore carriers. I have reviewed thousands of pictures or them. Few have much artistic value. The pictures in this book lovingly capture the great ships of a time that is rapidly slipping away. Some of these pictures are truly breathtaking. Obviously, a lot of people don't know or care about ore boats, but if you have heard the songs of the Huletts, you have to have this book in your collection.

To amazon.com: Please track down Volume II!

This book was a real delight. I have had the pleasure of following the author's career through high school and college and I have to say that this is the best of his work that I have read. The stories have a humanist, philosophical angle, the characters drawn with beautiful language. I recommend taking a chance on this young author since he's due to become a well-known scribe.

A very well researched and straight forward review of the ships of the lakes and their evolution. Mr. Thompson has done his homework and presented a recap that I will refer to many times in the future for reference. I would like to have seen more photos and more discussion of the earlier bulk freighter evolution but this material will wet your appetite for more. I hope to see more books of this type soon. Well worth the investment

This book was quite a revelation for me as I have always been a fan of Felicity Kendall's TV comedy shows but had no idea that she grew up in India, where I spent much of my childhood at about the same time. Frequent references to places like Breach Candy in Bombay, and the Maidan and Chowringhee Road in Calcutta brought back vivid memories. So too did certain words and phrases like chowkidars (sort of watchman or servant), peons (messengers), dhobi (manual washerman or lady), chota pegs (small whisky's) and pye-dogs (loose unfettered mongrels, often rabid).

The descriptive writing is writing is evocative too and I quote the following passage from early in the book which aroused several senses in me: "A white mist hovered over the sprawling Maidan. In the early hours of the morning the dry grass looked lush with dew . . . the sickly sweet smell of the city had not yet taken hold of the day, and, in the cool air, the sounds of barking pye-dogs were still faint. Across the Maidan large black crows cawed and swooped at one another from the tall trees, and in the distance people walked and bicycled their way to work along the footpaths, municipal peons in their khaki shirts and bush shirts, pressed into starched creases that would not last till lunchtime, vendors in dhotis, their baskets of ware balanced perfectly on their heads, arms swinging freely in easy confidence." How brilliant is that?

This is not only a fascinating and entertaining autobiography but it is also entwined with the parallel story of Felicity's relationship with her father. The book carries a present day story line of her father lying very ill in hospital in the autumn of his life together with Felicity's own story throughout her life.

Felicity was taken to India by her parents as a baby as her father managed a travelling theatre specialising in the works of Shakespeare. The huge population of India together with their recent colonial British heritage meant that there was a potentially large audience the length and breadth of the sub-continent. The lifestyle of the family and acting troupe varied from splendid to meagre according to the cash flow and income generated by the performances. They boarded in splendour with Indian royalty on some occasions and in humble, if not run down lodgings on others. Felicity's first speaking stage performance was at the tender age of 9 and from then on that was to be her life. At age 18 she returned to England, against her father's will, on her own, to forge her own way in the world of theatre and found that England was a foreign country to her altogether. Never before had she owned a coat or worn gloves or stockings but the English climate dictated that she did so then. The cultural change was difficult to get used to as was the formal or strict attitude of the British compared to the more laid back philosophies espoused by the Indians.

The story takes us through her whole life from growing up in India and learning first to speak Hindi like a native, being top of the class later in Urdu, her love affairs and marriages, her motherhood, her extraordinarily successful role in TV's "The Good Life", her work with such dramatic giants as Ismail Merchant and Derek Jacobi through to the time of publishing in 1998. Throughout her life the constant threads are her family and India - two enormous constants. I look forward to, and will really enjoy, the sequel to "White Cargo" even if it is only half as good as the first.

Sometimes, history is written by but a handful of individuals; that certainly was the case with the first British settlements in Australia. The term "Empire" is to some extent misleading, in that it gives an exaggerated idea of monolitihic power: the totality of the resources that the British Empire had committed to colonizing Australia in 1789 were a few decrepit ships laden with convict women and supplies, and a ragged band of half-starved colonists left on the Australian coast for over a year without any contact with the rest of the world. Sian Rees vividly evokes the vastness of the oceans separating these early settler ships from their homeland and from each other as they traveled the high seas, not encountering a soul for weeks or months at a time, and lets the reader feel the isolation of the early colonists - those on the second ship, wondering if there was even still a settlement in Australia to be reached, and those already on land, wondering if the promised relief from Great Britain would ever arrive, or if the authorities in London had forsaken them.

Unfortunately, while this book succeeds in giving one a better understanding of the general process surrounding British colonization of Australia, and the many hardships involved, this was not its primary goal and otherwise I found it lacking. It is not precisely, as the cover claims, "the true story" of the ship and its convict women, since none of the women left any written record at all of their experience. It is rather a mixture of the women's names and the crimes they were convicted of (gleaned from London criminal records) braided together with an assortment of facts from contemporary travellers' accounts, sailors' reminiscences, and other source material which gives the flavor of the period but does not directly relate to the story of the ship and its women. Far, far too many times, Sian Rees resorts to phrases including "it is possible that..." or "must have been" or "would have started" or "presumably" or "probably"... Rees does rely heavily on the published memoirs of John Nicol, a sailor on the Lady Julian; her reliance on Nicol makes it all the more jarring that she freely dismisses him whenever his memoirs contradict her assumptions, as when after quoting him dozens of times she dismisses his memory of a particular incident saying "this was in memoirs written when he was an old man, which are inaccurate in other details."

I really wanted to like this book, and the author is to be commended for trying to rescue the forgotten story of the female convicts. But this is light reading, not rigorous history, and where the documentary sources just aren't there she might have done better to write a historical novel and fictionalize freely rather than build a "non-fiction" book out of a tapestry of conditional statements.

In the foreward to this engaging narrative, Ms. Rees informs us that "when the American colonies defeated British soldiers and tax collectors, they also stopped accepting British criminals. By 1783, therefore, Britain had to find somewhere else in the world to transport its criminals." Australia was the place. Just as Jamestown, the early colony in Virginia, needed an infusion of marriageable women to allow it to grow (one of the three events of the red-letter year, 1619, was the arrival of a shipload of unmarried women), so would the penal colony in Sydney Cove.

Beginning with a description of the "crimes" for which women were sentenced to capital punishment and proceeding through the trials, prison conditions, and alternate punishment of banishment, Ms. Rees traces the voyage of the first group of women convicts to Australia. From the onset, she admits that her primary sources are limited and one, the diary of one of the crew of the Lady Julian, is somewhat doubtful because it was written so long after the fact. Even so, she has pulled together court records, contemporary British accounts of prison conditions, accounts of later voyages and other sources into a very impressive piece of research, and a very readable story.

In particular, her accounts of ship-board births, the pecking order among the female prisoners, the rights the crew assumed (both for sexual favors and for selling them in the ports of call) are fascinating reading.

An exquisitely penned and thoughtfully researched account of life in post-Revolutionary War England.

The horrific means of coping with an over-populated society included shipping women convicts to the Austrailian colonies for "crimes" ranging from hankerchief theft to manslaughter.

Disregard the title's implications. This book is a gripping account of how more than 200 women and children survived a ghastly voyage and how many emerged as heroines.

It's one of those books you don't want to end and will contemplate long after the last page is read.

This is a book that is too dark and scary for children. The book contains black and white illustrations of violent and frightening scenes. One implies slave rape. Another shows rats eating the corpses of dead Africans. One quote from the introduction states, "many [Africans]... chose suicide--mainly by jumping into the shark-infested ocean," As someone who has a Masters degree in early American history, I think discussing this subject is vital to the American dialogue. However, the style of this book is not fit for a child. I would rank this book without a star if Amazon's rating system would allow me to do so.

While teaching the 6 traits of writing to middle school students, I was given The Middle Passage to use as an example of a book with strong voice. The book completely awed me with its dark, powerful images. Page after page, the illustrations evoke incredibly strong emotional reactions in the reader despite the absence of words. While the story is certainly worth sharing and keeping alive, the black and white drawings are graphic enough that I decided to save the book for a time when I could provide students with more background information to prepare them for the harsh realities depicted. This is a book that I will keep in my collection because of its artistic power, historical accuracy, and vivid impact.

This book brings out soo many emotions. Words need not be said..... just look..... A story that is told so very vividly... the pictures soo strong... the pain soo clear. I didn't realize it was a children's book, I got it because of the power in the pictures.