The Mariners Mirror Archive
Book Review-‘ Mastermind of Dunkirk and D-Day: The vision of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay’ by B. Izzard,
Writing a biography of Bertram Ramsay is never going to be easy. Ramsay played a vital role in the most significant amphibious operations in the European theatre during the Second World War. From Dunkirk in 1940 to the opening of the Scheldt in November 1944 Ramsay was a key directing and co-ordinating figure. At the […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics
Subjects include: Biography
Book Review-‘ Warship 2020’ by J. Jordan (ed.),
Had formal numbering not been dropped in 2016, this would be volume 42 of the annual Warship. It has long since become the premier English-language periodical for the history of warships of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, having long since implicitly shed its original remit of also embracing the fighting ships of the age of […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics
Subjects include: Miscellaneous | Navies | Shipbuilding & Design
Book Review-‘ The Modern Cruiser: The evolution of the ships that fought the Second World War’ by R. C. Stern,
he first and very positive thing one notices about this book is the sheer quality of the production. Sumptuous is perhaps too strong a description, but there is a good strong dust jacket which will not fray or tear with shelf wear; the pages are of strong durable near- photographic- quality paper, and the images […] Read More
Filed under: WW2 | Post WW2
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Navies | Weapons
Book Review-‘ Silver State Dreadnought: The remarkable story of battleship ‘Nevada’’ by S. M. Younger
USS Nevada was one of the first of a new generation of American dreadnoughts. She and her half-sister Oklahoma pioneered ‘all or nothing’ protection and oil burning as designed. She had turbines, but the US Navy was still worried about potential range disadvantages of these power plants and thus made Oklahoma a reciprocating engined vessel, […] Read More
Filed under: WW1 | WW2 | Post WW2
Subjects include: Battles & Tactics | Navies | Shipbuilding & Design
Book Review-‘Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856–1914’ by G. A. Frei
Until relatively recently the vast majority of studies of the laws of war at sea in the run up to 1914 have focused principally on the question of belligerent rights and the extent to which the future combatants in this conflict, mindful of their expectations of prospective hostilities, had sought to enhance or limit these […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics
Subjects include: Strategy & Diplomacy
Book Review-‘A Man for All Oceans: Captain Joshua Slocum and the first solo voyage around the world’ by S. Grayson
Like many a schoolboy who was mad about sailing, I devoured Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World. Over half a century later this book has come along to show how cleverly he constructed his own legend, and how much of the man himself has remained an enigma. Stan Grayson is a fellow sailor, and […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics
Subjects include: Biography
Book Review-‘Robert J. Walker: The history and archaeology of a U.S. Coast Survey steamship’ by J. P. Delgado and S. D. Nagiewicz
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is generally known as an environmental monitoring agency which observes issues as diverse as fisheries manage- ment and severe weather. I will admit that before reading I was not familiar with the agency’s work in the preservation of shipwrecks and other historical maritime sites, nor its predecessor, and […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics
Subjects include: Archaeology
Book Review- ‘Leith-built Ships, vol. 1, They Once Were Shipbuilders’ by R. O. Neish
I had high hopes for this book. The important shipbuilding industry of Leith has long needed a comprehensive history. There is a great heritage of distinguished shipbuilders such as Menzies & Co. who built the transatlantic pioneer Sirius, Ramage and Ferguson who built the ill-fated København, and Henry Robb who carried on the shipbuilding tradition […] Read More
Filed under: Other (Nineteenth C)
Subjects include: Shipbuilding & Design
Book Review- ‘Stormflod 1825’ by B. Poulsen
The Limfjord is Denmark’s largest fjord and separates the northern tip of Jutland from the rest of the country. This shallow waterway is 180 kilometres long and prior to 1825 it had access to the open sea only through an outlet to the Kattegat on its eastern side. In February 1825, a major North Sea […] Read More
Filed under: North Sea | Other (Nineteenth C)
Subjects include: Miscellaneous
Book Review-‘Chasing the ‘Bounty’: The voyages of the ‘Pandora’ and the ‘Matavy’’ by D. A. Maxton (ed.)
The story of the Bounty and its problematic ‘green grocery trip’ between 1787 and 1790, has long fascinated authors and historians. Over time, the truth behind the story has sadly become bogged down by a mixture of myth and fiction. The sheer number of plays, films, documentaries, radio programmes, books and news articles are almost […] Read More
Filed under: Mutiny & Discipline | Other (Eighteenth C) | Pacific
Subjects include: Manpower & Life at Sea | Ship Handling & Seamanship
Book Review – ‘Kendall’s Longitude’ by J. Bendall
Chronometers were (and are) expensive instruments, which is the reason why so many of them are preserved and as such items that are one or even two centuries old can still be found in the market and at auctions. Many chronometers, therefore, took part in maritime activity from the third quarter of the eighteenth to […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics
Subjects include: Manpower & Life at Sea | Science & Exploration | Ship Handling & Seamanship
Book Review-‘ The Stirling Castle, a 70-gun Ship Lost in the Great Storm of 1703: Archaeological investigations 1979–2009 The Maritime Archaeology Monograph, series 4’ by J. Whitewright (ed.)
It is no small thing to cover 30 years of archaeological investigations in a single volume. The substantial changes to the management of shipwrecks and developments in archaeological methods make this feat all the more impressive. Despite that considerable time depth, this monograph collates all the relevant material from different field seasons and organisations to […] Read More
Filed under: Popular Topics
Subjects include: Archaeology | Historic Vessels, Museums & Restoration