![]() Unfortunately, he puts this book into an odd shade of grey between scholarly publication and low brow educational non-fiction. Now for the content: The premise of this book is quite interesting the author is trying to examine the naval standoff between Germany and the Western powers through statistics to determine how effective the respective tactics actually were compared to what they were supposed to achieve. (And there might be copy right issues with the maps and charts included!) A scholarly book would advise its readers where the originals can be found. But the most serious charge is that the numerous charts and photographs included (in bad quality) have no sources listed. ) inflating the index and making it difficult to use the key terms for the index are poorly chosen and are mainly the names of polititians and generals. But still the shoddy editing gets worse: The index has been generated automatically, and instead of listing consecutive pages like this '100-110', they are listed individually (like this: 100 101 102 103 104 105. If the shortcomings in editing could be reduced to the selfdesigned cover, or the absolutely bad quality of the images inlcuded, or the use of quotation marks that are not part of the German character set, I would disregard them in my review, but they are, unfortunately, more pronounced: Upon opening the book, I immediately noticed that the whole book is set in hyphenless justification (which is a serious issue in German, because of the potentially long words) reading this book feels like driving down a poorly maintained road with broken dampers. I have to start my review with mentioning the abhorrend quality of the editing this book received. I am not versed well enough in the intricacies of naval warfare-strategies and politics to judge the validity of the content definitively, but this book is simply horrible to read, and here is why: This book reads like a very long college level history paper in German. I should probably mention that I won this book in a giveaway.
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