3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Poorly written and, overall, very disappointing, May 28, 2007
I’d been waiting to read this book for a long time, ever since I’d read London’s brief piece “America’s Earliest Terrorists: Lessons from America’s first war against Islamic terror”—obviously drawn from this book—at National Review Online. (Google on “Joshua London” and “National Review Online” and you’ll find it.) While I highly recommend that brief National Review Online article, anyone with the same motive as mine is probably going to be disappointed with the book.
Instead of fleshing out the points about the heritage of Islamic terror (how it’s part of mainstream Islam and far antedates American involvement in the mideast and the existence of Israel), the book says hardly more on this subject than the brief article I cite.
Plus, reading the book was like having a stick poked in my eye, because the writing is so bad. (I’m not sure what book these other commenters reviewed!) Best to give some examples (and please remember, I **wanted** to like the book):
* On pages 16 and 17, Bernard Lewis is introduced **twice** (as “the historian Bernard Lewis”)
* On page 41, the USS Chesapeake is introduced in one sentence as a “forty-four-gun frigate” and in the next sentence as a “thirty-six-gun frigate.”
* Prominent character James Leander Cathcart is introduced on page 54, quasi-introduced again on page 56, and effectively introduced **again** (including his middle name) on page 109.
* On page 108, whle detailing the lineage of one of Jefferson’s naval appointments, Captain Richard Valentine Morris, author London mentions one of Morris’s uncles, “Governor Morris.” He means, of course, **Gouverneur** Morris.
* Another howler is this passage from page 117: ” … but stormy whether forced them to the Bay of Tunis. They arrived on February 22, 1803. Their arrival had little affect on the Tunisians …” [precise transcription]
There’s lots more where those came from. But maybe those seem too picayune for you to agree that the quality of thought that went into writing the book leaves something to be desired? There’s bigger stuff, too.
For example, after awhile, I was dying to see a map that would give the relative placement of Tangiers, Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, Malta, and Syracuse, among other ports of call. Then I discovered there **is** a map among the clutch of illustrations near the center of the book, but labels on it smaller than “Mediterranean” are too blurry to read.
The welter of individuals’ names really calls for a “dramatis personae” at the start of the book, so one has a hope of keeping track of the characters. Go fish!
And the description of all the comings and goings of various ships and people doesn’t add up to anything useful. It’s similar to reading an airline’s schedules for entertainment.
In short, the book reads like a first draft, or perhaps even a zeroth draft. The author acknowledges two editors at Wiley, but it’s hard to believe either had more than a nodding acquaintance with the book. At least a couple hundred hours of [additional?] editing would be needed to whip this mess into shape.
So I give it two stars because it **does** contain interesting material that could be the basis for a vastly better book (and one star would suggest I have an axe to grind on the subject of the book) . Very disappointing.