This is the second of the batch of new books recently purchased by me from Naval and Military. The book is based on the use of contemporary letters written by cavalry men after the campaigns of Waterloo, Sikh Wars in India, the Crimea, the Mutiny, the Boer War and WW1.
The amount of research it took to acquire these letters from all sorts of sources is impressive. However much of the narrative is based on "Theirs Not To Reason Why. Horsing The British Army". A book I have and one that is clearly the definitive account of this subject. There are none of the accounts I have read elsewhere on cavalry actions during the wars in question, I guess that's because the author wanted his book to be all new, which is fine in respect of the letters quoted but the bits in between are not very original.
All that said my main issue with this book is less about the content but the proof reading, or lack of, more to the point. I can only assume that this essential task was performed by a computer program in that if the spelling of a word was correct the word was passed. Of course that means there several places in the text where the wrong word is used. This is tolerable generally but there are some cases where the whole sentence has a changed meaning and when reading the book I found I came to a complete stop several times and had to work out exactly what was being said. That is frustrating and really unnecessary,
Things like that can easily spoil an otherwise good book, its just penny pinching after all. That said, an interesting book but mainly because of the original letter quotes rather than the narrative.
No comments:
Post a Comment