Open Thread 176

It's time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.

Longtime readers will know that I am a big fan of the Naval Institute Press, and works from their catalog form the backbone of a lot of posts here. And I recently got a new book from them, a volume from their Naval History Special Edition series on the Iowa. Now, I did not have high hopes for this as an improvement on the state of the art for history on Iowa, as it was short and in a standardized form, which rarely bodes well for quality. But I felt professionally bound to order a copy, as I do for all books on Iowa and the class, and was shocked by what I received.

The quality of the history in the book is adequate, with the only major error I've found being something he picked up from another, better source. (More on this coming soon.) But the writing is dreadful. Now to be clear, this is not because I'm a prose snob. The point of naval history books is the history, after all, and I've read plenty of books where it's clear that the writing is very much secondary to conveying said history. But I do think it's reasonable to expect that someone who is publishing a book could write well enough to get an A in a sixth-grade English class, and, well, Lawrence Burr can't. Each sentence is chopped out in isolation from the others, so you'll get paragraphs where three out of four sentences start with "the" or just don't flow into each other at all. Not to mention occasional howlers where a sentence is just obviously grammatically incorrect, and non-sequitur sentences that felt like someone really trying to get a draft up to the required word count. And to be clear, while I do blame him for being willing to write a book, I also blame the Naval Institute Press for not having an editor do at least one pass to catch obvious errors and remind him to occasionally vary his sentences a bit. Even more baffling is the fact that it was originally scheduled for (IIRC) spring of 2023, but was delayed repeatedly, to the point where I was making jokes about it never actually arriving. What was being done during that time? The book is not currently available through USNI's website, and I genuinely wonder if they're pulling it except for pre-orders because of how bad it is, but they didn't get back to me about it in the few days between my getting the book and this going up. In any case, please don't buy it, because it's not particularly good as history and it's terrible as a book. Also, there's five pages of ads for World of Warships.

Overhauls are Propulsion Part 1, my reviews of museums in Singapore, The Range of a Carrier Wing - An Experiment and for 2024, Naval Strike Missile and Freedom of Navigation and American Policy Part 1.