Sea Trials

Rating:
Summary: Why?
Review: A horrible book, ripe with clunky grammer and horrible errors; some which should NEVER have been made by anyone who did even a basic study of submarines.

Rating:
Summary: Editing seems to be a dead art.
Review: I want to like this book more than I do. It's exciting and fascinating, as good sub stories are.

However, no one edited this book, from what I could tell. Apart from Hyman Rickover becoming Hiram Rickover, and the sub being _Nashville_ in the jacket description (and on one page in the text) but _Centurion_ in the text, there were just typos galore and clunky sentence construction more than once. It got to be painful at times, and I read the book more slowly than expected, because I was editing it for myself.

Another complaint: submarines are traditionally called boats, even though they're ship-size now, and it didn't ring right to me to have a submariner insist that it be called a ship. They call them both boats and ships, but boat's the traditional term.

I also could've done without the pilot character's whining to himself at first about how awful it was to be around submariners, technical geeks and nerds, oh no, spare him. Grow up, sir. Submariners may be "weird" and "bizarre", but they also served well in World War 2. Look into that history sometime if all you think they are is "weird". (Granted, it's written by a Navy woman writing from the viewpoint of a male Navy pilot, and maybe she has this attitude problem herself...)

Rating:
Summary: Run Silently Away, Away
Review: This book should "run silent" into some dark forgotten corner. Factual and editorial errors abound (stairs on a ship). The focal point of the story is in one page called the Nashville, and then back to its original name.

The most serious fault is just slopply writing and editing with a very real embarrassment for the gallant men and women who serve in the nuclear Navy.