Worst Book ever!

Originally posted by dhfan

The other one is about the building of the Panama Canal. I’m not going to look for it as I’d probably doze off as soon as I saw it.

Maybe someday I will regret it, but I slept through my cruise ship’s transit through the Pan Canal two years ago….Not very charismatic is it?

JH

Whilst you all have a go about the worst books you’ve read I’m going to take the liberty of going off on the opposite tack and list one of my favourites: ‘Think Like A Bird’ by Alex Kimbell.
I found it well written and its serious style is offset by typical forces humour of the times.
I had an e-mail from Alex the other day to say that his new book is out but (stupid person that I am) I forgot to make a note of the title.

Originally posted by neilly
The Shacklady Mosquito book doesn’t even get the technical side right! A good example he says Oboe was fitted to FB VI Mosquitoes:confused: :confused: & in the back of the book, under Mosquito Squadron, 105 Squadron gets a slight Mosquito mention. The last sentence says “Fought the desert war & eventually received the Mosquito B IV”. As for my other favouite Squadron, 109, it’s only mention is “Luqa 1944”. Nothing in either entry about Pathfinders or Oboe etc! There are typos, words missing, wrong mk’s given, it is just so bad it’s appalling:mad:

Cheers,
Neilly

And I bet they even forgot to mention raids like Oslo, Aarhus and operation Jericho

My greatest disappointment was ‘Firepower: a History of the Aircraft Gun’ by Vadnais and Holder. If you want a laugh, you can read a review on it I posted on the J-aircraft site at:
http://www.j-aircraft.org/bkreview/dispreview.php?revnumb=19

I have to admit one useful outcome, though. I was so irritated by it I reckoned I could knock out something better while standing on my head. So I got in touch with Emmanuel Gustin and we started work on ‘Flying Guns’. The problem was this grew to the point that it’s now three volumes: ‘WW2’ came out in March, ‘WW1’ is due any time and ‘The Modern Era’ next Spring.

Tony Williams: Military gun and ammunition website and discussion
forum

Originally posted by SteveYoung
I’m glad I’m not alone in thinking Spitfire The History is a disappointment. Yes it’s a comprehensive work of reference, but it’s eminently unreadable.

An amazing amount of errors in captions and photo IDs too. It was a bit disapointing.

Dan

I’m glad I’m not alone in thinking Spitfire The History is a disappointment. Yes it’s a comprehensive work of reference, but it’s eminently unreadable.

I’d have to agree with Neilly on this one – the Shacklady book on the Mosquito that he talks about is probably the worst book I have ever seen. I started to wonder a few pages into it whether it had actually been proofread at all! Not only are there glaring technical errors and completely incorrect image captions, but paragraphs simply stop in the middle of a sentence on more than one occasion!

I am thnking of sending a letter to the publishers to explain to them just how bad it is. Neilly, mail me off-board if you’d like to contribute to my rant^H^H^H^H letter.

Andy

Sold my first edition of Spitfire – The History to buy the second edition and I’ve been regretting it ever since.
Don’t think Key have ever heard of proof readers. Spelling mistakes, typos, paragraphs repeated and that’s just in the first dozen or so pages.
To refer to Sir James Martin as George Martin defies belief.

On a non-aviation note, I can add two more that are both terminally tedious, read at your peril.
Journey Up The Amazon by Peter Fleming, unbelievably Ian’s brother. I did it for my O level English Lit back at the end of the sixties and it had a lot to do with me giving up the subject. (Shakespeare didn’t help, either).
The other one is about the building of the Panama Canal. I’m not going to look for it as I’d probably doze off as soon as I saw it.

Ah yes, the dreaded XMAS arrivals of those picture books!!!! We intellectuals WILL NOT STAND FOR SUCH RUBBISH!!!!!!!!! Worst book I’ve had lately was not an aviation book but was a racing book about Winston Cup driver Ernie Irvan, and it was co written with his cooperation. Just about everything in it was misspelled including his long time sponsor Texaco Havoline on every other page…..A monumental embarrassment…..Just frickin Horrible!!!!!
JH

Got to agree on the ‘unwanted present’, usually in the form of one of those hideous ‘Encyclopedia of Aircraft’, full of pictures accompanied by a general narration on the history of flight. Favourite pictures seem to include the shot of the GR3 firing Sneb rockets, 1970’s shots of the BBMF, and poorly reproduced publicity stills from WWII.

However, as we’re all nice chaps and chappeses, we accept the gift with good grace and enthusiasm before (1) stowing in the bookcase (2) five months on, transferring to the loft, and (3) disposing in a car boot sale after a few years (time required to ease the guilt)

The Shacklady Mosquito book doesn’t even get the technical side right! A good example he says Oboe was fitted to FB VI Mosquitoes:confused: :confused: & in the back of the book, under Mosquito Squadron, 105 Squadron gets a slight Mosquito mention. The last sentence says “Fought the desert war & eventually received the Mosquito B IV”. As for my other favouite Squadron, 109, it’s only mention is “Luqa 1944”. Nothing in either entry about Pathfinders or Oboe etc! There are typos, words missing, wrong mk’s given, it is just so bad it’s appalling:mad:

Cheers,
Neilly

Speaking of Shacklady, the Morgan/Shacklady book ‘Spitfire – The History’ has my vote as one of my biggest book disappointments. The book is a VERY thorough technical history, but almost totally ignores the most important side of the story ie the in-service, human part of the history.
As the great Jeffrey Quill remarked in his lukewarm introduction, “It would be possible to criticise the book on the grounds that sometimes it tends to get bogged down under its own weight of detail and perhaps misses some of the broader interpretations.”
Too right Jeffrey.

I’d have to go with A Race on the Edge of Time by David Fisher. This is an American book about British radar development and is truly the worst book I’ve ever come across – so bad, it’s not even worth buying to see how bad it is. To give an example, he mentions that Dowding was a spiritualist. Many of the upper classes were, in the early 20th century, including Churchill, Arthur Conan Doyle and others. However, Fisher claims that because Dowding believed in an afterlife that he was certifiably insane and, had the Air Ministry known of this, he would have been sacked from his job and we would have lost the Battle of Britain.

Whilst I don’t belive in spiritualism, I wouldn’t knock someone else’s beliefs. However, believing in spirits certainly doesn’t make someone insane!

I really hate books that take half an idea and run with it when there’s nothing there in the first place. Fisher’s book is riddled with factual errors, but this claim takes the biscuit.

Any one of those coffee table ‘Everyones Book of Airplanes’ – you know the type, with colour pictures of Confederate Air Force Wildcats and the P38 Lighning – complete with the CAF titles – in flight and captions implying that they were genuine pix over Europe or something! Or a Buchon in BoB Luftwaffe markings and a caption about how successful the ‘ME109’ was during the blitzkreig.
Always a ‘favourite’ at Christmas with aunties who thought you’d be impressed with such a big book (but still managed to leave the charity shops £1.99 price tag on it!).

I shall have a look and see if I still have one, and also see what else annoys me.

Flood.

A while ago I bought a massive book called ‘Aircraft of World War II-a Visual Encyclopedia’ by Michael Sharpe,Jerry Scutts and Dan March.The main text is good,the performance charts are well laid out and the photo’s are good too-and then there’s the captions. There simply are no words to describe how bad the majority of the captions are.They range from being blindingly obvious (eg “Nice shiney nose on this plane”) to a collection of words which aren’t even coherant English. It’s a great shame because the rest of the book is informative and well researched,and a wide variety of types are covered,even some of the more obscure ones-the captions let the whole thing down-I find it so painful to read that I barely use it.