Book Query: British Cruisers by Norman Friedman

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nova10

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Greetings and salutations

According to Amazon, Norman Friedman is about to release two books on the same subject, British Cruisers. They are British Cruisers: From Treaties To The Present published by Seaforth Publishing and British Cruisers: Two World Wars And After published by US Naval Institute Press. Both books have 320 pages. Would I be right in assuming they are exactly the same book? If not, then the title of the latter appears more appealing, infering it covers a longer period of history than the other one. Help anybody?
 
Same book, the UK original edition is by Seaforth publishing and will be republished in the US by the Naval Institute.

Norman Friedman is actually doing a 2nd volume due out in a couple of years to cover the early designs upto the treaty, but thats not due for a couple of years yet.
 
Nova,

would you please post a brief review. I'm still undecided about it.
The chapter index would be great (if possible) and are there many unbuilt projects illustrated?.

Thanks in advance

Antonio
 
According to Amazon this book is not going to be available until April, yet some people seem to have it already?
 
sealordlawrence said:
According to Amazon this book is not going to be available until April, yet some people seem to have it already?
Click to expand...

Well Seaforth Published it January, so either get it from Seaforth, or try W H Smiths Books which has it cheaper than Amazon, if Amazon haven't got it in stock yet, or wait on Amazon to get their delivery.
 
I understand that this book focuses more on the earlier ships and thus does not provide any new info on two of my

areas of interest:

Escort cruiser designs after Seaslug, especially the version nearly ordered in 1962.

Cruiser development after 1957, especially the missile ships with post-Seaslug systems

Does the new book add anything much to Friedman's postwar royal navy book (out of print, but well worth
tracking down) and the Brown-Moore rebuilding the Royal Navy?

I shall continue to wait and hope that someone like Damien (TSR 2) Burke will come along and satisfy my
curiosity on this 60s period with all its fun stuff in real depth (line drawings, good artwork, etc)

UK 75
 
By the moment I have droped this book from my wish list. I already have Grove's "Vanguard to Trident" and Brown's "Rebuilding the RN". Fridman's book seems to add nothing significative from the unbuilt project side over the books I cited.

In fact my original thought was buying Friedman's Cruiser and Destroyer (the post-WWII volume) books togheter but according to the comments, my expectations have been deceived.

My recommendation to editors and writers is, please show the chapter index of your books. Give us clear information about the contents. Otherwise I prefer to save my money.
 
Bought it, read it, loved it. Even my not-quite-two-year-old was impressed - he took one look at the illustrations and his eyes went as wide as soup plates and he said "Wow, boats!"

Some of the unbuilt projects, albeit not illustrated, are simply mind-boggling, particularly the armoured cruiser with three QUAD 9.2 INCH turrets. Dear God, can you imagine being hit by that? Especially since the gun would almost certainly have been evolved over the last pre-dreadnought marks and probably have at least a 6crh shell. Even a battleship would have to have second thoughts, and carrying an aircraft for OTH spotting would have been pretty-much mandatory.

My only real disappointment is that IMO there wasn't enough said on lessons learned, and how the design philosophy stood up under combat conditions (something I'd particularly been hoping to read regarding the WW1 cruisers). I know it's a technical-development history and not an active-service history, but still...

On the other hand, the relevant pages of my copy of EHH Archibald's "The Fighting Ship in the Royal Navy" (or rather, photocopies thereof) are going to get pretty heavily annotated once it comes out of storage.

I understand his follow-up is going to cover the Victorian cruisers and leave off where this one picks up. I can't wait!

(Edited to add: UK 75, given your wishlist the book you're probably looking for is Friedman's "The Postwar Naval Revolution". There's quite a few things in this book I remember from that one, but to basically reprint half the earlier work wouldn't have been appropriate.)
 
Just to update this thread - Friedman's follow-up on Victorian-era cruisers is now in my hands and I'm loving it.


It's a heavy slog, and goes quite deeply into the strategic and political decisions which influenced the design, endless trade-offs for weight and space (mostly weight), debates about armament, propulsion, etc.


Anyone who's read Oscar Parkes' immortal book on British battleships (some of which overlaps into the large-cruiser category) and D.K. Brown's books on the era (Before the Ironclad and Warrior to Dreadnought) will find a lot of the technical discussion very familiar, but that doesn't detract from Friedman's work. The quality of the pictures is at times quite incredible, at times not so much; but it must be remembered that given when these ships existed, we're probably lucky to have some of the pictures at all. A few typos here and there, including obviously-repeated words, a thing which is regrettably becoming more and more prevalent in any work.


In short - if you're looking for an authoritative, in-depth book on the subject and you don't mind devoting a lot of time to the reading, buy it.
 
I got the Seaforth Publishing version of Dr Friedman's book for Christmas, and whilst I'm happy to have it - especially for the export cruiser plans for Venezuela - the small print is a pain compared to his destroyers book and some of the pictures seem to have a very low resolution. Of course, it could just be my eyes aging...
 
I have never encountered a book with too small print, yet I need glasses with -6.75 and -8.00 corrections. But I have seen far too many books with too large print...
 
A correction of -8.00 is for longer distances. People who complain that print is too small, are usually middle-aged and are on their way to needing reading glasses.
 
Yes, for longer distances, but without glasses I can't see clearly beyond about 5" and with my current glasses closer than 10" tends to start to get fuzzy...Yet, e.g. the font in Jane's yearbooks or pocket bibles is very readable to me...
 
Picked this up from Amazon for Christmas, though if I'd checked the size of the thing (A4, 430 pages), I'd have had it delivered at home, not 300 miles away! No problem with the print size, though I'm going to need a magnifier to get my money's worth from the pictures - they aren't small or poor quality, my eyes simply aren't up to pulling out all the detail they contain. For those wondering if it's worth getting these in addition to DKB's Warrior to Dreadnought etc., there's definitely a difference in the level of detail, I've only really been through the Interwar section in any detail so far, and as an example there's a discussion running through all of the K-series designs considered in defining the Fiji, whereas DKB only hits a few selected highlights. It's not necessarily deeper than DKB, just concentrated on a smaller area and able to be more exhaustive about how the designs evolved through different concepts (which isn't surprising as DKB also needed to cover the rest of the Navy, not just the cruisers). There's also some limited coverage of designs produced for foreign sales opportunities where they illuminate the evolution of constructors thoughts in some way.

My only gripe is that I wish the footnotes had been integrated at the end of each chapter, not concentrated in 50(!) pages at the back of the book. You'll definitely want a bookmark or two.
 
DWG said:
My only gripe is that I wish the footnotes had been integrated at the end of each chapter, not concentrated in 50(!) pages at the back of the book. You'll definitely want a bookmark or two.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Some of those footnotes, especially the longer ones, might better have been integrated with the text. I always liked the way DKB integrated his footnotes into the margins alongside the text! Can't always be done, of course, but it made referencing very easy.
 
Does the volume about cruisers from WWI to the present also cover the battlecruisers (Hood, G3, Fisher's Incomparable proposal) ?
Also as the owner of a copy of Brown's "Rebuilding the Royal Navy" can I expect anything new about post WWII cruiser unbuilt proposals ?

thanks
 
Ford, I think you can expect a bit more detail, given that the work focuses entirely on one class of ship. OTOH those who already own or have read Friedman's "The Postwar Naval Revolution" will, I suspect, find a lot of material which is very familiar to them.


The books don't go into any detail on battlecruisers per se; I suspect because they are considered to be closer relatives to the battleship. There is (a little bit of) material detailing the path of evolution of concept from the large Victorian armoured cruiser to the battlecruiser.
 

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