I think you have a footnote problem...

[davidgillon]

Continuing my reading of Friedman's Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns and Gunnery: 'Hmm, I know this is the last chapter, but I'm only 67% of the way through, there must be a big data annex or something'.

Nope, main text ends at 67%, the remaining 33% of the book is the footnotes. I knew there were a lot of them, and with a kindle it's easy-ish to navigate back and forth, but a third of the wordcount, seriously?

His research is immaculate*, but his editors need to stage an intervention. Eight page footnotes (I'm not exaggerating) need to be in the main text.

I'm still happy I bought it, but it's disappointing that he just stops the narrative dead at the end of his time period. There's no attempt to sum up, conclusions or whatever.

*Interpretation maybe not so much, I've seen some comments pointing out he isn't as rigorous with the USN as the RN, accepting uncorrected USN figures, even when the real Japanese loss rates, produced by checking Japanese records, have been available for a couple of decades. And even within the text there are issues: "The USN didn't use RN-style barrage fire" - You just bloody described them doing precisely that!!

Comments

[hamletta]

I had a somewhat similar (but different) experience reading LS Huang's Zero Sum Game (the self-pub version). Was well into it, and it seemed like the arc was coming to a close but Kindle kept telling me that I was 30% through. I was having the WTF? How long is this book moment, when, at around 33% the story climaxes and ended.

And then I remembered I bought the trilogy, and Kindle was measuring against the total word-count...

[davidgillon]

Been caught by that one before!

[yhlee]

Wait, an eight-page footnote?! *faints*

[davidgillon]

Some of his footnotes would be chapters in anyone else's books!