I am very appreciative of Acrylicos Vallejo (AV) for sending new products for review, and I am equally appreciative of all the Review Corps crew members who take care of all of the legwork to get materials to reviewers and the completed reviews published for the modeling community. It is a privilege to be part of this manufacturer-modeler group effort.
The Somme by Richard Van Emden was originally published in England by Pen and Sword as a hard cover book on May 24, 2016 and a soft cover on June 6, 2016. Casemate released this soft cover edition on August 19, 2016.
London resident Richard van Emden has written profusely on the subject on World War One. He worked as a journalist after graduating from Newcastle University in 1988. He books focus on World War I and include: Tickled to Death to Go, Prisoners of the Kaiser, The Trench, Sapper Martin, Last Man Standing, Britain’s Last Tommies, Famous, Veterans, Boy Soldiers of the Great War, The Soldier’s War, and Tommy’s Ark. He has interviewed over 270 veterans of the Great War and many of those interviews are used in this book. Richard Van Emden also is heavily involved in television programs about The Great War and includes Veterans, Roses of No Man’s Land, The Boy Soldiers of the Great War, and The Real War Horse.
Originally published in the Netherlands in 2014 by S.I. Publicaties BV, this hard cover book covers the four year period of the ‘war to end all wars’. Translated into English by Britta Nurmann, Pen and Sword Books released the first English edition in in January 2016. Osprey Publishing released this reprint edition in August 2016. Dr. Guus de Vries has focused this book on three perspectives:
I am very appreciative of Acrylicos Vallejo (AV) for sending new products for review, and I am equally appreciative of all the Review Corps crew members who take care of all of the legwork to get materials to reviewers and the completed reviews published for the modeling community. It is a privilege to be part of this manufacturer-modeler group effort.
We live in a Golden Age of modeling, we do. It seems that not a day goes by before some new product is offered to plastic modelers. This time around is a new set of excellent diorama weathering effects offered by Vallejo called ‘Thick Mud’. As the name suggests, each of six varieties offered contains a different shaded sludge mixture that looks, acts, and cleans up like mud.
This is the stuff that we have all tried to perfect: using water, paint, pigments, real dirt, fine sand and some kind of fixing agent. Vallejo has simply taken the guesswork out of it for you, but they’ve smartly rendered the concoction in an easy-to-use-and-clean-up acrylic medium.
The set includes the following shades:
Originally envisioned as a movie by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver, The Frozen Chosen has been released as a book about the First Marine Division and the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. This new book relies heavily on a series of interviews conducted by Cleaver with survivors of the battle resulting from a 1989 reunion of “The Frozen Chosen”. The release online by the US Marine Corps Historical division of the Korean War Project, along with recently released from Korea, Russia, and China finally spurred Thomas McKelvey Cleaver to finish this book.
The book is divided into 10 chapters with an introduction, index, a Bibliography and Glossary of Abbreviations:
Model Art Modeling Magazine is an excellent periodical from Japan providing an abundance of modeling subjects in each issue. It doesn’t matter what your modeling focus is, each issue will provide something of interest for you, and more than likely, you’ll find something interesting that you didn’t know you would.
Although the magazine is published entirely in Japanese, the quality of the photos in each issue is really amazing, and goes a long way in telling the story. There are plenty of “work in progress” and “how it was built” photos highlighting the tools, materials, and techniques used by the master builders. These photo guides go a long way in explaining the builds visually, although I’m sure some details are missed without a proper translation. In fact, the photography is so good, even the advertisements were interesting. I found myself perusing the advertisements almost as much as the work in progress photos.
This is the forty sixth volume in the Weapon series. This volume deals solely with the 45 cal. M3 sub machine gun, which was commonly called “The Grease Gun” because of its resemblance to the mechanics grease gun familiar to so many young men in the army. It has also been called Americas Sten Gun because like its British counterpart it was designed to be made with stamped metal welded together. This simple design made it really cheap to manufacture with a net cost of $33.33 to the government. It is hard to believe that this weapon was used by the military for almost 50 years.
This 80 page paperback book is full of pictures and illustrations. Both B&W and color. There is a picture or image on practically every page. The full color illustrations are in the fine detail that the Osprey books are known for. The five chapters cover the development, use and impact of the M3 “Grease Gun”. There is an extensive bibliography for additional resources for research.
During its heyday the Roman Empire sprawled across the better part of three continents, making it one of the greatest political bodies of its day. To maintain such an empire required an enormous military budget and huge numbers of men at arms (an approach to militarism we can, alas, observe to this day). One of the chief duties of this sprawling military was to hold the edges of this empire from incursion from without.
Osprey Publishing and author Raffaele D-Amato have put together a surprisingly exhausting study of the military units comprising Rome’s Western borders – more specifically, what would someday become England, Germany and France.
