Hi Everyone,
I’m Will. I have been posting reviews on Goodreads since 2008, 1222 as of October 2021, if you can believe that. If you are serving a particularly lengthy prison sentence you may find reading all of them a way to help pass the time. I will not be porting all of those over here. I might need a prison sentence of my own (always a possibility) to have the time. I have provided a link to GR where you may wander through them all at your leisure, if you get that urge.
The impetus for starting this blog was the purchase of Goodreads by Amazon. I was very concerned that Amazon would alter the rather comfortable setup so many of us enjoyed at GR, and I wanted to have a safe haven for my babies before that day was set to arrive. Well, several years on, Amazon has mostly kept their hands off, so I continue to do my reviewing primarily on GR, but hung onto this site as a fall-back should Amazon decide one day to become more intrusive. As of August, 2021, after GR reduced its allowable review size in 2019 by 25%, forcing longer reviews to dip into the Comments section, and having just recently banned the use of external links in comments, (both those changes, BTW, having been made with zero notice to us reviewers) it became clear that it was time to bring my somnolent site back to life. It does, IMHO, need a significant overhaul, but for now I am leaving it pretty much as is and will just be posting new reviews.
I am a Boomer, thus the “Coot” of the title. I have had a few careers, which is not unusual these days. I retired several years ago. I have even done a bit of freelance book-editing, but am not in the publishing field beyond that and never have been. If you want to be pissy, I guess an exception might be the newsletters I wrote for the little league teams I managed. But other than that, not in publishing. Ok? Jeez!
You will not find images of me here. I have a face made for radio and a voice made for print. But there are images out there, if you know where to look and have a strong stomach.
It should be known that my book goddess, my wife, works at Harper Collins. So if you believe that negates my reviews for Harper books, be my guest. In fact, she has no say in what I write and only rarely reads my little offerings even after I post. If you have a concern about whether I am a mole, secretly flogging Rupert product, I suggest you read a few reviews and see for yourself whether you think I am an honest reviewer, or not.
The image in the header is a photo I took from Brooklyn Bridge Park of the lower Manhattan skyline. I have a couple hundred more from the park on Flickr. Also on Flickr, I started writing the beginnings of stories that insinuated themselves into my tiny mind while looking at some of the photos I had posted. I have made a set there, called Beginnings, and have ported those to the Beginnings Menu item here. I hope to add more to the seven I have written so far, both on Flickr and here.
What else? I am a native Noo Yawkah, and do the accent quite nicely when upset. I have lived or worked in all five boroughs (and a few parts of Joisey, as well). My undergrad semester in London back in the 70s was my only break from living in NYC. These days, I live in Wilkes Barre, PA. I had an embarrassing moment in 2018, when I got to meet Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf (we love him) at a public event here in WB. We exchanged some intel on New York items. Two of his kids live in NYC and his wife was born in the same Brooklyn hospital as my youngest. When he asked me about my fifteen months of life in Pennsylvania, (at that time) “Well, what do you think?” I drew a blank and emitted some form of huminahuminahumina. He offered a very sensitive reply about it being quite a change from living in NYC. But there are some things about living in Wilkes Barre that are pretty cool. In the 2018 political season my wife and I met a lot of interesting people, via being volunteers for PA Dems, canvassing, volunteering in phone banks, running phone banks, doing data entry into the state Democratic Party database, attending many gatherings of diverse sorts, parties, rallies, fund-raisers, arts awards ceremonies, protests, meet-and-greets. We feel a connection here to our elected representatives that was much less the case back in NYC. I have nothing against my NY politicians, one of whom even helped me get a job in a desperate time, but the connection here is more personal overall. It will be very interesting to see if those connections persist beyond the election seasons. I am optimistic. We intend to remain politically active to some degree.
I have been a baseball fan since gestation, I expect. A die-hard (emphasis on die) fan of the New York Metropolitans since before their birth. Even managed teams for thirteen seasons of little league baseball/softball.
I am still pondering what to include in this blog, whether to expose some short pieces of fiction and non-fiction I have written, and poems I wrote for my kids (three, all grown) some years back. The downside is burning them for potential use in an actual magazine or journal. Publishers of such things tend to reject anything that has previously been posted, and I still have aspirations. I am also pondering re-naming this to something else, and wondering if I need to do a total redesign.
As of October 2021, this blog is still in transition, as I expect it will always be. I am not entirely comfortable with the WordPress interface, and am not interested in learning enough CSS to be able to roll my own. (I was a programmer for over two decades, so could, if I wanted to, but my life is a busy one, and I would rather spend my time doing other things.) The site has been in a suspended state for four years. But it is time to wake up. Part of this is to repair the many broken image links. I counted over 100 reviews requiring repair, and am seeing to those in a slow-but-steady manner. Currently, I am over half-way finished. I am posting on Coot’s some of the reviews I posted on GR in the four years I have been away. It is another slow-but-steady process.
I have a considerable number of readers (more than 120K) on GoodReads. One result of this is that I receive an ungodly number of review requests, enough that I felt it necessary to ask that authors with review requests pass me by. I simply cannot take on any more than I am already doing. Sorry.
So, that’s me. Welcome! Hope you enjoy the site.
Coot's Reviews 
Coots reviws: I would like to invite your attention to this volume of my father’s World War II memoir which I self-published in 2018 and edited in 2020. Col. Nicoll F Galbraith, GSC, US Army was General Jonathan M. Wainwright’s G-4, Logistics, staff officer, who survived the capture of Corregidor with Wainwright and other senior Allied officers and three and a half years as a Japanese POW. It is a valuable addition to the POW story that modern readers would gain much from. Respectfully submitted. Whitney Galbraith, LCDR, US Naval Reserve, 1959-1964.
https://www.valleyoftheshadowpow.com
———————————
The Flags of My Father
It can often take a long time, often too long, for a son to recognize the value of his father, in his own life and that of the society he defended. The experience of my father, Col Nicoll F. “Nick” Galbraith, GSC, US Army, has come to me in magnificent proportion with my self-publication of Valley of the Shadow: An Account of American POWs of the Japanese, published by XLibris in June, 2018, revised May, 2020.
This experience was triggered, now seemingly long ago, by the ambitious year-long exposition of our Pioneers Museum in Colorado Springs in 2010, titled So Far From Home: the American POW Experience in World War II, the entire Japanese half of which was my father’s wartime archive, from the surrender of Corregidor in May of 1942 and continuing through the three-and- a-half years of infliction as a “guest of the emperor.”
As our Galbraith family amalgamated our father’s extensive POW archive, including Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright’s original Corregidor surrender order, that aged, dusty box containing over 1,000 handwritten flimsies was dragged out from a deep family shelf and I began to understand, page by page, what we had.
The two flags played an integral part in the Corregidor surrender process and an emotional one in August 1945, when the POWs were rescued/released by a six man OSS team and the Russian Red Army, both events being very close calls.
Col. Galbraith treats these experiences thematically, in third-person narrative format, enabling him to offer a psychological, emotional and moral matrix to help the reader interpret the challenges and personal behaviors of incarcerated American prisoners who suddenly had been deprived of their normal social and physical lives as officers, colleagues, husbands and fathers. Galbraith describes his own and his prison mates’ struggle to maintain their personal dignity and relationships.
Whitney H. Galbraith Colorado Springs, CO 719-633-2740 https://www.valleyoftheshadowpow.com
————-
80 years after Bataan, history has personal resonance in Colorado Springs for hero’s son
• By STEPHANIE EARLS stephanie.earls@gazette.com April 13, 2022
Colorado Springs resident Whitney Galbraith is the son of U.S. Army Col. Nicoll F. Galbraith, who was responsible for the evacuation of Manila in 1942. Whitney discovered more than 1,000 pages of his father’s writings, documenting his experiences in the war and as a POW of the Japanese.
Even after he retired from the Army to spend many long, good years reading books, playing bridge and leading a quiet life with his family in Colorado Springs, Col. Nicoll “Nick” Galbraith maintained the dignified demeanor of an officer. He wore a coat and tie every day and was a man of few spoken words – unless you knew the right questions to ask.
Whitney Galbraith now knows what those questions would be. But it’s too late; his father died in 1986, at age 89.
Luckily, the Army officer who played a key role, 80 years ago this week, in the evacuation of Manila prior to the Fall of the Philippines during World War II, including the safe evacuation of nurses, the Angels of Bataan, to Corregidor – was a prolific writer.
He left behind his words, for history and his children, to discover.
“So much of what I knew about my father, when he was alive, was through osmosis,” said Whitney Galbraith, who is 83. “I knew the rough outline of his experience, but I was a young child during World War II and was only aware of the surface” that he was gone, that he spent the war in prison camps, and that we got him back in 1945.”
Whitney Galbraith knew his father had been a rigorous recorder and keeper of diaries, documents and artifacts during his time in the Philippines and throughout the 3 1⁄2 years he’d spent as a prisoner of war, in Luzon and camps in Taiwan and China, where he was when Japanese forces surrendered in 1945.
He didn’t realize just how comprehensive the collection was until he and his older brother, Nicoll Jr., set about selecting items for a 2010 Pioneers Museum exhibit about American POWs during World War II.
“That’s when I just stumbled on this, on a dark, dusty shelf,” said Whitney, sitting at his kitchen table next to a box filled with reams of sepia-toned pages stored in plastic.
More than 1,000 “flimsies,” some typed, many handwritten in loose lines of slanted script. A memoir, in third person.
“His cursive tells me that it’s rapid forethought, that he’d had this whole thing in mind all the while during his POW years,”Whitney said. “He knew exactly what he wanted to write. Just stacks of it. Just amazing.”
And so he started reading.
Col. Nick Galbraith was a slender man in his early 40s, maybe 5 foot, 9 inches tall, with a wisp of a mustache and Clark Gable good looks.
Born in Williamsport, Pa., in 1896, he began his professional military career at age 20, expecting to be sent overseas to serve in what would come to be known as World War I. To his disappointment, he was ordered to the U.S.-Mexican border, to serve as a horse cavalry soldier.
He hadn’t seen his last wartime service, though. Not by a long shot.
Twenty-three years later, the world was again on the brink of war. Duty called the commissioned Army officer and married father of three to Fort Stotsenburg, now Clark Air Base, on Luzon Island in the Philippines, the stronghold of Allied operations in the South Pacific. The Army sent his wife and three young children along, too, only to evacuate them back to the States in the summer of 1941.
Leila Galbraith was “an Army wife and had no idea where to go, “but she had an aunt who lived in Colorado Springs, and an open invitation, Whitney Galbraith said.
The family settled temporarily to wait out the war with Leila Galbraith’s aunt, Sally Whitney Robinson, and her husband, the well-known artist and illustrator Boardman Robinson.
Meantime, half a world away, Col. Nick Galbraith’s saga was just beginning.
The island nation where he and thousands of American and Filipino troops and support staff were stationed had been a U.S. territory since 1898. Operations in the Southwest Pacific, under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, were headquartered there until defeat by the Imperial Japanese Army became imminent. The general and his family were evacuated by submarine to Australia in March 1942.
On April 9, after months of intense fighting, bombing and bloodshed, the Bataan Peninsula fell to the Japanese. The infamous “Bataan Death March,” the forced transfer of as many as 80,000 U.S. and Filipino troops more than 60 miles to a prison camp in the north, began. Thousands wouldn’t survive the journey, and the episode would lead to international charges against Japanese commander Lt. Gen. Masaharu Homma and two of his officers, for allowing their men to commit war crimes.
The day before, on the afternoon of April 8, 1942, Logistics Officer Galbraith had been ordered to leave Bataan for Corregidor by Gen. Johnathan Wainwright, who was in command of Philippine forces after MacArthur’s departure to Australia. The tiny island off the southern coast of Bataan was the last bastion of Allied operations in the South Pacific, and Galbraith was to report the “impending collapse” to the command there.
He took a number of staff officers, and the Angels of Bataan, with him, to sit out another month of siege. As a result, no nurses were captured on Bataan.
“That’s one of my dad’s proudest moments, was his ability to do that,” Whitney Galbraith said.
What remained of the Battling Bastards of Bataan would continue their doomed campaign for another month on Corregidor, as Japanese forces closed in and aimed flame-throwing tanks at the entrance to the Allies’ ad hoc base in the Malinta Tunnel. Gen. Wainwright’s men were trapped and being massacred.
Surrendering would turn out to be a battle all its own. In an attempt to stop the carnage, Wainwright sent an officer out with a white flag. The Japanese officer he met wasn’t authorized to accept a surrender. After several more days trying and failing to broker a surrender, Wainwright ended up in Manila, at a meeting he hoped would bring an end to fighting.
“There’s a photo of my dad sitting with Wainwright preparing the surrender speech, which I’m sure was an interesting, and difficult, moment for my dad,”Whitney Galbraith said.
Homma was afraid of a potential guerrilla war, and steadfastly refused to accept surrender until every American in the field surrendered, too.
“He wanted more than Corregidor. He wanted the entire Philippine Islands cleaned of American forces,” Whitney Galbraith said.
Wainwright tried to find a way forward: If somehow he was able to round up the remaining forces in the field, then could a formal surrender happen? With a formal surrender, the American captives in the Philippines would become prisoners of war, protected by international conventions and laws. Lives would be saved. Wainwright’s Hail Mary worked. The Japanese allowed him to send emissaries to different parts of the archipelago where it was thought Allied field commanders were still operating.
Col. Nick Galbraith was one of those emissaries.
Galbraith set out for the “boondocks” of Northern Luzon, on a “Heart of Darkness” style quest over mountains and through jungles to find a U.S. commander thought to be in charge of units there. He was accompanied on the trek by a Japanese escort, and he carried three dime-store flags given to him by the Imperial Japanese Army.
One was an American flag. One was Japanese. And one was the white flag of surrender.
“So depending on what line he thought he might be crossing, he’d wave the right flag. I don’t know how often he had to use them, and somehow it worked,” Whitney Galbraith said. After six weeks, the Japanese finally said, OK, you’ve tried enough.”
Formal surrender of the Philippines to the Japanese occurred on May 6, 1942. Col. Galbraith rejoined his men at a prison camp in Central Luzon.
From there, Galbraith and the other men were moved around the island and then packed onto various vessels, Japanese Hell Ships, including the Oryoku Maru”bound for prison camps, first in Taiwan and then China. As the Allies gained ground and the perimeter of the war continued to move west, Col. Galbraith found himself and other officers at a prison camp in Mukden, Manchuria, in August 1945.
That’s where he was when the war ended, at least for those in the field who had access to a radio.
A six-man rescue/release team from the Office of Strategic Services was dispatched to the Hoten Camp, to secure the safe release of prisoners.
Sgt. Hal Leith, of Golden, was one of those OSS officers. In his diary, Leith wrote about parachuting from a B-24 and landing near an American POW camp run by a Japanese commander who was unaware of the surrender.
Col. Nick Galbraith’s diary entry for that day records what he saw on the ground. Six Americans floating to the earth, to save them.
“And all these years later, Hal Leith is in Golden and Dad’s in Colorado Springs. I would have loved to get those two together, but it wasn’t possible,” said Whitney Galbraith. ‘”We lost dad in 1986, and I only learned about a dozen years ago that Hal Leith was so close. I wish I would have known earlier.”
But along with regrets and missed moments is gratefulness for what he does know now, and for a memoir that answers so many questions he didn’t get to ask about his father and the lesser-known, but just as dramatic, chapter of World War II in which he played such a critical role.
Whitney Galbraith turned those pages his father furiously churned out, then stashed away in the years after his service overseas, into a book “Valley of the Shadow: An Account of the American POWs of the Japanese.” He self-published the almost 500-page account, including photos and archival documents from Galbraith’s collection, in 2018.
He hopes that sharing his father’s words, and the 80th anniversary of the Fall of the Philippines, will help bring attention to an important story that’s far more than a personal journey.
“Getting to know your father that you didn’t know in earlier times is, for anybody, thrilling,” he said.
Getting to know a father who was a war hero, and being able to share his story with the world? Thrilling doesn’t even come close.
LikeLike
Get with the times old man, your reviews are garbage. I proudly buy all my books on amazon and so should anyone reading this. Old man Bill should smoke a joint once in a while.
LikeLike
What courage! A weenie getting high in his mother’s basement, so scared of an old man he has to hide behind anonymity. Pathetic, dude. Get a life.
LikeLike
Please take it someplace else.
LikeLike
Still hiding. Still got nuthin’. No one forced you to be here. Pound sand, loser.
LikeLike
To Whom it may concern, I signed on, rather late in the game, to the 2021 Non-Fiction Readers Challenge
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hello Will,
I hope that you are well.
Just wondered please if you might take a look at one of my latest novels, now available on Amazon in both electronic format, but also in paperback.
THE ITALIAN TRAP By.- K.E. Heaton.
The second world war is almost at an end, but the father of facism “Benito Mussolini” is on the run, and must be detained to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
Can Dick Charlesworth from S.O.E. capture the monster, and bring him to justice?
The story is complicated… but simply… it must be told.
And… its free to download an electronic copy from Amazon, on Saturday, 27th, November, 2021.
So grab yourself a copy, and if you’d be so kind, please, let me know what you think.
Thank you for your time.
Kind Regards
Keith.
LikeLike
Thanks for thinking of me as a possible reviewer for your book. As you might imagine, (or might not) I receive many such queries, to the point that I put a line near the bottom of my profile above that I am not accepting author-review requests. My wife being in publishing and bringing home books all the time, incomings from several other houses, and buying books, added to the fact that I am a relatively pokey reviewer, cranking out only one new review a week, all combine to make accepting review requests problematic. So, sorry. I will not be able to take on your baby, but I truly wish you the best of luck finding readers. There are a a gazillion reviewers out there who, I am sure, will be more than happy and better able than I to have a go with it.
Best,
-Will
LikeLike
Thank you for your comments Will.
You’re a good man.
Kind Regards
Keith.
LikeLike
I have nothing to do with amazon. They don’t pay taxes.
LikeLike
It’s even worse than that. In 2017 Amazon received a rebate of over $130 million. Talk about corporate welfare.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Absolutely disgusting.
LikeLike
Hello WIll,
Hope you are doing good. You have an amazing blog here, loved it. I am writing to you today, looking for an honest review of my suspense, thriller, sci-fi story-book “Time Crawlers”, published on June 14, 2018, via Kindle Direct Publishing. The book is 118 pages long.
Alien Invasion, Dark Artificial Intelligence, Time-Travel, High-Tech Hindu Mythology, Djinn Folklore, Telekinetics and life-consuming Cosmic Entities are some major themes in my book which has 6 tightly-knit, fast-paced Sci-Fi stories.
Your precious words would be a very big help to me and would enable me to write better books in the future. Please let me know if you would be willing to share your valuable review. I will share the PDF or MOBI as required by you.
Amazon link here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DRPPGK6
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40540847-time-crawlers
Please let me know how to proceed.
Very Respectfully,
Varun Sayal
LikeLike
Hi Varun,
Thanks for thinking of me as a possible reviewer for your book. As you might imagine, (or might not) I receive many such queries, to the point that I put a line at the top of my GR profile (clearly need that here too) that I am not accepting author-review requests. Between my wife being in publishing and bringing home books all the time, incomings from several other houses, and we buy books too, added to the fact that I am a relatively pokey reviewer, cranking out only one new review a week, means that accepting review requests is problematic. So, sorry, I will not be able to take on your baby, but I truly wish you the best of luck finding readers. There are a lot of reviewers who, I am sure, will be more than happy and better able than I to have a go with it. Your book sounds like a fun read. I wish you the best of luck finding appreciative readers.
-Will
LikeLike
Hi Will,
Thanks a lot for this response. Apologies I perhaps missed the line about not accepting reviews. I reached out because I saw that you like Sci-Fi books and many Sci-Fi readers have been saying some good words about “Time Crawlers” on Goodreads. But I totally understand that you are already packed. My best wishes for your other reviews.
Regards,
Varun
LikeLike
“I have a face made for radio and a voice made for print.” with a bio like that, what’s not to like?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks, Da
LikeLiked by 2 people
Subscribe!
LikeLiked by 1 person
What a great blog. When you have a moment, check out this new historical novel about, of course, Brooklyn on goodreads . . . https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25942936-exile-on-bridge-street
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hello Will, would you be interested in reviewing my novella “Pulse: When Gravity Fails”? It is a thriller with a hint of sci-fi. I can send the printed version.
More details on my website:
htttp://www.scifibookseries.com/
Thank you in advance.
John Freitas
LikeLiked by 1 person
I do hope you will crosspost all your GoodReads reviews here. Not just due to the Amazon concern (GR may go down at any time), but just that the blog medium is far more pleasing to the eye to read long detailed reviews. There should be scripts or tools that can help you achieve this.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sorry for the extremely tardy response, Ashwin. First, thanks for your kind suggestion. I agree about the superior visual appeal of the blog medium over the presentation on GR. I have over 1200 reviews on Goodreads. Bringing them all across would be a prohibitive drain on my time, precluding directing adequate attention to more pressing tasks. Every one takes some work, and I have managed to mostly get it down to a system, so can do this without completely losing my mind. That said, I decided that I will copy over a significant subset of what I wrote during my absence from this site, that is, from 2017 to 2021. Not all of those, but the ones that exceed GR’s ever-shrinking review-space allowance, and others that I think merit the trip. So far (as of 10/9/21) I have been doing this at the rate of one extra review a week. It will take me a while to tote across all those worth toting, but this allows it to be done at a manageable rate. Another element (extra task) involved in cranking up this old engine is that a lot of the reviews on here have suffered significant breakage to their image files. I counted over a hundred that needed repair. I am reconnecting those at what seems a sane rate to me, five a day. So should be caught up within a month or so.
Hope that addresses your query.
Thanks for caring, bro. It means a lot to me.
LikeLike
An amusing and lighthearted intro to yourself and your blog – nice one 🙂 Just a quick heads up, Ive made volume one of my poetry book free on Smashwords now so if you get chance to check it out let me know what you think – be nice 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
What a lovely collection. I hope you will keep them coming…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for the follow. Good stuff here. -ben
LikeLiked by 1 person
Congratulations on starting this journey, Will. I, too, am interested to see where it leads.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I follow you on Goodreads and always like your reviews. I wanted to print a copy of your review of The Son, which my wife just finished reading. Printing a copy from your blog seemed easier that printing a copy from Goodreads. Vic Carson
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think it’s great you started this blog. I like your reviews very much!
LikeLiked by 1 person
What a great intro. Makes me want to read your comments, reviews and general thoughts.
LikeLiked by 1 person