Bathtub Admirals Jeff Huber $24.95, 256 pp, 311

Those of you familiar with Jeff Huber's commentaries on U.S. political and military ineptitude — they appear regularly on ePluribus Media and on Pen and Sword — may be partially prepared for this incredible saga, but the story he has to tell is much worse than you expect and much funnier. He has written a hilarious parody of the U.S. Navy and an antic send-up of modern military fiction.

The book covers the period from the last days of the Cold War to the beginning of the present Bush administration, through the Clinton Administration—the same twenty years that Huber served as operations officer of Carrier Air Wing Eight and USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), and commanding officer of Airborne Early Warning Squadron 124—from the point of view of his hero Jack Hogan, whose naval career path to parallels that of the author. Huber says that the resemblance between him and Jack ends there—but he has infused his story with the kind of detail that lends verisimilitude to his tale. It is full of anecdotes based on experiences that he lived though and the tall tales and naval gossip that enlivened dull nights at sea, not excluding the brainless, don't-ask-don't-tell policy and the bumbling efforts to cover up the Tailhook scandal. Huber says that in the navy you never get a straight story about anything.

Aaron Barlow reviews What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, December 2007.

It's a huge world out there—even bigger, now that we have the Internet expanding its boundaries and hoarding its history. So vast is it that we all miss things. Nobody, no matter their field or narrow specialty, can any longer say that they are on top of all that's going on. Anyone who believes otherwise will sooner or later be hit by a gigantic surprise, will be forced to discover that what they thought was an entirety of a discourse was merely one small clique.

As a dabbler, someone who looks into a number of fields for my primary research (the intersection of culture and technology), this doesn't bother me particularly. In fact, I like it, for it assures me that my work will never be finished, let alone up-to-date, making it an endless game. And I love playing.

One recent surprise was a man called James Paul Gee, newly ensconced as the Mary Lou Fenton Presidential Professor of Literary Studies at Arizona State University. Once a linguist, he is a founder of the Games, Learning, Society group based in Madison, WI (where Gee used to teach). Immediately after hearing him speak at the City University of New York Graduate Center last December, I ran home and ordered his most recent book, a “revised and updated” version of his 2003 What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.

This is one of those “duh” books. That is, there's nothing startling in it, just things that many of us teachers will say, on reading, “I should have thought of that.” Thing is, we didn't; Gee did.

He writes, in his Introduction, that:

you cannot play a game if you cannot learn it. If no one plays a game, it does not sell, and the company that makes it goes broke. Of course, designers could make the games shorter and simpler. That's often what schools do with their curriculums. But gamers won't accept short or easy games. So game designers keep making long and challenging games and still manage to get them learned. (3)