We have Claudia Caruana's TASTE OF MALTA and respect and admire the efforts she put to gather all the Maltese recipes that seem to exist and had existed in Malta for generations.

Maltese food is "neutral" to most nationalities - I know, I used to own a restaurant in Toronto selling Maltese food, and all types of people enjoyed our cuisine.

Claudia's book is a must in every kitchen of those people who are interested not only in good food, but also in healthy food.

Thanks, Claudia,

Alfred Grech

I have tried some of Ms. Caruana's recipes. They came out fabulous. My dinner guests raved over the dishes, wondering where I came up with such exquisite food. It's great trying new recipes like the maltese cuisine. This author is definitely going places. I imagine her future works will be just as great and original.

Claudia has done such a wonderful job of bringing together a collection of the best dishes that Maltese cooking offers.

Her major achievement has been in her idea of obtaining recipes from such a diverse group of people who have obviously enjoyed cooking.

Shores and Cull really can write about WW II aviation. Their books are marvellous, action-packed, accurate, full of data. I just don't know why all their books are so expensive. I bought "249 at War", but this one I had to borrow from a friend of mine.

First of all I would like to say,that if you haven't already read Christopher Shores "HURRICANE YEARS"I suggest you do so.Malta The Spitfire Year 1942 is the second volume of the air battle in malta. The Author Chrisopher Shores has done a superb job on this book.There are more than 200 rare photographs and more detail regarding the air battle of Malta. Thankyou Christopher Shore for a memorable book.

This was a light-hearted humorous story about Malta during the Second World War. Nicholas Rinaldi successfully moved the reader through a number of quirky characters whose motivations were shaped by the uncertainty of the war. There was an addicted gambler, a clumsy pilot and of course Melita the heroine - a spontaneous beautiful Maltese who captured Rocco Raven's heart - the stranded American soldier whose devotion to duty became an obstacle to his relationship with the heroine.
The book is funny and it brought out the chaos and the craziness of war amidst the resilience and the resourcefulness of the Maltese, the expatriate business people and the military personnel that defended the island.
The writer gave the reader an excellent description of nightlife in Malta, which was incomplete without good food and various American wartime music. And one got an overview aerial combat in Rinaldi's depiction of warplanes that constantly pounded the island with bombs.
The writer, I believe, tried too hard to mimic Catch-22 by the late Joseph Heller, who incidentally wrote praises that the publisher placed on the jacket of the hardcover. While I would put Catch-22 and Rinaldi's book in same class, I would place The Jukebox Queen of Malta a couple of rungs below Heller's masterpiece.

Rinaldi's The Jukebox Queen of Malta gives us Rocco Raven, an American radio operator trapped on Malta during the German and Italian bombardments of WWII. Rocco quickly learns he cannot escape the enchantment of the island, it's charismatic people and the love he feels for Melita. Rinaldi weaves history with stories of perserverence and will, providing a humorous and fantastical account of the human spirit in times of war. Through the lunacy of the constant bombing, servicemen like Fingerly hoard tidbits of Maltese history-Dragut's dagger, a one hundred pound suit of armor and mummies from Egypt. I loved this book, it's timeless characters and prescient storytelling!

The Jukebox Queen of Malta is a wonderful book full of realistic, heartwrenching characters and terrific historical detail of Malta during World War II. I enjoyed the way the author tells the tale of Rocco Raven, an American trapped on Malta, with poetic language and a sense of the ironic. His tender and often violent portrayels of wartime life on Malta offer the reader a humorous, bittersweet tale of people coping with the absurdities of war -- relevent to the current crises in Kosovo.

I like to purchase travel guides that are not more than one year old to insure I am reading up to date information. This Travel Pack of Malta was described as a 1999 edition. In fact while the Travel Pack was put together in 1999 and contained a 1999 map of Malta the Travel Guide which was 90% of the package was a 1996 edition. I feel this was a misrepresentation of the package since most of the information was compiled in 1996 not 1999 as I was led to believe.

If anyone is planning a trip to the beautiful islands of Malta, this book is a must buy! The layout of the book is supberb and the information provided is very relevant and accurate. The foldout map that is included makes this a great value.

Probably the best available guide book about Malta, written by natives of the island and others with close connections. as usual with the Insight Guides, it succeeds in giving an authentic flavour of the place in miniature, and I have found it very useful throughout several trips there. Photography is very atmospheric, and almost faultless, though my only gripe is that the latest edition has replaced the Passionist 'cover boy' and his lantern - so typical of religious processions on the Island -with an ordinary, though very attractive, Maltese lass. The boy seemed to sum up perfectly the mixture of youth and devout Catholic faith of Malta. This apart, you will not need another guide to the Island if you have this one.

I'm generally anti-Insight Guides because of the typically shallow, boring way in which they try to tackle large countries. But Insight does a pretty good job with its regional and small-country series. I can imagine better ways to learn about Malta, but this is a nice, functional book if you don't know much about the place.

Since Malta is so small, the authors can go into a reasonably good deal of detail on the history of the islands, their people, and their sights. There's even enough space for a couple of short sections on Maltese architecture, superstition and lore, and classic Maltese automobiles. While this isn't the kind of guidebook you would actually sit down and read for pleasure, it's full of interesting anecdotes on the culture and history of the place.

I'm afraid many of its hotel and dining recommendations are rather elitist, but why not splurge for once?

I spent eight months in Malta, and ended up using this book in tandem with the Rough Guide version. Like all guide books, neither is 100% accurate, and that's life. Rough Guide is better for history, culture, art, etc. There will be much more info on any given sight there, but Lonely Planet has the practicalities a little more fleshed out. And as usual, the maps are slightly better. Depends on what you're looking for, really.

This is an excellent book...however there are a few places he missed. The pub in Mellieha that has FANtastic ribs and steak,
and the excellent French restaurant in Marsaskala. (The waiter here knows so much about the fresh fish you'd swear he'd caught them himself!)

If you're a scuba diver, Dive Med in Marsaskala gave us the BEST service!

Woodman who is an ex-merchant seaman does very well on the story of the convoys as they plied there way to and from Malta during World War II. In this he is good and the book has real value. This includes interviews with some of the surviving sailors of these convoys.

However he essentially uses no German or Italian source material and has a great number of errors of detail. Nor does he use recent academic books in English filled with new information. For example, he has the wrong Italian general capturing Addis Ababa in the war with Ethiopia, he confuses hellcat with wildcat fighters (used on British carriers), he talks about lightly armored Italian heavy cruisers when four of their seven were one of the most heavily armored heavy cruisers in 1939 (the Zara class), and he is in error on Axis losses and Axis commanders and confuses bomb sizes. The list goes on. Written so long after the war he should have gotten the details better.

With the fall of Crete, Malta appeared indefensible, yet to lose it would have dealt a winning hand to Axis forces in North Africa and made the capture of Gibraltar inevitable. In fact, the German High Command - the OKW - wanted to take Malta in preference to Crete, but was overruled by Hitler. While Crete fell to airborne assault, it proved of little enduring value to the Axis cause.

Malta, snuggled so close to the Italian mainland, seemed doomed. However, while many in Britain wrote it off, the islanders were gripped with a determination to resist. And the Navy grasped that in Malta it had an unsinkable aircraft carrier.

Woodman details the deadly chess game of submarines, shipping and aircraft, mines and weather, soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians, as both sides sought to protect or sever one another's supply lines.

Possession of Malta was crucial to the warfare raging in North Africa. Whoever controlled the island could dominate the Mediterranean, and hence the oil of the Middle East, and the entry to the Suez Canal. Failing to seize it ahead of Crete was one of Hitler's major errors of the war. That Britain maintained a garrison there was almost an accident - a fortunate happenstance which probably dictated the outcome of the North African conflict and eventually exposed the Axis Powers to a third Front in Italy.

Densely packed with information, this is an excellent source book for anyone interested in the North African campaign or naval/convoy warfare in WW2. Malta's role has always been understated: this book goes some way to restoring it to strategic importance, and does so without ignoring the human dimension of its determined population and defenders.

Death in Malta's protagonist is human, vulnerable and believeable. He is homesick, he's suffering from writer's block. He falls in love, and becomes obsessed with a mystery surrounding the disappearance of a little boy from the very house he is living in. All the while, you wonder whether there's a corpse in one of those clay jars he found. All the while, you wonder whether what he starts to write is truth or fiction. This story, although it centres around the Australian writer, is really about the old doctor who becomes his friend - his sharply defined personality makes you look forward to the next time he appears. The essence of "Death in Malta" is really contained in the character of Dr Phineas Micallef. A great read, with a realistic ending.

This book is superb. It is well written and the arguments for a goddess religion in Malta and the Orkney and Shetland islands is indeed convincing. The pictures are beautiful. That neolithic society was matrifocal and that the religious pantheon was dominated by female entities is, in my opinon, established beyond any reasonable doubt by authors like Mellaart, Gimbutas - and Cristina Biaggi!

But one thing is quite disturbing in this book (at least in the edition i have). "BCE" is generally replaced with "BP" witout changing the numbers! It may be some computer mistake but the unitiated reader might for example get the impression that the neolithic culture at Malta existed between 1500 - 500 BCE - since the book claims it existed between 3500 - 2500 "BP". ("Before Present"). I know that Cristina Biaggi very well know the chronology so it must be some weird mistake. It is a pity in such an impressive work.

The evidence laid out in this series of works is very compelling. The critics of these ideas seem only able to express themselves with "Preposterous!" or "Idiotic" but never with a calm rational comparison of data and artifacts.

One reviewer says it is idiotic to assume that the bull could have been a female symbol, that this is Gimbutas' imagination. But then there is artwork remaining from this era with clear pictures of bull skulls with horns drawn over the pelvic areas of women, with the horns positioned where the fallopian tubes would be.

The critics of Gimbutas either don't read her work or address people who have never read her work themselves.

Seeing the anger and spite towards this body of scholarly work leaves me wondering why is there so much hatred and antagonism towards the work of Gimbutas? Why are there so many irrational and inaccurate criticisms of her body of work?

Reading this book was like traveling halfway across the planet and entering a time when women's energy ruled. Dr. Biaggi makes a fascinating case for a time when a woman (The Goddess) was the first diety. This is a scholarly, ste-by-step exploration, but it is also lyrical and playful. One shares Dr. Biaggi's growing sense of wonder as she finds, examines and beautifully describes the mounting body of evidence of the Goddess culture, from cave drawings to artifacts to more Temples. The illustrations are wonderful. I highly recommend this book as a must read for every woman.

Well, this work is certainly comprehensive, not to say exhaustive, so I give it three stars in deference to that. However, this is a recent piece of history writing, and it really doesn't show. Like the many 19th century histories you can find at your local library, Sire's book is conspicuously lacking in distance from the subject. He frequently displays a partisanship (I think) unsuitable for a historian, lacing his writing with condemnation of the "dishonorable" actions of the French knights and the paints a winning portrait of the SPanish. (I am particularly thinking of the section on Juan de Homedes, 1550's.) He presents his arguement as a 'debunking' of de Homedes' bad press, but never really addresses the issue. In short, I think the author is more interested in dreaming of the days of chivalry than seriously re-examining the controvertial role of the Knights.

In 1096, when the first Crusaders arrived in Jerusalem, they discovered the Hospital of St. John, which healed the wounds of the heroic knights. It would be this encounter that led the hospitallers to rally around their leader Brother Gerard de Saxo and created the Order of St. John. The knights returned to Europe, but they never forgot the kindness of the hospital that healed their wounded. After the first Crusade, the Order grew in importance and received many appreciative donations that helped solidify the future for the Order. The activities of the Order of St. John throughout its history assumed the role as the defenders of Christianity. The Order gained importance and power because the knights of the order fought bravely against the vigorous Islamic world. The knights defended the Holy Land for a long time, but were finally expelled at their last stronghold at Acre in 1291. The Order of St. John moved to Cyprus for fifteen years, then Rhodes, and lastly Malta.

If you are going to read Bradford's The Great Siege: Malta 1565, I would highly recommend that you read something on the Knights of Malta and their origins (this book would be a good choice). I give the book four stars because I really enjoyed reading Attard's Knights of Malta than this particular book. Perhaps, it was the trendy front over, the fewer pages, the comfortable feeling folding the pages or his better storytelling of the Great Siege in my opinion.

An excellent scholarly account of the Knights of St. John, Rhodes, and Malta. Very well researched, and I found the writing interesting and exciting, although others may find it tough to slog through. Absolutely the definitive work on the order.