content: This book offers an interesting diagrammatic presentation of thirty-six warships, ranging from a Roman galley to a "Nimitz"-class aircraft carrier. Naval buffs will find this a useful book, with numbered guides accompanying the cut-away color diagrams that offered details about the layouts of the various ships. Yet the selection of what constitutes a "great" warship is rather idiosyncratic. The selection is exclusively Western in its orientation, as Chinese junks, Ottoman galleys or Imperial Japanese Navy vessels completely absent. Moreover, the compilers seemed to have been unable to decide whether a great warship was an innovative one or a historic one and included selections of both, leaving out others more deserving in the process. As a result, while an interesting resource, it is a limited one that lacks a theme that could have made it a truly valuable book.