Book Reviews
Page 19
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Fire fighting worldwide
FIRE ENGINES of the World (Osprey Publishing; £12.95) is a lavish volume and includes colour photos — it is what the Sunday paper reviewers would call a coffee-table-sized book, and at its price is a potential source for book tokens.
Author J. Mallet provides a survey of the equipment used worldwide (well, not China, but he does finish up with Vietnam).
This, then, is a book aimed at those attracted by the romance of fire fighting and contains a lot of technical information. Whenever a specialised service comes in, he says, it has been prompted by some great disaster. Afire during a reception at the Austrian Embassy in Paris on July 2, 1810, led Napoleon I, who was present at that time, to embark on a complete reorganisation of the city's fire services, as it was evident that the gardes-pompes, whom Du Mouriez du Perier had created during the reign of Louis XVI, were not equal to their task. That's in the section on France, which is so comprehensive that it even includes four paragraphs on the 5,500 inhabitants French possession of St Pierre and Miquelon between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
Osprey Publishing Ltd, 12.14 Long Acre, London WC2E 91P