ROBERT SHENK, America's Black Sea Fleet: The US Navy Amidst War and Revolution, 1919-1923 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012). Pp. 366. $24.94 cloth.This is a very difficult book to review fairly, since it is such a striking mixture of the good and the frankly bad. So what's good about it? First, like most publications of the Naval Institute Press, it is very well produced; it feels and looks good. Second, a review of local American naval reports on the tumultuous events that transformed Turkey between 1915 and 1923 can hardly fail to command interest, especially now perhaps with Turkey playing such a pivotal role in the events of the Near East. This was the age of the Armenian massacres, the burning of Smyrna and the expulsion of the Hellenic community from Turkey and the emergence of the modern secular state that we know today. The book is also a portrayal of naval engagement in action, a case study of what navies are used for when there's no war to fight.Observing these upheavals, and to some extent participating in the management of the tragedies they led to, the U.S. Navy maintained in Constantinople a small naval mission commanded by Admiral Mark Bristol. Making major use of the admiral's papers held in the special collections section of the library of the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, the author assembled a praiseworthy mass of material relating to his subject that intrinsically will be of great interest, both to people wanting to understand the events of the time and to those interested in the role of navies in times of difficult and contested peace. Nor is there any doubt that the author knows what he is talking about. He has clearly researched the background and the context in which this largely neglected naval mission operated. There is, in sum, ample material here for an in-depth analysis of the issue of these events and of the U.S. Naval role in them.Sadly, though, this book is no such thing. For a start, there is no real investigation of what the U.S. Navy was supposed to be doing in Constantinople in the first place. Indeed, the book's title is profoundly mis-leading in that there is very little in it of real substance about the Black Sea Fleet per se. Instead, the bulk of it is about the events ashore and what Admiral Bristol thought about them. One of the reasons for this was that the U.S. Naval contingent here was a very small force compared to the British, French, Greek and other fleets that also operated there and had much more substantial roles to play. The author rather elliptically makes the point that another reason for the helplessness of the U. …