A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2015 Oxford University Press On November 30, 2015, the Oxford University Press published Craig L. Symonds' The U.S. Navy: A Concise History. This 152-page hardcover covers the long history of America's naval service from its humble beginnings as the Continental Navy during the American Revolution (1775-83) all the way to its present standing as the strongest military fleet in the world. As the title and number of pages suggest, this book by the author of The Civil War at Sea, The Battle of Midway, and Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History is not a comprehensive account of the 243-year-long history of the United States Navy. Rather, it's akin to an orientation booklet that a midshipman might get upon arrival at the U.S. Naval Academy (where Symonds is a Professor Emeritus in the history department) or something that you or I might find at a gift shop in Annapolis, MD or any Navy town. Per Oxford University Press's description, The U.S...

©2013 Burford Books  On March 17, 1998, Burford Books, an independent book publisher based in Ithaca, N.Y., reissued Walter Lord's Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway as part of its Classics of War series. Originally published in 1967 by Harper Collins and reissued in paperback several times between 1968 and 1998, Lord's third book about World War II battles was one of the most popular and influential books about the Battle of Midway (June 4-7, 1942) and its impact on the Pacific War. Along with Gordon W. Prange's Miracle at Midway, Incredible Victory laid the groundwork for the mythologization of the war's second carrier battle as a modern-day David and Goliath story in which a badly-outnumbered American fleet defeated the mighty Combined Fleet of the Japanese navy. In the spring of 1942, the Japanese Empire was at the height of its power. In the first five months after the devastating attack on the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor, Japan had defeated American, Bri...

Cover art by Thomas Hart Benton.© 2001 Naval Institute Press The diesel-electric powered submarine was one of the deadliest weapons used in naval warfare during the two World Wars. During both wars in the Atlantic, Germany's U-boats did extensive damage to Allied shipping and twice threatened to starve Britain. After December 7, 1941, during the campaigns in the Pacific, the Japanese submarine force, tied to a rigid doctrine of stalking enemy capital ships, scored a few outstanding kills of carriers and the USS Indianapolis but did little to harm Allied cargo ships. In Clay Blair, Jr.'s Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War Against Japan, reissued by the U.S. Naval Institute (the same publishing company that gave readers Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October  novel) after several decades of being out of print, is a fascinating and detailed look at the officers, sailors and submarines of the Silent Service and their nearly four-year-long campaign against Japan...

Cover of the paperback edition of Six Frigates.   (C) 2008 W.W. Norton & Company On October 17, 2006, W.W. Norton & Company published Ian W. Toll's Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. In its 500+ pages, Toll (a former political speechwriter and financial analyst) tells the incredible story of the founding of the United States Navy during the Presidential tenures of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Set in the tumultuous early years of the Republic, Six Frigates follows the events and personalities that led to the appropriation, construction, and eventual deployment of the Navy's first post-Revolutionary War frigates: USS United States, USS Constellation, USS Constitution, USS Chesapeake, USS Congress, and USS President.  Before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution, the establishment of a permanent military became the most divisive issue facing the new government. The founders―particularly Jefferson, Madison, and Adams―debated...

Cover design for Bantam Books: Belina Huey. (C) 2005 Bantam Books, a division of Penguin Random House World War II is now three quarters of a century away in our collective memory. All of the great or infamous military and civilian leaders – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, George Patton, Takeo Kurita, and William F. Halsey – are long dead. The elderly veterans that in the U.S. are dying at a rate of 2000 men and women a day are now the junior officers and enlisted men who were then the youngest. In a decade or so, the last people to have lived during history’s largest and bloodiest clash of arms will be gone, leaving only the historical record and a plethora of monuments as reminders of those turbulent, violent years. Since the 1980s, when authors like Max Hastings,   Stephen Ambrose, Rick Atkinson, Antony Beevor, and Carlo D’Este kicked off the renaissance of popular World War II history writing, many fine books have been publ...

Cover art by Home Box Office, Inc. (C) 2010 NAL Caliber Books   Pros:  Interesting concept; vivid anecdotes; compelling characters Cons:  None After the phenomenal success of their HBO miniseries  Band of Brothers,  executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks turned to their friend Stephen E. Ambrose, author of the book they had just adapted for TV, and started thinking about future World War II projects they could collaborate on. The Second World War, after all, was a topic Ambrose knew backwards and forwards from his stint as President Dwight D. Eisenhower's official biographer and his subsequent career as a history professor. Ike had - before entering politics in 1952 - been one of America's top generals during the war, rising to the title of Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force and five-star general before the end of hostilities in 1945, so it was not a stretch for Ambrose to pen several best-selling books about the U.S. ...

(C) 1999 Berkley Books The late Tom Clancy is best remembered as the creator of the Jack Ryan series of novels that began with 1984's The Hunt for Red October and continues, to this day, via the works of his last co-authors, Grant Blackwood and Mark Greaney. Clancy, even in life, became a "name brand" which is used to market military-themed computer and video games ( Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy's EndWar, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell ) and book series ( Tom Clancy's OpCenter ) which consist of novels that were not written by Clancy himself.   Before his death at the age of 66 in October of 2013, Clancy was also a respected commentator on military affairs, Second Amendment rights, and politics. He was not shy about his conservative views; the Jack Ryan series often depicts liberal politicians (such as the hapless and unethical Edward Kealty, a thinly-disguised doppelganger for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts) as morally weak, idealistic-...