Here are 100 books that Pacific Crucible fans have personally recommended if you like
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I wear many hats: veteran, PTSD-survivor, gardener, national security and law enforcement worker, certified beer judge, gardener, husband, and father. These last two are the most important by far. So, for my list, I wanted to pick my top five reads that your dad absolutely won’t be able to put down if you were to gift him one of these for Father’s Day! There are all kinds of reading dads out there, from History Dads to Thriller Dads to Fantasy Dads. This list has wonderful, unput-downable, slightly under-the-radar books for all the reading dads you know!
I love an underdog story, and this book tells the story of a small, desperately outnumbered U.S. fleet facing down a much larger Japanese force off Samar during World War II—perhaps the ultimate underdog tale, with life-or-death stakes.
I broke down in tears at multiple points reading this book, a true account of absolute heroism in the face of overwhelming odds. This is one of the very best nonfiction World War II books I have ever read. It’s exhaustively-researched and detailed, but is not in any way boring—it reads like a vintage Tom Clancy novel.
“This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.”
With these words, Lieutenant Commander Robert W. Copeland addressed the crew of the destroyer escort USS Samuel B. Roberts on the morning of October 25, 1944, off the Philippine Island of Samar. On the horizon loomed the mightiest ships of the Japanese navy, a massive fleet that represented the last hope of a staggering empire. All that stood between it and Douglas MacArthur’ s vulnerable invasion force were the Roberts and the other small ships of a tiny American…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I became an author because I loved books and wanted to craft my own. Here are five books I consumed first as a reader and then as a writer, methodically noting what made these books brilliant in style, depth, and plot. If you enjoy thrillers or science fiction and are looking for books to hone your craft as a writer, here are my choices.
This book is the book that made me decide to become an author. I was always a voracious reader and crazy about all things technological—space exploration, airplanes, naval warfare, you name it. In my mind, there was no way anyone would want to read a book about my interests—until Tom Clancy showed it absolutely could be done and singlehandedly created a new genre of fiction with one book.
His research was so accurate that he was accused of spilling classified information about our submarine capabilities and tactics. But no, he was just an insurance agent from Owings, Maryland, who touched a 220-volt wire in my soul that made me decide, “Someday I’m going to do that, too!”
Tom Clancy's rich imagination and his remarkable grasp of the capabilities of advanced technology give this novel an amazing ring of authenticity. It is a thriller with a new twist, a "military procedural" with an ingenious, tightly woven plot that revolves around the defection of a Soviet nuclear submarine--the USSR's newest and most valuable ship, with its most trusted and skilled officer at the helm.
A deadly serious game of hide-and-seek is on. The entire Soviet Atlantic Fleet is ordered to hunt down the submarine and destroy her at all costs. The…
I’m pretty well qualified to provide you with a list of five great books about men at war because, frankly, I’ve spent half my life reading them and the other half trying to write them (you be the judge!). My degree in Military Studies was focused on the question of what makes men endure the lunacy of war (whether they be ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’), and it was in fiction that I found some of the clearest answers–clue: it’s often less about country and duty and more about the love of the men alongside the soldier. In learning how to write, I also learned how to recognize great–enjoy!
I came across this book while researching why the US Army (and Marines) struggled so badly in the Vietnam War. As with all the books I’m recommending here, it spoke to me of how men go to war for their duty but stay at war for their brothers.
It speaks volumes of the frustrations and contradictions of a war in which an American generation skewed to the poor and racially discriminated against was sent to fight a highly motivated army of liberation and paid the price for their obedience. And told me more about what really happened in the valleys of that benighted country than any history book could.
I read it cover to cover and then read it again, eagerly consuming its truth at a time when the scars were so fresh that the truth was barely starting to emerge, and I commend it to you both as a…
Hailed as the most important novel to emerge from the Vietnam War when first published in 1978, this book launched a spectacular writing career for James Webb that now includes four bestselling novels. A much-decorated former Marine who fought and was wounded in Vietnam, Webb tells the story of a platoon of tough, young Marines enduring the tropical hell of Southeast Asian jungles while facing an invisible enemy--in a war no one understands. Filled with the sounds and smells of combat, it is nevertheless a book about people, an amazing variety of closely observed characters caught up in circumstances beyond…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a young boy who made model airplanes and hung them on his bedroom ceiling with fishing lines and thumbtacks as if the planes were dogfighting. The aircraft were inspired by a movie called The Battle of Britain and were the same Messerschmitts, Spitfires, and Hurricanes. The boy grew up and began writing books for a living, making it his mission to help people love history as much as he did. One day, it dawned on him to write about his long-ago planes and their epic battle. I am that boy, and that's when I wrote my book.
I write stories about famous people and moments in history. I like to strip down the narrative and make history read like a top-notch thriller. But to do that, I need to stand on the shoulders of authors who devoted ten or a dozen years to researching and writing the detailed lives of a subject they adore. I do not have the attention span to spend so long on one character.
I love this book because William Manchester (and Paul Reid, who stepped in to finish the book when Manchester died) loves Winston Churchill. What he wore, how he spoke, who he loved, what he drank. It is hundreds of pages of gorgeous detail, waiting for a long winter’s reading night.
This is the second in William Manchester's masterly 3 volume life of Winston Churchill. It contests the favoured view that Churchill's finest hour was as Britain's wartime leader, viewing his greatest period as a statesman during 1932 to 1940, ignored in Parliament and disowned by the social and political establishment as a warmonger, he stood his ground, both in the Commons and outside of it, maintaining his principles until ultimately he succeeded in drawing the country behind him. He is seen as a man with limitations who could be unkind and callous, indiscreet and reckless to the point of foolhardiness…
I am a Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, where I taught for thirty years, including a four-year term as History Department Chair. I was the first person to win both the Naval Academy’s Teacher of the Year award (1988) and its Researcher of the Year award (1998). I received the Navy Meritorious Service Award in 1989 and the Superior Civilian Service medal four times. In 1994-95, I was a Professor of Strategy at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. After retirement, I returned to the Naval Academy in 2012 as The Class of 1957 Distinguished Professor of Naval History.
In chronological order, I’ll start with this book (1882, modern reprint 1999) by Theodore Roosevelt. There are many excellent modern books about this conflict, but a reader cannot go wrong by turning to an early book on the subject by a young (22) Theodore Roosevelt. Begun as his senior thesis at Harvard, it remains in print today and breathes with the future president’s love of all things naval.
"The Naval War of 1812" is an insightful historical work written by Theodore Roosevelt, an esteemed American statesman, historian, and the 26th President of the United States. Published in 1882, this comprehensive book delves into the lesser-known aspects of the War of 1812, focusing specifically on the naval battles that shaped the conflict between the United States and Great Britain.
In this complete edition, Roosevelt meticulously examines the events leading up to the war, providing a detailed account of the political tensions, economic disputes, and maritime issues that ultimately culminated in the conflict. He masterfully explores the motivations and strategies…
I am a Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, where I taught for thirty years, including a four-year term as History Department Chair. I was the first person to win both the Naval Academy’s Teacher of the Year award (1988) and its Researcher of the Year award (1998). I received the Navy Meritorious Service Award in 1989 and the Superior Civilian Service medal four times. In 1994-95, I was a Professor of Strategy at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. After retirement, I returned to the Naval Academy in 2012 as The Class of 1957 Distinguished Professor of Naval History.
The dean of American naval historians was Samuel Eliot Morison, who penned a remarkable number of books on the subject, including the 15-volume History Of Naval Operations In World War II. But among his best works is this biography that he wrote on Matthew Perry, which covers the years from the War of 1812 through the Civil War.
The younger brother of Oliver Hazard Perry of Lake Erie fame, Matthew Perry was a central player in the African Squadron, the War with Mexico, and the Opening of Japan.
A very good+ copy, clean, crisp, and unmarked, in a very good- dust jacket with some foxing and a few chips and tears. First edition. Cloth. 8vo. xxiii, 482 pp. Illus. with 75 b/w photos, drawings, and maps. The American Naval Officer who Helped Found Liberia, Hunted Pirates in the West Indies, Practised Diplomacy with the Sultan of Turkey and the King of the Two Sicilies Commanded the Gult Squadron in the Mexican War, Promoted the Steam Navy and the Shell Gun, and Conducted the Naval Expedition which Opened Japan.
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I am a Professor Emeritus of History at the United States Naval Academy, where I taught for thirty years, including a four-year term as History Department Chair. I was the first person to win both the Naval Academy’s Teacher of the Year award (1988) and its Researcher of the Year award (1998). I received the Navy Meritorious Service Award in 1989 and the Superior Civilian Service medal four times. In 1994-95, I was a Professor of Strategy at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England. After retirement, I returned to the Naval Academy in 2012 as The Class of 1957 Distinguished Professor of Naval History.
Any important American naval history book list must include Alfred Thayer Mahan’s book. It is not about American naval history, but it greatly influenced American naval history. It is not a good read; detailed descriptions of fleet engagements between ships of the line from the Anglo-Dutch wars to the Napoleonic Wars dominate the narrative.
However, Mahan’s emphasis on the importance of possessing naval power provided the impetus for America’s own naval expansion at the end of the 19th century.
This illustrated edition of Influence of Sea Power Upon History is complete with the original tables and battle maps, permitting readers utmost comprehension of the naval engagements described.
Alfred Mahan's exceptional examination of naval military forces and their growing significance and sway in the colonial era of Empire, remains unrivalled for its all-encompassing approach to the growth of naval conflict in the 17th and 18th centuries. Designed both as a reference book and as a vivid history in its own right, this text describes how various European powers grappled with and sought to exploit the advent of new technology and…
I am Daniel Hammel and my father Eric Hammel was a prolific author and military historian. He specialized in the Marine Corps and specifically World War II. Though he has passed, several of these books, especially Day of Infamy, inspired him to become an author, where he wrote over 40 books. This list is an ode to my father, Eric, and to his many accomplishments.
The third and final book of the epic Pacific War Trilogy, Twilight of the Gods is the story of the crushing of the once venerable Japanese Empire. At just under 800 pages the book describes in the great detail the coming apocalypse for the Japanese war machine. While 1943 was pivotal with the war in the Pacific having essentially been won by the Allies, it was 1944 and 1945 where the real murder of empire happened. In these two years of horrendous fighting, hundreds of thousands died for what was clearly a lost cause. The Japanese tried one last time at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, but were massacred by the incredible might of the U.S. Navy and combined forces. Toll brings the reader into the little details of the war, and how they affected everything.
In June 1944, the United States launched a crushing assault on the Japanese navy in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The capture of the Mariana Islands and the accompanying ruin of Japanese carrier airpower marked a pivotal moment in the Pacific War. No tactical masterstroke or blunder could reverse the increasingly lopsided balance of power between the two combatants. The War in the Pacific had entered its endgame.
Beginning with the Honolulu Conference, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met with his Pacific theater commanders to plan the last phase of the campaign against Japan, Twilight of the Gods brings…
I am a professional historian who has been writing books for more than forty years. Most of the books have been about war and dictatorship in the first half of the twentieth century. My last book, The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945, developed my long interest in air war history, which goes back to my first major book written in 1980 on air warfare in World War II.
This is simply one of the finest books to be written on the final critical two years of the Pacific War, with extensive detail on the Japanese side of the conflict and plenty of new insights into the better-known American story. It is a big book, but this was a large conflict both in terms of space, time, and the resources deployed. It was also chiefly a story of amphibious naval warfare, an original and significant development in modern warfare that too often gets understated. By the end of the conflict, the American armed forces had created the shape that they were to employ for the next half-century in projecting power overseas.
May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day-shortened to "V.E. Day"-brought with it the demise of Nazi Germany. But for the Allies, the war was only half-won. Exhausted but exuberant American soldiers, ready to return home, were sent to join the fighting in the Pacific, which by the spring and summer of 1945 had turned into a grueling campaign of bloody attrition against an enemy determined to fight to the last man. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese would clearly make the conditions of victory extraordinarily high.
Following V-E Day, American citizens understandably clamored for their young men to be shipped…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
Perhaps because I get bored easily, or maybe because I hear voices, I have found that my writing lends itself to exploration (different points of view, traditions, styles). I write to learn and to play. I distrust writers whose characters all sound like them, live lives like their own. It feels completely unfanciful, completely disinterested in the long literary tradition of make-believe. Writing and reading, at the end of the day, are ways for me to escape boredom meaningfully, and why should I wish to do that with stories that don’t offer up a small amount of the great kaleidoscope that is life?
Though these stories are actually linked, told over a century and a half through many generations of one family, the characters are so different that what acts as the unifying thread for this book more than anything is its exploration of imperialism’s traumas, perpetrated, experienced, and inherited.
Like my own work that seeks to explore a country’s identity through many different members and eras, Serizawa paints a portrait of Japan before and after the Second World War in breathtaking scope to remind us that events in history have much longer roots and much greater reaches than we recognize.
Winner of the PEN/Open Book Award Winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award
A kaleidoscopic portrait of five generations scattered across Asia and the United States, Inheritors is a heartbreakingly beautiful and brutal exploration of a Japanese family fragmented by the Pacific side of World War II. A retired doctor is forced to confront the moral consequences of his wartime actions. His brother’s wife, compelled to speak of a fifty-year-old murder, reveals the shattering realities of life in Occupied Japan. Half a century later, her estranged American granddaughter winds her way back East, pursuing her absent father’s secrets. Decades into…
