Here are 100 books that Naval Institute Guide to Naval Writing fans have personally recommended if you like
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William L. McGee is an award-winning World War II Pacific war historian. His writing career has spanned six decades — three of them in marketing and sales in the broadcasting industry. He is a WWII veteran of the Pacific theater and an atomic veteran of Operation Crossroads, the postwar atomic bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll in 1946.
When I began researching and writing for my books this fifteen-volume set by distinguished historian Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, was one of my first purchases for my World War II library. I consider his series a must-have for any WWII researcher or history buff. I did much of my research and writing on freighters and always took selected volumes with me.
Like all Boomers, I grew up in the shadow of “The War.” My parents, relatives, and others participated in World War II to various extents; all were affected by it. Therefore, I absorbed the Pacific Theater early on. My father trained as a naval aviator, and among my early TV memories is the 1950s series Victory at Sea. My mother coaxed me early on, and an aunt was an English teacher, so I began learning to read before kindergarten. In retrospect, that gave me extra time to start absorbing the emerging literature. Much later I helped restore and flew WW II aircraft, leading to my first book.
President Franklin Roosevelt commissioned Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison to write the definitive history of the U.S. Navy in WW II, and Morison produced an epic 15-volume series between 1947 and 1962.
Despite more recent research it is richly detailed, elegantly written, and remains a standard source. The Two-Ocean War, Morison’s 1963 one-volume condensation covering all theaters of operations, was among the books that piqued my interest in the subject. It is particularly valuable in describing the Pacific island campaigns as well as the war at sea.
Originally published in 1963, this classic, single-volume history draws on Morison's definitive 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. More than a condensation, The Two-Ocean War highlights the major components of the larger work: the preparation for war, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the long war of attrition between submarines and convoys in the Atlantic, the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, the long grind of Guadalcanal, the leapfrogging campaigns among the Pacific islands, the invasion of continental Europe, the blazes of glory at Leyte and Okinawa, and the final grudging surrender of the…
William L. McGee is an award-winning World War II Pacific war historian. His writing career has spanned six decades — three of them in marketing and sales in the broadcasting industry. He is a WWII veteran of the Pacific theater and an atomic veteran of Operation Crossroads, the postwar atomic bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll in 1946.
Published in 2000, this reference book makes previous chronologies of the Navy at war out-of-date. My co-author and wife, Sandra McGee, uses this chronology to create social media posts, such as “On this day…” or “75 Years Ago Today…”.
Ten years after the close of World War II, the U.S. Navy published achronology of its operations in the war. Long out of print, the work focused onwhat were then defined as critical and decisive events. It ignored a multitudeof combat actions as well as the loss or damage of many types of U.S. shipsand craft-particularly auxiliaries, amphibious ships, and district craft-andentirely omitted the U.S. submarine campaign against Japanese shipping, Thisgreatly expanded and updated study, now available in paperback with anindex, goes far beyond the original work, drawing on information from morethan forty additional years of historical research and writing.…
William L. McGee is an award-winning World War II Pacific war historian. His writing career has spanned six decades — three of them in marketing and sales in the broadcasting industry. He is a WWII veteran of the Pacific theater and an atomic veteran of Operation Crossroads, the postwar atomic bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll in 1946.
This hefty 881-page book covers in detail the story of the greatest shipbuilding program in America’s history. When America entered WWII in December 1941, I was chomping at the bit to get in the action, but I had to wait a year until I turned seventeen. I applied for a job at the Kaiser Shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, and trained to be a welder on the big ships.
During World War II, America's shipbuilding industry, mobilized under the U.S. Maritime Commission, set records of production that have never been equaled. Given the daunting task of building ships faster than they were being sunk, shipbuilding firms across the country found new ways to increase their efficiency and scale of production. Huge new shipyards were built, a labor force of 640,000 was employed, and over 55 million deadweight tons of ocean-going ships were delivered, including the famous Liberty and Victory ships. First published in 1951, Ships for Victory chronicles this remarkable wartime program in magisterial detail: the development of revolutionary…
I am an economist who came to realize that the marketplace of ideas was a political doctrine, and not an empirical description of how we came to know what we think we know. Science has never functioned in the same manner across centuries; it was only during my lifetime that it became recast as a subset of market reality. I have spent a fair amount of effort exploring how economics sought to attain the status of a science; but now the tables have turned. It is now scientists who are trained to become first and foremost market actors, finally elevating the political dominance of the economists.
Edwards revealed how the very architecture of early computers owed a debt to the political structures of the Cold War. The innovation of a command/control/information infrastructure set the template for military regimentation, and subsequently for the surveillance society we currently inhabit. The story of how cybernetics—a field that never quite made the grade as pure science—nevertheless conquered the culture, is fascinating.
The Closed World offers a radically new alternative to the canonical histories of computers and cognitive science. Arguing that we can make sense of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their roles as metaphors and political icons, Paul Edwards shows how Cold War social and cultural contexts shaped emerging computer technology―and were transformed, in turn, by information machines.
The Closed World explores three apparently disparate histories―the history of American global power, the history of computing machines, and the history of subjectivity in science and culture―through the lens of the American political imagination. In the process, it reveals intimate…
I’ve always loved military history. Over time, the ancient Greeks won out. They have the coolest equipment! The more you find out about their culture, the more interesting they are. I studied Classics and English Lit. as an undergrad and went to Athens for my Master's. My PhD research was on ancient Greek warfare and historiography–how the Greeks wrote history. That became part of my first book, Military Leaders and Sacred Space in Classical Greek Warfare. I’ve taught in several universities, including courses on warfare, mythology, art, and historiography. I run the Panoply Vase Animation Project, which makes educational animations from ancient antiquities. I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw.
This is a super useful book that really gets into the practical realities of ancient Greek land warfare. With contributions from many noted experts, this book examines the weapons used in classical Greek battles and the contribution of the instruments used for signaling.
There’s a chapter on techniques for identifying battle dead, which is very niche but very interesting. I particularly like the chapter by Michael H. Jameson on sacrifice before battle; this is probably the best treatment available on this subject, and it gives so much insight into the world of classical Greek warfare.
Incorporating research found in ancient literary, iconographic, epigraphic, and archaeological sources, this book explores the experiences of the soldiers who conducted battle on the small plains of ancient Greece. The volume, which draws on the accumulated expertise of nine American and British scholars, emphasizes the actual techniques of fighting and practical concerns as the use of commands, music in warfare, the use of "dog-tags", and ritual on the battlefield.
My passion for developing entrepreneurial and business instinct is simple. It is all based on confidence. Over time, my experiences have shown me that many leaders (myself included) can end up in “decision paralysis” and default to taking no action at all. Leaders can have all of the information and indicators that a decision is the right thing to do, but they default to doing nothing. By developing a better understanding of my own instincts, I have been able to build confidence in the decisions I have made over the past 20 years, thus eliminating any deterrents from making sound decisions.
I really hesitated putting The Art of War on my list. It is almost cliché as a lot of pretentious students of business and entrepreneurs will have a copy of this book prominently displayed in their office or listed as an influence in their professional profiles.
However, the lessons in this book are simple and profound. When you cannot win the battle, do not engage with the enemy. While these seem like simple common sense insights, all business leaders should revisit them in their most simplest terms. There are too many books and resources that will take one of the concepts from The Art of War and turn it into a thesis and completely water down the lessons at hand.
To refine your entrepreneurial instinct, you should frequently revisit what it was built upon. The Art of War is the foundation.
Trained as a physicist and employed for twenty years as an engineer, my great interest in the application of science then led me to write. I authored technical papers on the physics underpinning venerable machines such as pendulum clocks and waterwheels; these were read by the chief editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, who invited me to turn them into a popular science book–the first of fourteen. Often, technological advances were made empirically–the development of sailing ships, bridges, or pocket watches–by working people with no formal knowledge of science, yet their designs survive as triumphs of human thought, as well as useful machines.
This book is unique, to my mind, in topic and style. How is it possible to write engagingly about such a niche subject? Gunpowder was invented in China, but it was in Renaissance Europe that it became adapted to warfare (to say the very least).
This book covers a neglected aspect of technological history in an age otherwise much written about and covers it readably.
Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe explores the history of gunpowder in Europe from the thirteenth century, when it was first imported from China, to the sixteenth century, as firearms became central to the conduct of war. Bridging the fields of military history and the history of technology -- and challenging past assumptions about Europe's "gunpowder revolution" -- Hall discovers a complex and fascinating story. Military inventors faced a host of challenges, he finds, from Europe's lack of naturally occurring saltpeter -- one of gunpowder's major components -- to the limitations of smooth-bore firearms. Manufacturing cheap, reliable gunpowder proved a…
I was born to privilege in Manhattan. A seeker from the get-go, I perpetually yearned to see below the surface of the pond and understand what lay beneath and how the world really works. Not connecting with Western philosophy, religion, or culture, I turned to the wisdom of the East at a young age. I stayed the course through decades of training in Chinese martial arts, eventually reached some understanding of them, and realized my spiritual ambitions when I was ordained a Daoist monk in China in an official government ceremony. I write about China then and now and teach meditation and tai chi around the world.
Both the monk and the martial artist in me have long found Sun Tzu’s treatise on how to conduct military campaigns to be fully as seminal as Carl von Clausewitz’s “On War.” Both books are studied at the United States Military Academy at West Point. I find Sun Tzu’s wisdom to be applicable to both combat and life’s more pleasant endeavors, such as relationships and work. Sun Tzu’s is purported to be the student of the great Daoist Sage Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching, a seminal work that many folks find impenetrable. Perhaps that’s why Sun Tzu can be a bit oblique sometimes, too. This interpretation of his lessons, replete with wonderful illustrations, lends insight into the text and makes it easier to understand.
An entertaining graphic adaptation of the oldest military treatise in the world.
Hailed as the oldest philosophical discussion on military strategy, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has been adapted as a graphic novel by award-winning illustrator Pete Katz. In this collectible thread-bound edition, the narrative focuses on a teacher instructing a pupil on the main points of Sun Tzu’s treatise, with vibrant battle scenes interspersed throughout. Issues such as planning, tactics, maneuvering, and spying are illustrated with full-color scenes, so that readers may gain a greater understanding of principles from the fifth century BC.
I’ve always loved military history. Over time, the ancient Greeks won out. They have the coolest equipment! The more you find out about their culture, the more interesting they are. I studied Classics and English Lit. as an undergrad and went to Athens for my Master's. My PhD research was on ancient Greek warfare and historiography–how the Greeks wrote history. That became part of my first book, Military Leaders and Sacred Space in Classical Greek Warfare. I’ve taught in several universities, including courses on warfare, mythology, art, and historiography. I run the Panoply Vase Animation Project, which makes educational animations from ancient antiquities. I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw.
I love how thorough this book is–it is full of fantastic examples covering all sorts of aspects of ancient Greek warfare. What causes ancient Greek wars? Who fights? How do they prepare? What happens? There are so many interesting questions.
This book, by one of the world’s leading experts, offers many thoughtful answers drawn from ancient literature, archaeology, and iconography–pottery, stone carvings, statues, and statuettes. I come back to this readable, informative book again and again.
From the soldier's-eye view of combat to the broad social and economic structures which shaped campaigns and wars, ancient Greek warfare in all its aspects has been studied more intensively in the last few decades than ever before. This book ranges from the concrete details of conducting raids, battles and sieges to more theoretical questions about the causes, costs, and consequences of warfare in archaic and classical Greece. It argues that the Greek sources present a highly selective and idealised picture, too easily accepted by most modern scholars, and that a more critical study of the evidence leads to radically…
