Fans pick 100 books like Pursuit

I am the author of six books on World War II, including my book that's listed below and Escape from Java: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the USS Marblehead. My fascination with history began at a young age when I built model ships and read books about World War II. My interest eventually grew into research and writing. I have interviewed scores of veterans from the Pacific War. My articles have appeared in World War II History, Naval History, and World War II Quarterly Magazines.

I am a retired police officer, except I don’t write about law enforcement. I write about the military. My degree is in Political Science and History. I am a meticulous researcher. My emphasis has been on the Vietnam War. My father served in both the U.S. Navy and the Army National Guard. One of my great uncles served in Africa during WWII. His brother during the Occupation of Germany. I have a step-uncle who spent time as a POW in Laos during the Vietnam War. My step-father served in the Army National Guard, and my step-brother in the U.S. Army, Korea and Ft. Hood.

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. 

I’ve been writing on maritime, naval, and military subjects for nearly a quarter-century, beginning with my first published work, “Unsinkable – The Full Story of RMS Titanic” in 1998. My fascination with ships and the sea originated with my father, who served in the US Merchant Marine in the Second World War. His experiences in the North Atlantic in 1943-44 gave me to understand that no matter how large and powerful – or small and fragile – a ship may be, it is her crewmen who brings her life, and sometimes go to their deaths with her. It’s their stories that matter most when recounting the naval battles of any war, and these five books are among the best at presenting them.

In a long international business career, I’ve survived military coups, a guerrilla war, storms at sea, life in mangrove swamps, tropical forest, offshore oil platforms, and boardrooms. My passion for nineteenth-century history, and my understanding of the cutting-edge technology of that time, have inspired the Dawlish Chronicles. The Royal Navy officer, Nicholas Dawlish, and Florence, the love of his life, are real people to me. The challenges they face are strongly linked to actual events both overseas and in Britain in the late 19th century and I know most of the settings from personal experience.

I’m the son of a wartime merchant seaman who in 1944 joined ship at age 16 after becoming an orphan. The sea remained his life’s passion even after he got kicked off ship in 1947 as a result of poor eyesight (he was long-sighted and you’d kinda think that a good thing on being a deck officer). I grew up with the stories of the war at sea and guess what: It rubbed off, and in his later life we wrote books together. And so, dear reader, here we are. Welcome to my world.

I’m the son of a wartime merchant seaman who in 1944 joined ship at age 16 after becoming an orphan. The sea remained his life’s passion even after he got kicked off ship in 1947 as a result of poor eyesight (he was long-sighted and you’d kinda think that a good thing on being a deck officer). I grew up with the stories of the war at sea and guess what: It rubbed off, and in his later life we wrote books together. And so, dear reader, here we are. Welcome to my world.

I’m Steve R Dunn, a naval historian and author of twelve books of naval history, with two more commissioned for 2024 and 2025. As a child I used to invent naval fleets and have always loved the water.  Now, I write about little-known aspects of the First World War at sea, and try to demonstrate that, despite the mass slaughter and ultimate victory on the Western Front, if Britain had lost command of the sea, the war would have been lost. The combination of recognisably modern weapons with Nelsonian command and control systems renders the naval side of WW1 endlessly fascinating to me.

I have been a lover of history all my life, seeing its course change in decisive conflicts, the clash of empires that defined the winners and losers. One thing that always fascinated me was seemingly insignificant events that ended up assuring either victory or defeat. I have always said that “the devil, and the story, is in the details.” The books on this list provide those details exhaustively. These histories are the grist for the mill of my writing mind, and I think my readers can clearly see that my books are “labors of love” in homage to the history I have studied so diligently throughout my life.

I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories.