The most recommended books about court-martial cases

The near-savant brilliance of Charles Wilkes, captain of the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-1842), is prominently tee’d up here by Philbrick (one of our greatest writers of lesser-known nautical history), as is his jealous, petty, venal and stubborn mindset which ultimately was his undoing.

Also the primary reason you’ve never really heard of this remarkable scientific voyage that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean and even named the newly discovered Antarctic continent. I was surprised to learn the Exploring Expedition was much more ambitious than the overland Lewis and Clark trek, scooped up infinitely more specimens of natural history and scientific data – but was nearly completely forgotten in our history books.

Philbrick untangles the perils and personalities to help us understand why. 

A mystery novel, that tells a haunting, captivating story of the cost paid by one individual soldier at the battle of Messines Ridge. Impeccably researched, the reader is given a firm historical grounding of the physical, psychological, and geophysical costs of being at the explosive, bloody cutting edge of warfare on the Western Front.

Full of fascinating sci-fi technology and characters, The Last Watch caused me to feel awe. The central concept surrounds the discovery of the edge of the universe. It’s called The Divide, and humans have used alien technology to reach it. And you definitely do not want to cross over The Divide. But what happens when the universe begins to collapse? The Sentinels—a rag-tag group of humans who’ve been banished for committing various crimes against humanity—are the guardians at The Divide. Led by an equally powerful and flawed protagonist, Adequin Rake, they square off against aliens and humans to try and save the universe. Action, love and death, and the emotions inherent in these things, are thoroughly enjoyed when you read this book.

Like many people, I heard about the USS Indianapolis in the movie Jaws during Robert Shaw's fantastic monologue. The memory of that scene and that story never left me, and decades later, I stumbled upon this book in a used bookstore. Written in a third-person voice and using all the tools of a fiction writer, the author spins a much stranger tale than a Steven Spielberg movie could ever be.

It is a fascinating and horrifying account of the greatest naval disaster in the U.S. Navy's history, caused by cascading foul-ups, miscommunications, and oversights in the final days of World War II.

It was an engaging read that kept me up dreaming about swarming sharks for several nights in a row.

I based one of the most riveting portions of Daughter on Carlson’s meticulously-researched account of what one newspaper called the “Staked Plains Horror.” And horror it was.  In the middle of a dangerously dry summer, forty Buffalo Soldiers led by white officers set off on a routine scouting expedition. Several days later three Black troopers returned to report that all the men of Troop A were missing and presumed dead.

Eventually, all but four of the party made it back to Fort Concho with tales of having survived by drinking the blood of their dead horses and their own urine. Carlson’s careful examination of the records of the court-martial trials that followed reveal what a large role the officers’ bigotry and ineptitude played in triggering this catastrophe.

This book is a slow-burn thriller, and I found it both compelling and disturbing. 

I love books that draw on contemporary issues and raise complex and thought-provoking issues. Word of Honor uses the Vietnam War to tackle difficult topics, and with the tagline, The Moral Maze of a Man at War, it’s the kind of book I revel in, one that took me through a multitude of emotions and challenged me to question more.

I’m a sucker for complex stories, novels that tackle politics, personal relationships, and very human dilemmas. This novel had it all.  I became invested in the outcome; I both cheered for and dreaded the consequences for the main character. That uncertainty was compelling and provocative.

This slow-burn, page-turner isn’t an action story, but gripped me and made me think. I like that.

A novel about a rusty old destroyer minesweeper, a supremely difficult captain, a mixed bag officers in a dysfunctional wardroom, a horrific typhoon, and a nail-biting court-martial. The seagoing and combat portions of the novel are very realistic, reflecting Wouk’s time in uniform on a similar class of ship in the Pacific during WWII. In my hand as I write this is a battered 1951 first edition of the novel, with a slightly tattered cover, which I treasure above almost any book in the five thousand volumes in my personal library. Over the years of my career, I’ve returned again and again to The Caine Mutiny, and the fundamental lesson of this sea novel is what both leaders and followers owe each other, especially in the demanding crucible of the sea.

The book is about an 18th-century British secret mission to South America during the Imperial War with Spain. I love history and the way David Grann makes this an absolutely thrilling bit of narrative non-fiction.

You can feel the terror of the sea voyage and the storms, the anguish as the crew faces unbelievable odds and challenges, the hunger when there’s no food, and the rage as the crew looks for someone to blame for their misfortune.

It was a ripping yarn that wouldn’t let me go, right to the end, even after some managed to get back to England. I felt like I was there. This didn’t have the dusty feel of a tale pulled from an old archive or dredged up out of yellowed letters or from the crumbling pages of library books.  This was a living, breathing story of heroism, cowardice, virtue, and malice. It was a… show more.