[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to build on the weekend post on my Dad’s book and highlight a handful of other scholarly books that have been especially meaningful to me. Leading up to a weekend tribute to a scholar I love even more than her book!]
World War II naval histories were one of the defining interests of this young AmericanStudier: from the Sink the Bismarck! board game to the Tarawa beachhead model (and all the others I highlighted in that post) to Alistair MacLean’s H.M.S. Ulysses(1955), if it involved or was even adjacent to 1940s warships, I was on board. So when I read Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (1963) early in high school, I was both ready to be blown away but also still so inspired by Morison’s ability to distill so many histories (the book is a concise adaptation of his 15-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II) into such a readable narrative text. And then I learned that Morison had gained a commission from FDR in 1942 to join the Navy and document its operations from the inside, and that during those experiences he narrowly escaped death at the hands of a kamikaze pilot among many other striking moments. Such fraught personal details only make Morison’s achievements as a historian even more impressive, and make Two-Ocean War a book I still truly love.
Next Valentine’s read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Scholarly books or voices you love?
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