The Restless Wave: A Novel of the United States Navy

380 pp. Scott Bradley James arrives in Annapolis, Maryland, as a plebe in the class of 1941 without a terribly good idea why he wants to be a naval officer, other than that his father was a sailor, and he wants to see the world, whatever that means. Scott and his roommate become fast friends, and, after surviving scrapes of their own making, the two fetch up at Pearl Harbor. War is brewing, and their class has graduated early. They have been sent to battle stations. Admiral James Stavridis is an acclaimed novelist, a decorated military leader, and a great student of military history. He draws on it all to capture the experience of being storm-tossed by the first bloody years of the Second World War. Scott Bradley James is a talented young officer, but he has a lot to learn. And war will have a lot to teach him. The Restless Wave offers a gripping account of the U.S. Navy's astonishing progress through the first three years of the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor through to the Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal. A story of character under pressure in the harshest of proving grounds, it is written with careful fidelity to the truths of war that have made tales of the sea essential to the art of storytelling since Odysseus.