Published by Bantam in 2004, is the first full narrative account of the Battle off Samar, generally considered the greatest upset victory in the U.S. Navy’s history. Using eyewitness accounts, exclusive interviews, and previously classified documents, the book brings to vivid life the story of outgunned American sailors of the small task unit “Taffy 3,” who rose to an impossible challenge and turned back the largest battleship task force that Imperial Japan ever sent into combat. A main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Military Book Club, Last Stand is a charter selection of the U.S. Navy’s Navy Professional Reading Program and the winner of the 2004 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature. It was chosen as one of “a dozen Navy classics” by the U.S. Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine (December 2008 issue).
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¶ Read the Reviews of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
¶ Read the Reviews of Ship of Ghosts
Ship of Ghosts, published by Bantam in 2006, is the story of the USS Houston (CA-30), President Roosevelt’s favorite warship, which entered the annals of our most compelling naval mysteries when she was lost off Java early in World War II. Nothing would be known of the fate of the ship, or of her crew, until the war was won. The final radio message from Captain Albert H. Rooks, the commander of the storied flagship of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, gave no hint of the odds his crew had faced—and told nothing of the extraordinary ordeal the ship’s few survivors would confront as slaves on the notorious Burma-Thailand Death Railway, the inspiration for David Lean’s Oscar-winning film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. A main selection of the History Book Club and the Military Book Club, Ship of Ghosts was a 2007 winner of the U.S. Maritime Book Award.
