April 2010 - Glenair, Inc.

#5 It is 1667 and the mighty naval war
between the Dutch and the English still
rages. Sir Francis Courtney and his
son Hal, in their fighting caravel, are on
patrol off Southern Africa, lying in wait
for a galleon of the Dutch East India
Company returning from the Orient.
The battle is joined and doesn’t quit
for 600+ pages. If you do not like
ship-to-ship battles, brutal sword
fights, daring captures and escapes,
torid love scenes, and all the other
features of a classic historical
action-adventure novel, then Birds
of Prey is not for you. If you do, then
you are in for a ride.
#6 Captain Blood is the tale of Peter
Blood, an Irish-born doctor and
adventurer with unusual sense and
principles. Students of business
and management will enjoy Blood’s
unconventional views on how to run
a successful privateering campaign
and how to view the world with
objective sense and principled
conviction: “You may define our
positions as you please, said
Captain Blood to M. de Rivaroli.
But I’ll remind you that the nature
of a thing is not changed by the
name you give it.”
QwikConnect n April 2010
#7 The Caine Mutiny
is Herman Wouk’s
1951 Pulitzer Prizewinning
novel. The story
begins as we meet the
newly assigned and
inexperienced officers of
the decrepit World War II
minesweeper, the Caine,
who must struggle with the
psychological challenges of
service under the paranoid
and cowardly Captain Queeg.
Queeg’s arbitrary enforcement
of naval discipline leads the
ship’s officers reluctantly down
the path of conspiracy. The
Pacific typhoon that triggers the
mutiny is a whopper.
#8 Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous
should be every boy’s favorite sea story.
When spoiled brat Harvey Cheyne falls off
an ocean liner in the North Atlantic fishing
grounds, he is rescued by the “We’re Here”
out of Gloucester, Mass. In the predictable
but endearing story, Harvey gradually learns
what it takes to be a man in the unforgiving
world of the commercial fisherman—and of
course returns to the arms of his parents as
the mature and self-reliant son they always
wanted.
#9 Das Boot or “The Boat “ by
Lothar-Günther Buchheim depicts
the brutal life of the submariner in
the Atlantic theater during World War
II. Buchheim’s account of one great
captain and his crew is as funny,
sweaty, gritty, and frightening as any
in the annals of sea literature. You’ll
empathize with the Germans (the
captain has no love for Hitler) as the
hunters become the prey, lurking on
the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar,
afraid to lower a toilet seat for fear
of being heard, unable to keep a
cigarette lit as the oxygen wanes...the
expression “you could cut the tension
with a knife” could have been coined
for this book.
#10 The Sea Wolf by
Jack London. If you
love sea stories,
this one is a doozy!
Sealer captain
Wolf Larsen is an
obsessed figure
who conducts a
psychological
battle with
Humphrey
von Weydon,
a castaway
rescued at sea
by Larson’s
sealer Ghost,
bound for the
Bering Strait. The run amok Captain
and von Weydon embark on a psychological battle of
wits which culminates in a tug-of-war for the rescued
man’s soul. Ambrose Bierce wrote, “Wolf Larsen... the
hewing out and setting up of such a figure is enough
for a man to do in one lifetime.”
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