The most recommended books about the Pacific Ocean

My next book is by far the least well-known of my authors, and it’s by far the least well-known book. It’s by my friend and colleague, Samuel Alexander, with whom I’ve co-written a couple of books now, including This Civilisation is Finished.

It’s a splendid read. For philosophers, it’s charming, because Sam is continually bringing in implicitly, and most explicitly, the great philosophers. He’s quoting or talking about Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and the rest. His characters sometimes offer lines of one of them to each other. And, in that sense, it’s very much a novel of ideas in the tradition of utopias and dystopias.

This book is one of those books I reread every few years for the pleasure of Stevenson’s prose mastery and its richness in accurate detail of South Pacific Island existence.

RLS ranked this novella among his top accomplishments. Written in his final years at his home on the island of Upolu in Samoa, it is a lesson in the art of storytelling. Set on a small South Seas Island, it encapsulates in its tale of one white trader’s experience the essence of the human interface between two disparate cultures. While his In the South Seas journals more deeply explore the intricacies of island life, This book takes you there 150 years ago.

A tale of the world’s end should be intense, and I love how Cascade is driven by ethical urgency, its gallows humour lurching grippingly into dead seriousness.

As ancient magic cataclysmically awakens (in a clear analogue to climate change), media tycoons, wizards, researchers, and anarchists strive and struggle. Some hope to mitigate catastrophe; others choose to unleash evil—racism, xenophobia, the sadistic thrill of the jackboot—for political gain. All politics are petty at the end of the world, but we remain sadly human.

For me, what lingers past the final page is a vision of humanity within catastrophe. If we are our own greatest enemy, we are also the reason we carry on. Magic, like nature, is indifferent to suffering. To be saved, we must save each other.

Bones of My Grandfather is a grandson’s search for answers to the astonishing saga of a soldier lost in brutal fighting on a remote atoll in the Pacific and the hole that loss left in his family and their descendants. His loss was in the headlines because his family was well-known and wealthy, but even that didn't help them bring home his remains.

Woven among details of the battle are pockets of family history, the politics of finding and identifying remains, discussion of the War Graves Registration Service, amphibious warfare history, and even the politics of awarding war medals, the Medal of Honor had been denied to Bonnyman in 1944, but awarded to him two years later.

The US Navy at war in the Pacific is the backdrop to a series of high-pressure decisions made by various officers in command. The most striking is the heroic attack of a group of lightly armed US destroyers against the main forces of the Japanese Imperial Navy in the battle of Leyte Gulf. The so-called “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” and the heroism in particular of Commander Ernest Evans, a Native American who receives the Medal of Honor for his decisions in the battle. I’ve always been awestruck by Evans, who was a quiet, thoughtful man who had to make the hardest choice literally “to risk it all” to achieve his mission.

The earlier books on my list lay the foundation for McCullough’s masterpiece, which focuses on the French and American efforts at Panama.

While many readers interested in Panama and the Canal often start here, this book is best served at the end: like a great dessert and aperitif following a wonderful meal.

I have read many Musk books, and seen many Musk videos. So this is just one of many.

I have extracted the methods, Musk uses, in a collection. I have to admit, one reason I like them, is that they are essentially the same as my own, in Competitive Engineering! Just great engineering and management.

But, Musk, as yet, has not written his own methods book, or even articles or slides. So we have these biographical books, and videos, as the only evidence of his methods.

But his methods are clear enough in essence. “Fanatic on metrics” (source March 1, 2023 Investors video). Frequent, early, automated, measurement of results. Empowerment to increment towards a super-competitive product, service, and organizational results. Visions of the very best qualities, by far (example Safety).

Three Tesla models are top 3 of the 50 safest cars currently rated for safety! I value my family’s lives.… show more.

In the 19th century, it was believed that if a way could be found through North America’s ice barrier, beyond lay an open sea offering ships a shortcut to the Pacific.  The quest to find it became a litany of disaster, suffering, human spirit stretched to breaking point and heroic survival. Canada’s greatest historian, Pierre Burton, turns factual accounts into a riveting read, ‘a cliff-hanger with colorful characters’ as Newsweek described it. This is another book I hate to lend for fear I’ll never get it back.

Imagine, if you will: the world’s tallest mountain suddenly appears in the middle of the ocean. Where did it come from? What is its purpose? And what happens when dumb, curious humans (a natural but very dangerous combination) decide to go investigate?

They certainly don’t have fun! But the reader will because this horror novel is so wonderfully weird that I was gobsmacked by the time I finished. You can’t be sad when you’re wondering if there are monsters in the snow…

I first learned about World War II news correspondent Ernie Pyle when I was a boy in the 1960s. An elementary school reading book included an article about him and did not gloss over the fact he died at the hands of a Japanese machine gunner on April 17, 1945.

His story stuck with me, perhaps because my father fought in World War II, just like the soldiers Pyle wrote about.

Pyle mostly covered the European theater, becoming beloved by Americans as he reported on the lives of average soldiers. But in early 1945, he moved to the Pacific. In the Last Chapter, published a year after his death, Pyle writes about and celebrates the marines, sailors, and pilots he encountered in the Pacific, noting their names and hometowns as if writing a personal letter to their families back home. But for the reader, there is a sense of… show more.