(Late) summer reading - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

(Late) summer reading

Publishers kept busy while you were on summer leave. From the Khmer Rouge to al-Qaida, from a novel about SEALs to a novel voice about Iwo Jima, and from two perspectives on the Mayaguez incident, here are some recently published notable books to check at your library, bookstore or favorite website:

• The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole Who Infiltrated the CIA by Joby Warrick, Doubleday, 245 pages, $26.95; e-book $14

The Washington Post reporter and writer has credibility, a Pulitzer Prize and the expertise to make complex topics understandable.

• The 14-Hour War, Valor on the Koh Tang and the Recapture of the SS Mayaguez by James E. Wise Jr. and Scott Baron, 320 pages, Naval Institute Press, $34.95; e-book $19 — and:

• The Mayaguez Incident: Testing America’s Resolve in the Post-Vietnam Era by Robert J. Mahoney, 337 pages, Texas Tech University Press, $39.95

Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge seizes a U.S. cargo ship and tests the Gerald Ford administration. Mahoney says the four-day incident 36 years ago helped to produce the “most radical organizational and operational transformation in the Department of Defense.” Wise and Baron focus on 200 Marines who faced Khmer Rouge fighters.

• Viper Force: 56th Fighter Wing — To Fly and Fight the F-16, photographs by John M. Dibbs, text by retired Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Renner, 192 pages, Zenith Press, $40

You might expect 200 color photos of one subject to be monotonous, but most of the images are compelling. Even the flight simulators look dramatic through Dibbs’ lens.

• A Soldier’s Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq by William Doyle, NAL Caliber, 316 pages, $25.95; e-book $13

The jacket says, “this is the story of America’s T.E. Lawrence.” Fluent in Arabic, Patriquin helped gain support for the Sunni Awakening and later was killed in an improvised explosive device blast.

• Suffer in Silence by David Reid, St. Martin’s Press, 352 pages, $24.99; e-book $12

After the Navy SEALs got bin Laden, best-seller lists have included “SEAL Team Six” and “The Heart and the Fist.” Here comes the novel. “Hell Weektakes on a new meaning” with extortion on the Pacific.

• State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America’s Empire by Stephen Glain, Crown, 496 pages, $26; e-book $13

In the turf war between diplomats and warriors, the author explains “how and why American foreign policy became militarized.”

• Confronting Al Qaeda: New Strategies to Combat Terrorism by Kevin McGrath, 336 pages, Naval Institute Press, $42.95

This scholarly book with 59 pages of notes suggests politics must be considered a part of the strategy to fight al-Qaida.

• Fighting Spirit: The Memoirs of Major Yoshitaka Horie and the Battle of Iwo Jima, edited by Robert D. Eldridge and Charles W. Tatum, 264 pages, Naval Institute Press, $26.95

For the record, “the first memoir written by a Japanese military officer who helped plan the Battle of Iwo Jima, to be published in English.” Tatum knows the topic. He was there.

• Grab Their Belts to Fight Them: The Viet Cong’s Big-Unit War Against the U.S., 1965-66 by Warren Wilkins, Naval Institute Press with Association of the U.S. Army, 312 pages, $35.95; e-book $21

The author “draws on a wealth of Communist Vietnamese sources.”

J. Ford Huffman is a Military Times book reviewer.