I water-skied on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, my first successful run after some false starts in trying to recapture a youthful pastime, with the end of my 50s a few weeks away. I’d been reading an engaging new book, Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War, by Doug Most, and as I sped across the water, thought of Admiral Emory S. Land’s statement to a Senate committee: “If you want fast ships, fast shipbuilding, fast women, or fast horses, you pay through the nose.”
Review copies of other upcoming books added to my late-summer reading pile. So You Want to Own Greenland?: Lessons from the Vikings to Trump, by Elizabeth Buchanan, outlines the strategic importance of that northern island, while suggesting that threats to take it over might not be an optimal U.S. strategy. Buchanan, who co-founded the polar warfare program at West Point and headed research for the Australian navy, writes: “Trump could easily celebrate a handsome investment partnership in critical minerals or an increased military footprint for US defence needs, once he walks back his maximalist demands to ‘own’ Greenland.”
Crick: A Mind in Motion, by Matthew Cobb, is a 600-page biography of biologist Francis Crick, coming in November, which a science-journalist friend encouraged me to request, on grounds that a book this long has a particular need of reviewers, as an encouragement for people to undertake reading it, and a substitute for those who won’t. An intriguing insight, from what I’ve read so far, is that Crick’s brilliance relied heavily on clicking with collaborators, including James Watson, with whom he co-discovered the DNA double helix, and Christof Koch, with whom Crick probed the neuroscience of consciousness.
Regarding Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958), whose research was important in Watson and Crick’s work, Cobb writes: “Despite what many people believe, they did not steal Franklin’s data; as you will see, the research for this book has revealed the breakthrough to have been far more collaborative than anyone realised.” Cobb later writes that Crick “struck up a mutually respectful and collegial relationship with Franklin, discussing with her repeatedly and giving her detailed feedback on her draft articles on DNA, forming a friendship that would last the rest of her short life.”
I’m awaiting review copies of other books, including Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA Right, by Laura K. Field, and Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, by John Blair. I also hope to receive a copy of Conjuring the Void: The Art of Black Holes, by Lynn Gamwell (foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson). Recently, in writing about gravitational-wave astronomy, it occurred to me that an obstacle to public understanding and political support of that field is that it’s not geared to produce striking imagery of the sources of the waves, such as black holes; something art can ameliorate.
Launching Liberty opens with a British passenger ship, RMS Scythia, crossing the Atlantic to the U.S. in 1940 amid perils from German U-boats. On board, along with many refugee children and others, was a young British shipbuilder named Robert Cyril Thompson, carrying a briefcase of secret blueprints for a new type of giant cargo ship. His mission was to strike deals to get a fleet of these built in American shipyards, requiring a vast expansion of the nation’s shipping industry. The resulting Liberty Ships (and a later type called Victory Ships) were instrumental in winning World War II. A key figure in their construction was Henry Kaiser, an industrial titan who previously had little experience in shipbuilding.
The effort involved cranking out ships on an unprecedented scale and pace, which included bringing minorities and women into the workforce and providing healthcare for workers (the origin of the Kaiser Permanente non-profit). It’s an inspiring story, and relevant today in that U.S. shipbuilding has shrunk to a fraction of China’s, raising alarms at the prospect of losing a future U.S.-China war. Launching Liberty doesn’t delve into the current situation, but Publishers Weekly rightly notes that its story “is not only a fascinating slice of WWII history but a heartening glimpse of American industrial potential.”
—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky