J.T. McDaniel Official Website

Favorites

These are books and other things that I've particularly enjoyed, or which have had some influence on my life. And some of this is just fun, or possibly makes life easier.

Run Silent, Run Deep

This is Edward L. Beach's classic story of an American submarine captain during World War II. Ned Beach was himself a submariner, serving in Trigger and Tirante before assuming command of Piper in the final days of the war, and so was able to bring a wealth of first-hand knowledge to the story of "Rich" Richardson and his crew.

Told in the form of a "taped narrative" of the events leading up to Richardson's Medal of Honor, the story pulls the reader in from the very beginning. Many incidents ring true because they literally are true, though the real-life counterparts didn't necessarily happen to Beach. During the testing that finally fixed the problems with the Mark 14 torpedo, Richardson is pretty obviously a stand-in for Swede Momsen, for instance, and another incident seems to be based on something that happened to Mush Morton. And, in both of these cases, this works very well, for this personalization of history into the story's protagonist conveys a sense of "being there" you don't always get in a standard history.

Ned Beach, who passed away on 1 December 2002 at the age of 84, was a talented writer, both when dealing with true history, as in Around the World Submerged, the story of his submerged circumnavigation of the globe in Triton, and in his fiction. He was also a true gentleman.

Buy Run Silent Run Deep from Amazon.com.

Torpedo

Jeff Edwards is a retired Chief Sonar Technician, with years of anti-submarine warfare experience. His novel, Torpedo subtitled "A Surface Warfare Thriller," is a techno-thriller pitting a wolfpack of state-of-the-art German submarines against the American Navy. The subs have been sold to a renegade Middle-Eastern dictator, and it quickly becomes clear that the German intend to deliver them, even if it means sinking the American warships enforcing an arms embargo. Meanwhile, the British Embassy in Washington has been hit by a deadly biological agent, killing much of the staff.

Edwards moves smoothly from the subs, to the White House, and to the destroyers as he weaves a fascinating tale of international intrigue and modern naval warfare. His style is reminiscent of the early, more concise Tom Clancy of The Hunt For Red October, and equally as good.

Buy Torpedo from Amazon.com.

The Alukam

Jacob Thomson's The Alukam is a little hard to describe. It's a very "different" vampire story but, well, no, it's a tightly-plotted police procedural, or, uh, no, it's an erotic thriller, or... Like I said, it's different. It certainly is both a vampire story and a police procedural, and at least in this case there's a lot to be said for the combination. It's different in the sense that the detective is an Orthodox Jew, who not only has to contend with what he presumes to be an insane serial killer who thinks he's a vampire, but the complications imposed by his religion. The fact that he's trying to do this in a Gulf Coast Florida town with an Orthodox population of about 25 doesn't make it any easier. (Thomson calls the town Port Morrow but, having lived there, I really had no trouble figuring out that it was rather closely based on Fort Myers.)

Further complicating things is the minor detail that Detective Schneider's "insane serial killer" is not a nut who thinks he's a vampire, but is, in fact, actually a vampire—not to mention being the detective's great-great-great-great-grand-uncle, though he's only admitting to being a distant cousin. (Hard to deny, since they strongly resemble each other.) And, being a Jewish vampire, Isaac Nathanson functions under different rules than we're used to seeing. He's completely unaffected by sunlight, has no aversion to Christian (or even Jewish) religious symbols—though he hasn't been inside a synagogue in several centuries—and is confined to his grave only on the Jewish sabbath.

There's a lot of sex, too, much of it pretty explicit, so this isn't a book for the kids. There's also a really hot female vampire, even older than Nathanson, though physically appearing a few years younger, who moonlights as a stripper and gets into all sorts of interesting situations. Then there were the twins, but you should read it if you want to find out about them.

Buy The Alukam from Amazon.com.

The PaxAm Solution

Steven R. Bartman's The PaxAm Solution is a big, complex techno-thriller, which should appeal to anyone who enjoys Tom Clancy and other authors in that category. Bartman has taken the simple premise that an old military base could be turned into a high security prison camp, where the inmates are simply dumped into a barracks compound and left to fend for themselves as best they can, coupled with a brutally efficient automated perimeter system designed to kill anyone attempting to escape in a particularly brutal and effective manner, and then thrown in a cast of fascinating characters.

There's Renfro, the warden, a retired Marine colonel who sees the camp as a fitting place for the sort of human vermin who murdered his wife. And there's Gunther Zeiss, an international arms dealer who is the one man both vicious enough, and rich enough, to put together a coordinated escape plan. The actual escape attempt, which occurs during a hurricane—now well inland, but still enough to cause all sorts of problem for the Marine Corps Reaction Force—takes up 165 pages, and the best advice I can give you on that section is not to start it unless you have time to read right through it, because you won't want to stop reading once you get into it.

Buy The PaxAm Solution from Amazon.com.

U-859

This fascinating novel chronicles the maiden (and only) voyage of the Type IX-D2 long-range U-boat U-859, which sailed from Kiel on April 1, 1944, bound for Penang, in Japanese occuppied Malaya. The voyage would take six months, under conditions that can charitably be described as primitive, and with the knowledge that once out of the Baltic virtually any vessel they encountered would be the enemy.

The author, Arthur Baudzus, was aboard U-859 as an electrician during the actual voyage, and was one of only twenty men—out of a crew of 67—to make it out of the sunken U-boat after it was torpedoed by a British submarine less than an hour from its destination. Much of the story is told from the viewpoint of an electrician, Adam West, who is pretty obviously a stand-in for the author. In a slight departure from history, Baudzus has added the character of Lieutenant Robert McKay, a British officer who is along for most of the voyage as a prisoner after U-859 sinks his ship in the North Atlantic. McKay is purely fictional, but serves the dramatically useful purpose of letting West and others discuss subjects they would not normally dare talk of, since they can speak to him in English, which only West and a couple of officers can understand.

Most of what occurs in this novel accurately reflects reality. The times and places of attacks, and the ships involved, are quite real (with the obvious exception of McKay's destroyer). Kapitänleutnant John Henning (actually Johann Jebsen, the names have all been changed, since this is a work of fiction) shows himself to be a skilled navigator, and an excellent tactical commander. Most of all, he is blessed, at least until the final day, with that most precious of all gifts for a submarine commander, luck.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in U-boats, and a really good story to boot. The scenes in the sunken U-boat are among the best ever written, and take on added realism from the realization that they were set down on paper by someone who lived through the actual event. Only a tiny handful of men living today ever had that experience, and this book was written by one of them.

Buy U-859 at Amazon.com

The Nazi: Coming of Age in Hitler's Germany and the Voyage of the U-859

Arthur Baudzus, who wrote a fictionalized account of his service in U-859 in his novel of the same title, here presents a slim memoir that not only recounts the events of that arduous voyage, but also tells of his early life. Baudzus grew up in the small East Prussian city of Lyck (now Elk, Poland). He was ten years old when Hitler came to power in Germany. Not particularly interested in politics himself, Baudzus found himself unexpectedly a member of the Hitler Youth when that organization absorbed the German Boy Scouts, and joined an aeronautics club in hopes of learning to fly. He dropped out of both, but they were on his records, which would prove useful once he was grown and needed to show some sort of party connection to get work.

After serving an apprenticeship as an electrician, Baudzus found work in shipyards. Initially he was involved in the building of U-boats. Later, working at a different yard, he spent his time repairing battle damage and general wear and tear on front line boats. These were good jobs and, perhaps most important, shipyard workers were exempt from conscription. Despite this, Baudzus would later volunteer for the Navy and for U-boat service. By this time, Allied bombing raids made the shipyards almost as hazardous as the front lines.

Assigned to U-859 as an electrician, Baudzus departed Kiel in April 1944, spending the next six months in the cramped confines of the U-boat as she made her way south through the Atlantic, around Africa, and up through the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, en route to the Japanese held Malayan port of Penang. During the entire six months, Baudzus was on deck only once, passing ammunition as the U-boat engaged a Catalina seaplane.

U-859's voyage ended less than an hour from Penang, when a British torpedo put her on the bottom of the Malacca Straits. Baudzus was one of 20 who managed to escape from the sunken hulk, and spent 24 hours floating in the Strait before being rescued by the Japanese. He ended the war, curiously, as an inmate in a Japanese POW camp, as he turned out to be less cooperative than some after the German surrender.

Buy The Nazi: Coming of Age in Hitler's Germany and the Voyage of the U-859 at Amazon.com.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, largely as a result of this novella. The story of an old Cuban fisherman, who daily rows his fragile skiff out into the Gulf Stream in pursuit of the big fish that give him his living, but has caught nothing for the last 84 days, may be seen as an allegory for life itself. We all have our goals, our needs, and there are times when we overcome all obstacles to attain them.

Yet, having attained them, do we get to keep them? Do all our battles, indeed, end in the futility of death and loss?

Hemingway's simple, straightforward prose style often concealed a remarkable philosophical depth. True, he could sometimes find himself so enthralled with his subject that he would get carried away, as he once did in a seemingly endless article on bull fighting. But there is none of that in this book. The narrative unfolds in a clear, easy to read manner. The story itself is timeless, touching on themes which affect all of our lives.

Some recent reviews, probably written by high school students, fault the book for a lack of action. I can only presume these are people who have never fished. Someone once said that fishing is life, and I certainly wouldn't disagree. This is, quite simply, one of the best works of fiction ever written.

Buy The Old Man and the Sea at Amazon.com.