Admiral Stavridis’s Bookshelf/ Image Courtesy of Admiral (Ret.) James Stavridis
Top Five Books:
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes — A searing portrait of a young Marine officer’s first 60 days in vicious combat in Vietnam. Counter-insurgency turned upside down. Read it alongside Arkady Babkenko’s “One Soldier’s War” about the Soviet experience in Chechnya.
The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Montserrat — War at Sea, with all of the human costs; and a gripping portrait of command.
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian — This just one of an entire series of 20 novels set two centuries ago during the Napoleonic wars. They are a sustained meditation on life at sea, leadership in war, human interaction and the meaning of friendship, and great power politics. Taken together, the novels are the greatest sustained work of fiction in the 20th century. Really.
The Peloponnesian Wars by Thucidides — History was invented by the ancient Greeks, and this superbly told tale of coalition warfare, diplomacy and war, the rise and fall of city states, and the power of personality has it all.
The Memoirs of U.S. Grant — Human in scale, epic in execution, and beautifully written by a dying General who lived with passion and conviction — often misled by others, but always searching for his true north. Perhaps the best autobiography written.
The One That Shaped Me The Most:
Not a single book, but the collected works of Hemingway have had great influence on me. Taken together, they cover so many of the situations in which we find ourselves in the military and in the lives we have led — war itself, of course; but also the challenges of relationships, the turmoil of change, the danger of over-reliance on others, the need for a moral code, the bleak outcomes life offers in the end, the sense of resilience, a passion for life and all that it offers — the list goes on and on. Classics that I come back to again and again are “The Sun Also Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “The Snows of Kilamanjaro,” “The Old Man and the Sea,” “A Farewell to Arms,” “A Moveable Feast,” and the Nick Adams short stories. I own a half dozen first editions, and a signed copy of “A Farewell to Arms” that I count among my most prized possessions.
