Record Added: 2/6/2022 Series International Collectors Library Setting  Sea or Islands Topic Adult Fiction, Classics Publisher Doubleday Publishers ISBN B000FTTI0Y Year 1975 Age Adult Pages 498 Description Red leather binding
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The story is told through the eyes of Willis Seward "Willie" Keith, an affluent but callow young graduate of Princeton University. Following a mediocre living as a nightclub piano player, he signs up for midshipman school at Columbia University with the United States Navy to avoid being drafted into the United States Army during World War II. He endures inner conflicts over his relationship with his domineering mother and with May Wynn, a beautiful red-haired nightclub singer, the daughter of Italian immigrants.
After barely surviving a series of misadventures that earn him the highest number of demerits in his class, he is commissioned as an ensign in the Naval Reserve and assigned to the destroyer minesweeper U.S.S. Caine, an obsolete warship converted from a post-World War I-era destroyer.
The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard two destroyer-minesweepers in the Pacific Theater in World War II. Among its themes, it deals with the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by ship captains. The mutiny of the title is legalistic, not violent, and takes place during Typhoon Cobra, in December 1944. The court-martial that results provides the dramatic climax to the plot. |
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From estate sale, Ashton Idaho, June 2021.
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