B6


B


KLMNO Book World MILITARY REVIEW BY JOHN LEHMAN


An education, by land and by sea


THE LONG ROAD TO ANNAPOLIS The Founding of the Naval Academy and the Emerging American Republic By William P. Leeman Univ. of North Carolina. 292 pp. $39.95


A


fter American independence, patriots believed that standing ar- mies and professional navies were instruments of royal tyran- ny and had no place in the new


republic. George Washington, “Cincinnatus of the West,” set the model, taking up arms to defend his country and thenreturning to the plow when the threat waspast. Militias were to suffice for the new republic’s defense. Barbary pirates, conflict with France and


the War of 1812 brought the realization that, indeed, an army and navy were needed, but Thomas Jefferson did not trust their officer corps because they were largely in sympa- thy with his political enemy Alexander Hamilton. This fear helped motivate Jef- ferson to establish the military academy at West Point in 1802 to inculcate republican values. Naval officers, while equally pro- federalist, did not present as great a threat as their Army counterparts for they were usually away at sea. Thus, he saw much less need for a naval academy. So for the first half-century of the Navy’s


existence, its officers studied their profes- sion in “the school of the ship.” Captains took responsibility for the professional and moral training of young midshipmen, re- quiring them to take classroom instruction at sea from chaplains or civilian schoolmas- ters, who assigned extensive reading in the classics, science, philosophy and history. There were always advocates for a naval


academy, beginning with the greatest naval hero of the revolution, John Paul Jones, but political support came only after a major scandal. In 1842, midshipman Philip Spen- cer, who happened to be the son of the sec- retary of war, was hanged aboard the train- ing brig Somers by his captain on suspicion of conspiracy to mutiny. In 1845, Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft seized on the Somers affair as a reason finally to estab- lish a naval academy at Annapolis. William Leeman has given us an excel- lent history of the politics and personalities animating the long debate over whether to establish a naval academy, with many inter- esting anecdotes along the way. He chroni- cles President Theodore Roosevelt’s effort to establish Annapolis as the professional and cultural heart of the Navy. In 1906, Roosevelt made the discovery in Paris of John Paul Jones’s body the occasion for a publicity event. In order to draw world, and especially congressional, attention to his plans for building a world-class Navy, Roosevelt sent a squadron of cruisers to France to bring Jones’s body back to An- napolis for interment in a crypt under the Naval Academy chapel, patterned on Napo- leon’s Tombat Les Invalides. Like West Point, the Naval Academy rap- idly became an important institution in the American ruling establishment. While mer- it certainly had an important role in the se- lection of cadets and midshipmen, appoint-


ments went disproportionately to the sons of influential and wealthy supporters of members of Congress. Between 1845 and 1945 only 2 percent of midshipmen came from working-class backgrounds. Whereas the Army consistently commissioned offi- cers from the enlisted ranks, only 2 percent of naval officers in World War II had prior enlisted service. The ratio of officers from the better civilian universities to Annapolis grads in World War II was 70 to 1, with An- napolis alums usually found on the big prestigious ships and the grads from Offi- cer Candidate School (OCS) relegated to the lesser craft. The saying was: “It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that ring.” If one were starting from scratch without historical anxieties and political pressures, it is unlikely that the current Naval Academy would be the outcome. There is an inherent conflict between a liberal education based on skeptical inquiry and military indoctri- nation requiring unquestioning obedience. Combining the two educational cultures tends to create a pressure chamber with too much to do and no time to think and absorb. European military training has evolved


in very different ways. In the United King- dom, the naval academy at Dartmouth and the military academy at Sandhurst are based on an 18-month military-only cur- riculum by which military science and leadership are taught to the exclusion of purely academic subjects. Those who wish to get a university degree normally do so at a civilian university before or after they graduate from the academy. Officers thus gain a better understanding of civilian cul- ture and intellectual freedom, while also getting an undiluted indoctrination in military professionalism. This form of mili- tary education is also a lot less expensive. Some argue that relying on civilian uni-


versity programs such as ROTC would not produce officers who stay for a full career. Yet less than 50 percent of academy gradu- ates make the Navy or Marine Corps a ca- reer, which is about the same as ROTC and OCS members. The cost to the taxpayer for a commissioned officer from a service acad- emy is much higher than from ROTC. OCS is by far the best bargain of all. Critics have suggested that an institution led by people who all went to the same school will resist outside ideas and in- novations. That has certainly not been my experience with the senior naval officer corps. Innovation has originated much more from naval officers than from outside critics. Submarines, aircraft carriers and, in my day, cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles and ultra-high-tech communica- tion all were introduced by creative naval officers working with like-minded civilians. Leeman has told a fine tale of how the


Naval Academy came to be. His next book should take on the even more tumultuous story of how it became what it is today. bookworld@washpost.com


John Lehman was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, and is a member of the National Defense Commission.


NATURE REVIEW BY THOMAS HAYDEN


SUNDAY, AUGUST 8, 2010


Taming the vasty deep


LOUIE PSIHOYOS/CORBIS T CLIMATE


THE WEATHER OF THE FUTURE Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes From a Climate-Changed Planet By Heidi Cullen. Harper. 329 pp. $25.99


“The Weather of the Future” peers ahead at a world stricken by climate change. Using models to predict weather patterns, climatologist Heidi Cullen, a fre- quent contributor to the Weather Channel, explores seven re- gions and their grim futures: the Sahel in Africa, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, California’s Cen- tral Valley, two sites in Green- land, Bangladesh and New York City. Massive floods in Bangla- desh may pro-


duce “climate refugees,” Cullen suggests; New York may be battered by a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds as high as 135 miles per hour; and coral reefs may be eaten away by an acidic ocean. “These predictions and our seeming inability to heed their warning is a potential tragedy,” she writes.


Cullen also predicts some geopolitical


repercussions of global warming: Pirates run rampant, Osama bin Laden invokes U.S. carbon emissions to recruit terrorists, and Canada and the United States argue over naval authority in an ice-free North- west Passage. The book is at its best and most insightful when it explores today’s environment, such as regreening efforts in Niger. Let models be used to predict the weather, not the politics.


—Timothy R. Smith smitht@washpost.com FOOD


THE WILD VINE A Forgotten Grape and the Untold Story of American Wine By Todd Kliman. Clarkson Potter. 280 pp. $25


For Washingtonian magazine food writer


Todd Kliman, the mystery started one night when he saw “something wild, something alive” in the glass of red wine he was drinking. His interest and palate piqued, he decided to investigate the source: a grape known as the Norton, trade- marked as “The Real American Grape!” What he un-


earthed is the sub- ject of “The Wild Vine.” He traced the wildness back to the 1820s, in Richmond, Va., when a doctor on the verge of sui- cide found a reason to live in a grape he


developed by cross-breeding existing varieties. Norton red, the doctor’s namesake, may be essentially unknown today, but it was vot- ed one of the best red wines in the world at a Vienna exhibition in 1873. For many years the grape prospered in Hermann, Mo. (the Midwest’s “Napa before there was really a Napa”), but then Prohibition came along, and acres of Norton vines were pulled from the ground and burned. Decades passed in which the grape went unnoticed until it caught the attention of millionaire software guru Jenni McCloud, who took a radically new direction in life: starting a winery from scratch. She has since become the grape’s greatest champion (she’d rather “make the world’s best Norton than the 450th-best Merlot”) and the world’s largest Norton grow- er at her vineyard near Middleburg, Va. Kliman’s thorough research and enter-


taining spin on the Norton’s history make for a vintage that goes down smooth. —T. Rees-Shapiro


shapirot@washpost.com


wo-thirds of the planet’s surface; depths not sounded till well into the 19th century; home to the blue whale, history’s largest animal; poetic touchstone for that which is not easily crossed over: The ocean is vast- ness defined. And it was once thought, by everyone from Jules Verne to biologist Thomas Huxley, to be inexhaustible.


Alas, this wishful thinking has long since gone the way of free lunches, final frontiers and easy oil. Most of the fish stocks we rely on for seafood have been pushed to or beyond the limit of their ability to replenish themselves, and dilu- tion, as the old saw had it, is no longer the solution to pollu- tion — from sewage to plastic debris to bubbling crude, the seas are full up. The oceanic domain can still inspire hopes and fantasies,


however, as it always has. Fittingly, Julia Whitty’s “Deep Blue Home” is a dream of a book, vivid yet languorous, rich in de- tail, richer still in emotional impact. By anchoring her wide- ranging meditation to personal memories of a decades- distant season of ornithological research in the Gulf of Cali- fornia, Whitty distills the oceanic vastness into something bright, enticing and just manageable enough to be captured in a bottle. She also crystallizes the particular frustration of scientists who, while striving to understand the complex webs of marine life, have watched them torn asunder faster than they can be catalogued, let alone conserved. In 1980, Whitty writes, when she first visited tiny Isla Rasa


in the finger of inland sea that Steinbeck knew as the Sea of Cortez, 30,000 female leatherback turtles nested along Mexico’s western shores. She recalls one “in the last pulse of light before darkness . . . form[ing] a perfect mirror-image twin with the surface: a two-headed turtle, jellyfish tentacles streaming from the corners of her mouths, like cellophane noodles in a silver broth.” But then, as Whitty writes, “every- thing changed.” By 1996, fewer than 900 leatherbacks re- mained anywhere in the Central and South American Pacif- ic, the rest done in by pollution and choking garbage, indis- criminately lethal fishing gear, coastal development and the wholesale collection of eggs. “Deep Blue Home” can be trancelike. Whitty, an accom- plished documentary filmmaker, unspools scores of vi- gnettes of life in remote biological research camps and on film shoots throughout the world’s oceans, and intersperses these with allegorical references to Hindu mythology and some of the finest scientific descriptions of sea life and ocean dynamics that this former oceanographer has ever read. But the surprise is that an author who is still young can narrate from firsthand observation the passage of the ocean from vast and inexhaustible to something still wonderful but di- minished, like a penned bison or an ailing King Lear. The truth is, we all can tell this story — our world has


changed more in the past five decades than in the previous period of human history, and it has been changed at our hands. Nor has this been for the most part because of ex- traordinary events such as the ongoing Gulf of Mexico catas-


DEEP BLUE HOME An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean By Julia Whitty Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 246 pp. $24


FOUR FISH The Future of the Last Wild Food By Paul Greenberg Penguin Press. 284 pp. $25.95


trophe, but instead as a result of a million mundane deci- sions we have all made, unknowingly or uncaringly, to treat the ocean — the planet — as inexhaustible when it is not. Global warming. Ocean acidification. Ecosystem changes in- cluding the extirpation of large predator fish and mass die- offs of tropical corals. In the course of a single human life- span, we have altered the ocean in ways usually seen only over geological time. As a diver and filmmaker, Whitty examines the changing ocean from within its embrace. Paul Greenberg probes the salty depth from above, hand firmly grasping the working end of a fishing rod. An angler who has written about fish for al- most as long as he has pursued them, Greenberg focuses, in- tently, on what he rightly calls our last truly wild food source. The story of overfishing has often been told, though sel- dom this well. Greenberg considers four iconic creatures — salmon, bass, cod and tuna — to lay bare the cycle of discov- ery, exploitation and collapse that has touched or threatens practically every important food fish in the seas. He seam- lessly integrates the decline of wild fish with the rise of fish- farming, noting rightly that humanity is in the process of do- mesticating the oceans, as we long ago tamed the land, and that eliminating all but a few primary food species is a natu- ral consequence. In writing clearly and engagingly about the place of fish in global food markets, he manages also to con- vey the often-missed reality that fish are not just food, or even animals, but wildlife. “Four Fish” and “Deep Blue Home” are as different in pac- ing and approach as two such twinned books could be, but they share more than a watery muse. Refreshingly, they are reminders that science and nature writing can be accurate as well as engaging, accessible and true, that a strong narra- tive and strong science can coexist, and that both are buoyed when they do. Together, Whitty and Greenberg tell a profound story of


loss and point to a few sparks of hope peeking dawn-like across the storm-tossed horizon. In both books the sea itself, with its many wondrous forms of life, is the true and very sympathetic protagonist. The stories are grim, but the con- clusion of this saga has not been written. As the chief agents of doom, we have a unique opportunity to help a happier ending emerge. If these two books, read in the context of the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill, can’t help us muster the collective will to do so, it’s hard to imagine what could. bookworld@washpost.com


Thomas Hayden teaches environmental writing and journalism at Stanford.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152