Annapolis

They found the grace of God on the Chesapeake: Catholic, Puritan, and Anglican refugees from an aging world and the tyranny of its king. Among the fishermen and landowners, the crabbers and tobacco farmers, freedmen and slaves were two proud families whose fates intertwined: the Staffords and the Parrishes. For eight generations, as a nation fought for freedom, fought itself, and fought wars around the world, they shed their blood for the navy and the city that was its mecca. From blistering sea battles on wooden ships to the first ironclads, from the shores of Cuba and Tripoli to Pearl Harbor and Vietnam, Staffords and Parrishes became midshipmen and commanders, spies, and pilots. And with each generation their covenant grew stronger, old grudges grew deeper, and America's sea power became the most awesome in the world. In Annapolis William Martin puts you there: on the decks of a fighting frigate as cannonballs send deadly slivers of wood and showers of blood through the air; in the far Pacific, where an otherwise impeccable midshipman loses himself to the touch of a woman and an island paradise; in the first chaotic days of the American Civil War, when honorable young men, forced to take sides, gather for a final good-bye beneath a mulberry tree at Annapolis; in the high-tech war over the sands of Iraq, where navy pilots dodge SAM missiles and one Stafford becomes a prisoner of war and a symbol of courage.