编辑推荐From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Toll, a former financial analyst and political speechwriter, makes an auspicious debut with this rousing, exhaustively researched history of the founding of the U.S. Navy. The author chronicles the late 18th- and early 19th-century process of building a fleet that could project American power beyond her shores. The ragtag Continental Navy created during the Revolution was promptly dismantled after the war, and it wasn't until 1794—in the face of threats to U.S. shipping from England, France and the Barbary states of North Africa—that Congress authorized the construction of six frigates and laid the foundation for a permanent navy. A cabinet-level Department of the Navy followed in 1798. The fledgling navy quickly proved its worth in the Quasi War against France in the Caribbean, the Tripolitan War with Tripoli and the War of 1812 against the English. In holding its own against the British, the U.S. fleet broke the British navy's "sacred spell of invincibility," sparked a "new enthusiasm for naval power" in the U.S. and marked the maturation of the American navy. Toll provides perspective by seamlessly incorporating the era's political and diplomatic history into his superlative single-volume narrative—a must-read for fans of naval history and the early American Republic. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From Booklist Not confined to sea battles, Toll's history of the U.S. Navy's formative decades, from the mid-1790s to the War of 1812, rounds out affairs by anchoring the nascent navy to its financial supports. Navies are not inexpensive, and the costs of building and maintaining ships appear lightly but persistently in Toll's narrative. It centers on the first vessels purpose-built for the navy, the half-dozen frigates of which the USSConstitution moored in Boston today is the last survivor. Besides money, their construction involved politics; the Federalists favored the naval program (creating the Department of the Navy in 1798), while Jefferson's parsimonious Republicans were more diffident. Toll is as insightful about the essential domestic and diplomatic background as he is with his dramatizations of the naval engagements of the new navy, which produced a crop of national heroes such as Stephen Decatur. The maritime strategy and the highly developed sense of officers' honor, which influenced where particular battles occurred, emerge clearly in this fluent account. Vibrant and comprehensive, Toll makes an impressive debut. Gilbert Taylor Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Review Who knew that we owe the U.S. Navy to long-ago Muslim machinations?That gross oversimplification points to a historical accident that debut author and historian Toll capably works. At the time of the Revolution, America's navy amounted to a ragtag collection of privateers and merchantmen; even John Paul Jones's celebrated raid along the English coast was a freelance operation. After the Revolution, writes Toll, "what little remained of the Continental Navy was taken entirely out of service," the ships auctioned off and the men dismissed. Whether the new country needed a navy at all was a matter of hot debate among rival political parties, even as America's merchant fleet became an important presence in the Mediterranean and Caribbean markets. Enter the "Barbary pirates," privateers of four Arabic states that seized American ships and sailors in a sort of elaborate protection racket-one that England, the world's foremost naval power, could have easily crushed but instead used as a "check against the growth of economic competition from smaller maritime rivals," particularly the upstart U.S. In response, though taking time out to come to the brink of war with France, Congress authorized the construction of a federal navy whose six-frigate core numbered "the most powerful ships of their class in any navy in the world." The U.S. Navy then sailed off to Tripoli to begin the ten-year campaign that would finally break Barbary power. Toll's narrative closes with an admirably thorough account of the naval dimension of the War of 1812, when James Madison determined that an organized fleet acting in concert was less effective than a single frigate that could "get loose in the Atlantic and prey upon British shipping," which American ships did to great effect, doing much to win the war.A welcome contribution to the small library of early American naval history, deserving a place alongside one of the last such books-by a pre-presidential Theodore Roosevelt. (Kirkus Reviews) [A] wonderfully atmospheric account, brilliantly researched, full of stirring action and rich with the scent of the sea. -- Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman--This text refers to the Hardcover edition. Review "Wonderfully atmospheric...brilliantly researched, full of stirring action and rich with the scent of the sea." -- Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman--This text refers to the Audio CD edition. |
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