SEA WORLDS

...It may be that because each is primarily concerned with the little world of a single ship, the focus is sharper, the impact more forceful...

...It is a remarkably vivid account of life at sea under conditions of almost incredible danger and hardship, and the effects of this life, both in refining and in brutalizing the men involved, are cleanly and believably developed...

...there is not the extraneous and often confusing factor of the cities and farmhouses and roads and tilled fields where the land battles rage around and over the incidental and helpless and heartbreaking non-combatants...

...It is a book as endlessly fascinating as the sea itself, a rare combination of information and emotion, a background and fitting companion to all the great books about the sea from Conrad's and Melville's to these two less lasting but compelling volumes, and to those yet to be written...

...The Caine Mutiny is perhaps not essentially a "war" book, for in a way the events of the war have only a peripheral relation to the development of the increasingly tense and explosive human situation...

...This is a splendid character study, in an almost old-fashioned, Dickensian way—remarkably free of the modern trend toward pseudo- psychoanalytical cant...

...3.50...

...The court martial scenes are brilliantly handled, but here, too, although it is the stringencies of the Articles of War that gives the affair its high seriousness, it is the interplay of personalities that is underlined and italicized...

...The emphasis is all on the growth of this situation, which perhaps comes to a head more quickly and dramatically because of the war—but which is always there, inherent in the personalities of the people themselves...

...In any case, The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea are both excellent and affecting books...

...The Caine Mutiny is an extremely interesting and sound book, and if the villain (who is not, after all, the pusillanimous captain nor yet his mutinous First Officer) seems more believable than the hero, that is something that often happens in life as well as in books, for a bewildered good man is somehow likely to seem lacking in definition...

...It is beautifully written, in a style that seems to have something of the surge and rhythm of the tides, and while it is full of precise scientific detail and factual material, it is also evocative and haunting in the extreme...

...Reviewed by Katherine Rodell IDON'T know why the Wouk and Monsarrat books of the war at sea seem to have so much more power and definition than most of the books about the land war do...

...Oxford University Press...

...Or perhaps it is because the conflict is in a sense more limited— there is the struggle against the enemy and the unceasing struggle with the sea...

...In fact, it is precisely the glib smattering of psychiatric jargon on the part of one of the characters that in the end leads the others to the act of mutiny —an almost moralistic illustration of the old saw about "a little learning...

...230 pp...

...The Cruel Sea is forthrightly a war book, with the emphasis on the progress of the war in the North Atlantic, as well as on what the exigencies of war at sea do to its characters...

...Then, too, the enemy at sea is rarely met in close human contact—he is a ship, a submarine, a fighting machine, detected by radar, destroyed by depth bombs or torpedoes, almost impersonally...

...It is also the story of two ships— the first is torpedoed and the survivors carry on with a new one— and they become clear-cut personalities, too, bringing their own contribution to the march of events...

...The battle with the actual enemy, however, often seems secondary to the continual fight with the sea itself, an enemy hated and feared and irresistible and fascinating and never to be conquered...

...It is probably the enormous importance of the sea itself that makes for a great deal of the impact of these two books, and nothing could make the overwhelming force of that factor clearer than Miss Carson's book, The Sea Around Us...

...and this, too, makes for fewer minor but distracting emotional involvements...

...This, of course, is not a novel—it is a history of the sea, its origin, its composition, the life in it and on it and how it developed, and the account of the tides and currents and winds...