By Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman
Penguin Press: 320 pages, $27
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Admiral James Stavridis had the kind of career for which the term “well-decorated” was coined. Thirty-plus years in the U.S. Navy, including seven as a four-star admiral. Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Grad-school dean. Bestselling author and TED conference speaker on seamanship and geopolitics. Vetted potential running mate for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
None of which, he conceded, qualified him to write fiction.
Stavridis, who retired from the Navy in 2013, has written a clutch of nonfiction books but he’s a serious reader of fiction as well—an admirer of Aravind Adiga, Hilary Mantel and Don DeLillo. So he’d been kicking around the idea for a novel inspired by “The Bedford Incident,” a 1963 novel by Mark Rascovich (later a film starring Sidney Poitier). The book features a conflict at sea between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that threatens to escalate into World War III. Stavridis wanted to write a similar cautionary tale set in the near-ish future involving the U.S. and China.