Annapolis

by William Martin

Overview

From the days of pirate raids on the Chesapeake to swift-boat actions in Vietnam, the Staffords and their traditional rivals, the Parrishes, struggle with foreign enemies and each other to build a navy and a nation. They march across the deserts of Tripoli, sail into the South Seas to battle the British and dally with the native girls, fight aboard the Merrimac and the Monitor, fly into the battle of Midway, and look into the living faces of all four men on Mount Rushmore.

When Stafford descendant Susan Browne sets out to film a documentary about her famous ancestry, her work sweeps her into the past, to celebrate Stafford victories, mourn their losses, and confront their secrets. Annapolis is William Martin's most ambitious novel, a tale of romance and courage, honor and patriotism, an ode to the men and women who have made the proud traditions of the United States Navy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765392251
Publisher:	Tor Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Pages:	880
Sales rank:	506,982
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.96(d)

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author WILLIAM MARTIN is best known for his historical fiction, which chronicles the lives of the great and the anonymous in American history while bringing to life legendary American locations, from Cape Cod to Annapolis to The City of Dreams. His first novel, Back Bay, introduced Boston treasure hunter Peter Fallon, who is still tracking artifacts across the landscape of our national imagination. Martin received a New England Book Award, given to "an author whose body of work stands as a significant contribution to the culture of the region."

Editorial Reviews

Martin is the maritime Michener, charting sweeping historical fictions centering on cities and lands by the sea: Back Bay (1979), Cape Cod (1991) and now America's foremost naval town. The primary protagonists of this multigenerational saga are the Staffords, whose story begins in the 1700s with the adventures at sea and war of the family patriarch, Jedediah. Rivaling the Staffords are the Parrishes, a contentious clan whose support for slavery causes a conflict that lasts for more than a century after Rebecca Parrish crosses the bloodlines of the two families. Martin follows his charges through the Navy's involvement in the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, WW II, Vietnam and into the present. The contemporary conflict between the two families, traced in passages that separate the historical material, revolves around the efforts of filmmaker Susan Browne, a Parrish descendant, to create a PBS documentary about the Staffords. Martin's characters tend toward type, but his historical detail is impressive, peaking in scenes depicting relatively obscure events such as a struggle between several tribes in the Marquesa Islands, witnessed by Jason Stafford in 1813. A storyteller whose smoothness equals his ambition, Martin has written a panoramic entertainment that brings to vivid life the history of the American struggle to control the high seas. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selection; simultaneous Time Warner AudioBook; author tour. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Martin, the author of the well-received Cape Cod (Warner, 1991), has justly been compared to James Michener thanks to his sweeping, lengthy historical novels. Here he follows two families. Each generation of Staffords has sent at least one son to sea since the days of the Revolutionary War; the Parrishes, on the wrong side of the war, lost their Annapolis house to the Staffords and are still trying to get it back. Now, a distant cousin seeks to make a documentary film about the Staffords, aided by a black sheep Stafford who has been writing the family history. That history is interspersed with present-day squabbling over the property. But the predominant story is of the naval battles that the Stafford men fought, from skirmishes with pirates in Tripoli to Midway Island to the Tonkin Gulf. Because of the technical detail and the gore, this novel may appeal predominantly to fans of military fiction. Recommended for historical and military fiction collections.-Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.

Library Journal

A big beach book is on the way with this sturdy, generation- spanning chronicle from Martin (Cape Cod, 1991, etc.), now telling the story of an archetypally American family bound to the US Navy and to its Maryland roots from colonial times to the present.

From the start, the Staffords (who arrived in the New World in 1634) went down to the sea in ships and did business in great waters. Settling in both the Patuxent River Valley (to raise tobacco) and Annapolis, the tidewater family prospered. After the US gained independence, scions of the clan were blooded in the nascent Navy's campaign against Barbary Coast pirates and in action against British ships of the line during the War of 1812. Midshipman Jason Stafford survived these close encounters (as well as an idyllic stopover in the South Pacific's Marquesas Islands) to achieve high rank. During the Civil War, his sons served on Union gunboats and on Confederate raiders. Their largely male descendants went on to play supporting roles in the Spanish-American War, the founding of the Naval Academy, the Battle of Midway, and other turning-point events that marked America's emergence as a dominant naval power. Staffords also fought valiantly in the riverine jungles of Vietnam and, flying carrier-based attack planes, in the unfriendly skies over the Persian Gulf. Martin's long story is artfully kept within comprehensible limits by the latter-day activities of a maverick Stafford, liberal journalist Jack, who's writing a painfully detailed account of his family's odyssey, and by a distant cousin assigned to produce a PBS-TV special on the family. Their colloquies and inquiries provide continuity and perspective in a narrative whose serial protagonists are steeped in the tradition of doing violence with honor.

A lively, engrossing saga that brings epic chapters of US history out of the archival hold into the bracing air of the quarterdeck.

Kirkus Reviews