RaveThe Naval Historical FoundationThe author’s reluctance to criticize President Truman’s beatification of Halsey is a minor—and perhaps defensible—lapse in a great book. At 770 pages the volume is thick, but it is not dense. Rather, it is lucid, coherent, cogent and largely convincing. It belongs on the nightstand (reinforced for weight) of every student of history’s most encompassing and destructive man-made cataclysm. It comes as close as is possible to achieving Craig Symonds’s goal of writing a unified naval history of World War II. He has created a new standard of comprehensive, literate scholarship for that war. In the Navy’s parlance, Craig Symonds merits a Bravo Zulu.