An authoritative global narrative ... The author cherishes powerful passions ... Kennedy’s book is lavishly illustrated with watercolour paintings by the fine marine artist Ian Marshall, together with excellent maps and graphs ... Kennedy, foremost naval historian of our generation, is nonetheless a romantic. Some of his judgments — for instance about the shortcomings of Britain’s Fleet Air Arm, created by its shockingly inadequate aircraft — are less harsh than my own. Most of the book’s verdicts are hard to contest, however ... I believe the Royal Navy and US navy to have been the outstanding wartime fighting services of their respective nations. Kennedy offers them a fitting tribute and a penetrating analysis.

... packed with minutiae ... Daunting as these facts may be, the book makes for enjoyable reading, owing to the author’s easygoing style, as if he knows all this off the top of his head and is talking to you by a log fire. Kennedy is an academic who does not write like one; he writes a story, not a treatise. It is a story enhanced by Marshall’s exquisite artwork, in which the depiction of one gray warship after another never gets monotonous, retaining their fascination throughout ... That story holds chilling echoes of our own time and our own great-power struggles.

Engrossing ... The book has a thesis too—that naval warfare played a crucial role in (to quote the subtitle) 'the transformation of the global order.' No one is better positioned to make such a case than Mr. Kennedy, the doyen of the study of historical geopolitics ... It should be said that Mr. Kennedy’s treatment of the Eastern Front, though typically shrewd, rests on a debatable claim. He accepts the view that Hitler, in 1941-45, concentrated on the war with Stalin, starving Germany’s naval and air capacities in favor of land warfare in Russia. In fact, the German war economy most of that time was directed against the Anglo-Americans ... For all the heroism of individual naval encounters, Mr. Kennedy convincingly shows that World War II was won, ultimately, by superior American industrial capacity.

... beautifully illustrated ... For the illustrations alone, Victory at Sea is worth the hardcover price. Marshall’s minimalist watercolor brushstrokes create an immersive, impressionistic sensation; you can almost whiff the salt breeze and hear the gulls. With a fine eye for detail and close attention to accuracy, the artist depicts ships of every fleet in scenes all over the world. They are superbly reproduced in this volume ... When he is at his best, as he often is in these pages, Kennedy can be dazzling. His prose never fails him; he is always graceful and lucid on the page ... Taken as a whole, however, Victory at Sea does not meet the high standard of scholarship sustained in Kennedy’s previous works. To be blunt, the book is poorly sourced and blemished by many errors. There are no fewer than 80 Wikipedia citations in the endnotes but insufficient reliance on the most important historical scholarship of the past 20 years ... Minor errors, so long as they are not too numerous, are embarrassing but not fatal — in this case, fleets are misnumbered, ships mislocated, admirals misidentified, chronologies mangled and island groups confused. Whether Victory at Sea can be said to include major errors involves a judgment call, but there are at least a few candidates ... with enough research assistants to organize a basketball team, one wonders whether better coaching was needed. At the very least, some part of the collective effort could have been diverted to identifying and correcting errors, for example, by searching Wikipedia ... Kennedy’s professional legacy rests upon 50 years of distinguished scholarship. He is a legitimately great historian. No one book, much less a single faultfinding review, could dull a reputation that glitters so brightly.

Victory at Sea may be considered a just addition to the ranks of classics ... High caliber ... This gorgeous watercolor-illustrated one-volume history of the rise of American naval power in World War II captures the desperate struggle of war at sea and its pivotal importance for the transformation of a Eurocentric world to one of American dominance ... No matter what level of expertise or knowledge the reader has, all parts are equally worth reading ... Readers who have digested many a naval history book will recall that these books are often laden with black and white photos of ships at sea, or admirals, or kamikaze attacks, but the decision to use watercolor paintings by the marine artist Ian Marshall is brilliant ... For a one-volume history, Kennedy’s book is unsurpassed for depth, breadth, insight, and narrative.