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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Oct 2023, 512 pages
Paperback:
Oct 29, 2024, 512 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Kim Kovacs
Buy This Book
Mark Helprin, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Winter's Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, presents a fast-paced, beautifully written novel about the majesty of the sea; a life dedicated to duty, honor, and country; and the gift of falling in love.
A Navy captain near the end of a decorated career, Stephen Rensselaer is disciplined, intelligent, and determined to always do what's right. In defending the development of a new variant of warship, he makes an enemy of the president of the United States, who assigns him to command the doomed line's only prototype––Athena, Patrol Coastal 15––with the intent to humiliate a man who should have been an admiral.
Rather than resign, Rensselaer takes the new assignment in stride, and while supervising Athena's fitting out in New Orleans, encounters a brilliant lawyer, Katy Farrar, with whom he falls in last-chance love. Soon thereafter, he is deployed on a mission that subjects his integrity, morality, and skill to the ultimate test, and ensures that Athena will live forever in the annals of the Navy.
As in the Odyssey, Katy is the force that keeps him alive and the beacon that lights the way home through seven battles, mutiny, and court martial. In classic literary form, an enthralling new novel that extolls the virtues of living by the laws of conscience, decency, and sacrifice, The Oceans and the Stars is nothing short of a masterpiece.
Prologue
Hampton Roads, Winter
Snow falling upon water makes a sound so close to silence that no heart exists it cannot calm. It fell across the Chesapeake and in the harbors and inlets and far out to sea, surrendering to the waters with the slightest exhalation and a muffled hiss. Though few are there to see it, in winter this happens often.
In the construction and maintenance of warships in Virginia's Tidewater, now veiled in steady snow, engines throbbed, cranes swivelled, and barges plodded over black waters. The spacious anchorage of Hampton Roads is ringed by naval stations, air bases, and shipyards making up the largest concentration of naval might in existence. Interwoven with civilian cities and commercial waterways, this sinew of steel is a world of its own. Even so, its powerful present cannot overwhelm images that upwell from the past: the sails of the French fleet in surprising bloom off Yorktown; the Monitor battling the Merrimack; and within living memory the Battle of ...
It does have its flaws, some serious enough that many readers may put it aside before reaching its real meat – which is found about halfway through this relatively long book. While the beautiful descriptions add a lovely dimension to the narrative, they also slow it down; it's basically too much of a good thing, and it gets tiresome after a while. The author also goes to great lengths to describe ships and armaments. It's something naval enthusiasts will likely love but most readers will find tedious. Although those are fairly major complaints, the second half of The Oceans and the Stars makes up for those issues; indeed, if I were to grade the book just on its latter portion it would be a five-plus-star read for me and I'd be raving about it...continued
Full Review
(758 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
The plot of Mark Helprin's novel The Oceans and the Stars imagines the United States at war with Iran. At one point the heroes of the book end up in the Indian Ocean searching for an Iranian vessel, ultimately battling a force the US captain refers to as the NEDSA, the naval arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami, aka the IRGC, also referred to as the Pasdaran or the Sepah).
Iran has two independent military organizations. The first, the Islamic Republic of Iran Army, Artesh-e Jomhouri-ye Eslami-ye Iran or simply Artesh, pre-dates the 1979 Iranian Revolution and is responsible for defending the country's borders against external threats and maintaining internal order. It's considered a ...
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