The Man in the Yellow Raft

This year my literary project was to read all of CS Forester's books on the sea and naval warfare. Of his fiction, and I include his celebrated Hornblower series, this collection of stories ranks near the top in conveying the sense of man at sea and at war. These are terrific stories, and together with the collection in Gold from Crete (of which see my review), the reader is guaranteed entertainment and insight. What is remarkable is that CS Forester near the end of his life, and after four decades living in the United States, finally got it right in writing about Americans. After some inept or flawed portraits of Americans as naval warriors (The Captain from Connecticut, 1941; The Good Shepherd, 1956), Forester in 1960-61 managed to write a series of stories about the USS Boon, a destroyer in the Pacific War. Forester's pitch is near perfect, with few distracting anachronisms or mistakes (though I still find it hard to believe that lookouts in WWII announced a contact sighting with 'Sail ho.') In addition to the Boon stories, this collection includes three that were published during the war, and they have that same poignancy that characterized Forester's other stories from that period, as published in Gold from Crete. These stories are highly recommended for the lover of naval literature.