Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character

摘要

We are witnessing the slow death of character, postulates Admiral Stavridis in his new book. Using sea stories from a colorful group of admirals stretching across 2,500 years of history, Stavridis illuminates the most essential qualities of character, showing how these qualities can be used as sea buoys-marking big rocks and shoal water-to help us navigate more effectively across the inner sea we all must sail. At first glance, the book seems to fall into a long line of heroic leadership books that often trot out the same decorated military leaders and identify the same admirable character traits. But Sailing True North is different in significant ways. Some of the admirals Stavridis discusses were not heroic. Some are phantoms of history-names that so few people know that they might seem mythical, such as Chinese admiral Zheng He. Born to a Muslim family in 1371, Zheng was ten years old when he was taken prisoner and castrated. Despite being a eunuch, he became a fierce warrior and built Chinas first deep-ocean fleet. The nine other illustrious naval commanders whose stories Stavridis tells are Themistocles, Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson, Alfred Thayer Mahan, John Fisher, Chester Nimitz, Hyman Rickover, Elmo Zumwalt Jr., and Grace Hopper.