Flashback Friday is my own little weekly tradition, in which I pick a book from my reading past to highlight — and you’re invited to join in!

Here are the Flashback Friday book selection guidelines:

1. Has to be something you’ve read yourself
   
2. Has to still be available, preferably still in print
3. Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

Other than that, the sky’s the limit! Join me, please, and let us all know: what are the books you’ve read that you always rave about? What books from your past do you wish EVERYONE would read? Pick something from five years ago, or go all the way back to the Canterbury Tales if you want. It’s Flashback Friday time!

My pick for this week’s Flashback Friday:

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

(published 1951)

From Goodreads:

The novel that inspired the now-classic film The Caine Mutiny and the hit Broadway play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Herman Wouk’s boldly dramatic, brilliantly entertaining novel of life — and mutiny — on a Navy warship in the Pacific theater was immediately embraced, upon its original publication in 1951, as one of the first serious works of American fiction to grapple with the moral complexities and the human consequences of World War II. In the intervening half century, The Caine Mutiny has become a perennial favorite of readers young and old, has sold millions of copies throughout the world, and has achieved the status of a modern classic.

The Caine Mutiny is the book that brought us the iconic character of Captain Queeg, immortalized on film by Humphrey Bogart and famous for such gems as:

Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard, standard performance is sub-standard, and sub-standard performance is not permitted to exist.

Is Queeg incompetent? Cowardly? Or mentally unbalanced, perhaps dangerously so? That’s the moral dilemma that the junior officers on board the Caine must confront, deciding whether the safety of their ship demands overthrowing their leader — or whether the fact that Queeg is a poor captain is irrelevant to the fact that military men must obey the chain of command, period.

The Caine Mutiny is an exciting, intelligent read — at once an accurate portrayal of the alternating dangers and boredom of life at sea, an exploration of the inner workings of men under pressure, and a rollicking tale of a band of brothers that isn’t quite as noble and self-sacrificing as most war movies might have us believe. Filled with storms at sea, wartime engagements, and plenty of legal drama, The Caine Mutiny is a modern classic of wartime fiction.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

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