"Knights of the Sea"

Knights of the Sea: The True Story of the Boxer and the Enterprise and the War of 1812 (David Hanna)

I'm gonna cut right to the chase here: This book is a mess. From the title, you'd probably guess it's about a naval battle in the War of 1812, but what it reads like is a panicked high school history paper desperately trying to meet a minimum word count; Hanna seems unable or unwilling to hold on to a narrative thread, so instead he keeps going into non sequitors, quoting big parts of poems or songs, or quoting Jane Austen or Shakespeare. The result is a bizarre, tedious frakenstein of raw, puzzling little scenes that never seem to have anything to do with each other or, heaven forbid, what the book's actually supposed to be about. Hanna needs to get his shit together and hire a tougher editor.

Grade: D-