The Rising Tide

The Rising Tide By Jeff Shaara

Category: Novel Grade: A

Shaara is really emerging as the best author currently writing war-based fiction. He comes about his talent honestly. His father was the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Killer Angels, about the Civil War. Jeff Shaara hit the grand running by completing the Civil War series that his father started. He's gone on to write books about the Revolutionary War and the First World War. This book, The Rising Tide, is the first of a trilogy about World War II - more specifically about the war in Africa and Europe against Germany.

Shaara accomplishes a lot with a proven style. First, he believes that, while he writes about history, what he's really doing is telling a great story. While I'm a big fan of W.E.B. Griffin and his military novels, Shaara doesn't get in to any of the soap-opera aspects of the story that are such a prominent part of the Griffin books. Wives, family and sex play almost no part in Shaara's writing making his books more "serious" while, surprisingly not losing any of the entertainment value.

Second, Shaara has a key asset in his M.O. for telling these stories, one that he's used in every book so far, as I recall. While he doesn't write in the first person, Shaara always chooses a few people in the story to serve as multiple focal points. Each chapter in the book uses the viewpoint of a particular person to provide context for what's going on. This technique works because Shaara does such a good job of choosing his focal points. He starts by identifying a small number of the major players on both sides of the war. Here he's used Eisenhower, Montgomery and Rommel with a few chapters late in the book that focus on Patton and Kesselring, Rommel's superior. These focal points allow Shaara to tell the "high level" story -- the international politics, the strategy planning, the frustrations and gives us glimpses of the strengths and the weakness of Roosevelt, Churchill and Hitler.

What gives the book its emotional pull, however, is the second set of choices that Shaara makes in finding focal points. He always includes at least a couple of the normally faceless men who actually fight the war. In this book, he's pulled out two that not only show the agony on the ground, but also let Shaara talk about the new tools that began to be used in World War II. The two (fictional) men that Shaara singles out are Private Logan, a tank gunner, and Sergeant Adams, a paratrooper. Through these men, we get to see the on-the-ground reality - the mix of extraordinary boredom combined with the terror experienced by what were basically kids in the face of the most devastating war in history.

The combination of a terrific story and Shaara's style makes for a really incredible book. In keeping with the theme started in the last review, this is exactly the kind of book that we should be assigning to our high school students. While its well researched and, as far as I can tell, historically accurate (except for the completely cleaned up language), what this book really does, aside from entertaining and educating, is make the reader interested in learning more -- exactly what we should be trying to do with kids. Kids who grow up interested in history are far more valuable to them and to society than kids who learn (and may or may not remember) that date of D-Day.