From Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy comes the incredible story of that service, beginning to end. John Lehman focuses on the important ships, interesting people, and decisive battles in American naval history from the Revolutionary War to the present day.

Everyone and everything in these pages is larger than life. Some of the men are legends. Lehman covers, among others, the Revolutionary War's John Paul Jones (of "I have not yet begun to fight" fame); David Glasgow "Damn the torpedoes" Farragut of the Civil War; and the recently retired Hyman G. Rickover, the "high priest" of the nuclear submariners and his stormy, controversial relationship with Lehman himself. He also uses little-known diaries and accounts to tell the stories of the individual, uknown sailors who made it all possible. Then there are the ships: from the U.S.S. Constitution and C.S.S. Alabama to the ships of today's Navy including yesterday's nuclear-powered Nimitz supercarriers and today's superfast, high-tech Arleigh Burke destroyers just rolling off their blocks in Maine's Bath Ironworks. And finally, of course, the battles, thrillingly recounted from the Battle of New Orleans to the Battle of Midway to Grenada (which is more exciting than you thought).

Throughout the smoke and fire Lehman argues fiercely for the independence of the Navy and its men, and shows the service's gradual evolution from ragtag smugglers and blockade-runners to true ships of the line and eventually today's ultimate ship and sailor, technically skilled, but in the same fighting tradition of his illustrious forbears.

The first new single-volume history of the U. S. Navy in decades is also the most exciting ever.