NIMITZ

A reverent, expansive biography of Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded US naval operations in the Pacific in WW II. Written in flashback fashion, the book presents entertaining if disjointed accounts of major battles--including Nimitz' clashes with General MacArthur, who usually pulled strings and won, while Nimitz remained ""interested only in devising the most effective, least costly strategy for defeating the enemy."" Nimitz himself is presented as a punctilious but flexible commander, a genial raconteur who managed to build Pearl Harbor in 1920 by ""liberating"" war scrap clandestinely from other naval bases. The biography compiles not only his jokes but the birth weights of his grandchildren and the condition of the bathroom in German hotels he frequented in 1913. The man who said on being informed of the A-bomb plans against Japan, ""Young man, this is all very interesting but August is a long time from now and in the meantime I have a war to fight"" remains opaque: this is not an incisive study but an ingenuous work of commemoration, likely nonetheless to be a standard source.