Volume 28, Number 1 · February 5, 1981
Follow the Fleet
By John Keegan
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1805
by Alfred Thayer Mahan, abridged and edited, with an introduction, by Anthony Preston
Prentice-Hall, 256 pp., $29.95
The next compiler of a dictionary of British and American English would do the speakers of each a service if he included the proper name Mahan and the explanation that in Britain it is pronounced to rhyme with barn but in the United States with Japan. A considerable number of Transatlantic conversations would be rescued from foundering in the opening stages on mutual incomprehension. For Mahan is still a name to conjure with, both that of Dennis Hart, teacher of strategy to the generals, North and South, of the American Civil War, and his son Alfred Thayer, prophet of the creed of seapower to the Anglo-Saxon world.
Review, 2301 words
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