DODReads

Marshall K. Snyder’s Marine Defense Battalions in World War II: From Wake Island to Guadalcanal fills a long-standing gap in Marine Corps and naval history by examining one of the Pacific War’s most overlooked organizations. While the Marine Raider battalions, carrier aviation, and amphibious divisions have received extensive attention from historians, Snyder instead focuses on the Defense Battalions; the hybrid formations built to seize, fortify, and defend advanced naval bases across the Pacific.

Memoirs of military service often focus on a single perspective covering one career or one set of experiences. Raising Athena takes a broader view. MyLinh Brewster Shattan structures her narrative across two generations, examining her own experience at West Point in the late 1980s alongside her daughter’s journey three decades later.

Most books on health try to motivate, but Faith, Fitness, and Food removes the distance between what readers already know and what they are actually doing.

In this fully revised fifth edition, Neimeyer builds upon Simmons’s foundational work, preserving the structure and intent of the original while incorporating expanded historical context, recent scholarship, and detailed treatment of Iraq and Afghanistan to produce a more complete and current account of the Corps’ development.

By Michael Allison

Leadership failures are often attributed to poor decision-making, lack of experience, or flawed strategy, but Michael Allison’s Break the Bottle takes a different view.

Review by Steven-Paul Lapid, USN (Ret.)

Drawing on decades of experience in the Navy’s special operations community, Don Mann presents a concise and highly practical guide to the mindset that drives elite performance.

Review by Steven-Paul Lapid, USN (Ret.)

Michael J. Stout’s Goering’s Ground Troops offers a deeply researched and illuminating examination of one of the most unusual organizational decisions of the Second World War: the creation of the Luftwaffe Field Divisions.