Willie Keith crushing the stub in the ashtray was not the Willie who had lit the cigar. When the danger had passed, Keith lay alone on his bunk and smoked a cigar while he thought about things:Ī half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime. The second attack, some six months after the “mutiny,” nearly sank the ship. The USS Caine saw mostly minor combat action, but it did survive two kamikaze attacks. Like the topics listed above, the depths of this topic will never be exhaustively plumbed by anyone, but now that I am in my 60s, a parent with grown children, I have more perspective about it than I did as a teenager. This book is about death and chance, both of which I now have more perspective about than I did as a teenager. Once I attended a leadership seminar where the speaker said that leadership is love. There are many different kinds of love: in courtship in marriage (not the same as courtship) within families, especially the bond between parent and child and between people working together in a common enterprise. I now have more perspective about love than I did as a teenager. There are leadership lessons in this book that are applicable to our current era of political polarization. Many lines in the book resonate with me as I reflect on the bosses I’ve had, and on the kind of boss that I was. In the course of the novel, the USS Caine has six captains. I now have more perspective about leadership than I did as a teenager. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book again, after so many years. I read this book in high school, and I just re-read it. Keith spent most of that time aboard the USS Caine, a World War I destroyer converted to minesweeping duty in the South Pacific. The Caine Mutiny follows the life of Willie Keith from December 1942, one year after Pearl Harbor, to October 1945, shortly after the end of the war. It was published, and won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1951. The Caine Mutiny is a novel of historical fiction about World War II by Herman Wouk.

The caine mutiny 1951