“Let the Sea Make a Noise...: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur”, by Walter A. McDougall

816 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465051526

Let the Sea Make a Noise...: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur is an exceptionally innovative work, as Walter McDougall documents in a mere 800+ pages 400+ years of exciting voyages of discovery, pioneering feats, engineering marvels, political plots and business chicanery, racial clashes and brutal wars. It is a chronicle complete with little-known facts and turning points, but always focused on the remarkable people at the center of events while dividing the narrative into three technological eras: The Age of Sail; The Age of Steam & Rails; and The Age of the Internal Combustion Engine. But this is no mere history, for the author has employed the literary device of telling his tale through the medium of a dreaming professor debating an audience of historical personalities who were themselves at the center of events. Different, I grant you, even a little pretentious perhaps, but I liked it, for all that.

With echoes of Citizens, Shogun, The Fatal Shore, Hawaii, and Modern Times, Let the Sea Make a Noise... is unlike any history you've ever read. Not pure history or pure novel or historical novel, McDougall has written a novelistic history: a kind of impeccable nonfiction in a fantasy setting, if you will. As stated above, imagine a tale told by an historian who seeks to lecture to an audience of historical personages who were themselves key figures in the history the author is relating; and then imagine that historian being frequently interrupted by these historical characters reminiscing and arguing about the meaning of the events through which they lived. This is how this tale covering four never boring centuries is related by the author, a chronicle replete with little-known facts and turning points but always focused on the remarkable people at the center of events. 

Among these very-real but larger-than-life characters are the American-loving Japanese ambassador to Washington on the eve of Pearl Harbor; the Russian builder of the Trans-Siberian railway; a Hawaiian queen from the first period of Western competition for the Islands; the American Secretary of State infamous for his "folly" in purchasing Alaska; and a Spanish missionary from the period when it looked as if the whole area might have become part of the Spanish realm. A stunning saga of human adventure, Let the Sea Make a Noise... is a gripping account of the rise and fall of empires in the last vast unexplored corner of the habitable earth, an area that occupies one-sixth of the surface of the globe and all organized into short, action-packed scenarios that whip the reader from the tropical paradise of Hawaii to the island fortress of Japan, from the frozen wastes of Siberia to the California coastline, and into the power centers of London, Washington, Tokyo and St. Petersburg. McDougall offers dazzling insights into all the twists and turns of the Pacific empire.

There is no other book that covers these same subjects in this wealth of detail and with such chronological scope, nor with such creativity.