Week4_2/6/16_To Shining Sea

       The book of my choice is titled “To Shining Sea” written by Stephen Howarth. By looking at the title, and the first few pages, I can easily detect it is a story about the Navy. It is a non fictional book, and it goes through the years about well known members of the Navy. The book has a hard covering, but it is not leather. The book is fairly bigger than most books. Its cover is about 5 inches across and 8 ½ inches in height. The bind on the book is roughly 2 inches wide. The book contains 620 pages, which is a lot more than the books I normally read. The cover has blue on it and red on its bind. The title and author’s name is in gold with a few accenting touches. The font seems to be one normally used now, one similar to Times New Roman. When opening up the book, it made a cracking noise, as if it has been only opened a few times, so I was able to safely assume the book has not been used a lot. When I pulled the book off the shelf, it had some dust on the cover, also safe to assume it has not been used recently. The book is relatively new, and it was published in 1991 by Random House New York. The book cover makes the book look a lot older than 1991, and also the context of the book would make it seem older as well. I believe the reason why the book is published in 1991, is because it was a historical non fictional book. They needed to collect all the information, and then write it.

       This book was also interesting, because it had source notes. The author did not make up this non fictional story, he had gotten the facts from another source, and used those in his writing of “To Shining Sea.” That is interesting to me because it helps the author’s credibility.  The book also contains an index, to help find certain key words or important dates that happened.

       I did not get to read this book, but by looking at the external variables, it was pretty safe to assume the audience is towards people in the Navy. Another audience that could come to mind would be the elderly. I think the author wrote the story the way it is, to appeal to certain groups of people. This book could also be for anyone who is interested in learning about the Navy. I would not read this book in my free time, but someone might want to. The author probably wrote this book to appeal to people in the Navy or maybe even for schools to use. I do not know the rating or how appropriate it is, but maybe the author wants the book to be used for a classroom setting.

       Lastly, reading the about the author section, Stephen Howarth was part of the Naval Institute and part of the Royal Naval Reserve. Having this information can help determine that he wrote this book for people in the Navy. This book seems interesting, but not enough for me to check out and read.


Howarth, Stephen. To Shining Sea. New York: Random House, 1991. Print.