Admiral Hyman Rickover

“Marc Wortman delivers a 17-gun salute to this short, profane spitfire who pulled a reluctant Navy into the atomic era. . . . Wortman opens a window into the life of an intellectual titan disdainful of nearly everything except scientific honesty, his adopted nation, and the power of the atom.”—Jonathan W. Jordan, Wall Street Journal

Awarded the John Lyman Book Award honorable mention in the category of Naval and Maritime Biography and Autobiography, sponsored by the North American Society for Oceanic History

Winner of the 2023 Captain Richard Lukaszewicz Memorial Book Award, sponsored by the U.S. Military History Group

“A superb and even-handed treatment of a complex, brilliant, and driven admiral who inspired both awe and loathing across the Navy he fundamentally reshaped. Rickover’s raw accomplishments in delivering nuclear power afloat changed the US Navy forever and remain seminal today.”—Admiral James Stavridis, former supreme commander, NATO, and author of 2034

“Hyman Rickover is justifiably known as the ‘Father of the Nuclear Navy.’ Marc Wortman provides a lively, deeply informed, and revealing portrait of this remarkable man, warts and all.”—David Holloway, author of Stalin and the Bomb