Well-written. Compelling story. ( )

Excellent little book about the development of Monitor and the Merrimac. While much of their actual encounter is well-known, those events serve as the exciting capstone to the lively tale of how the ships came to be -- and that story is one I was unfamiliar with, and which proved far more interesting than I frankly expected. From the eccentric european immigrant behind the invention of the Monitor decades before the war and the internecine fighting within the Navy and War Department that almost scuttled it on several occasisions, the fight to build the ship was in many ways more impressive than the actual conflict in VA. I highly recommend this as a good short read.

(2014 Review #4) ( )

This was a gem of a small book. Within its 228 pages James deKay tells the incredible story of the Monitor's creation, construction and fateful encounter with the once formidable US Naval warship, the Merrimac; now reassembled into an even more impregnable Confederate ironclad: the Virginia.

The amazing battle between these two ironclad ships came only one day after the newly launched Virginia turned two US Warships, the Cumberland and Congress into firewood, threatening the Union blockade.

After the Monitor entered Hampton Roads the following day and fought the Virginia to a draw, the blockade remained intact, thus squeezing the Confederacy into a chokehold that would end its hopes of bringing in Great Britain and France into an alliance.

Much of the books narrative focuses on the Monitor’s creator, John Ericsson, whose engineering genius changed the course of naval history and ship construction. As deKay sums up the story in the last lines of the book: [the Monitor] “was precisely the right ship, at precisely the right place, at precisely the right time.“ ( )