The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story (A Novel) Hardcover – October 3, 2023

Stunning, accurate, worthwhile, real in ways needed so desperately in today’s world. Helprin is a genius writer - engaging, interesting, brilliant, and important. With my 36 years of active Naval service, this book was like reading a work of love. Wow!

"Snow falling on water makes a sound so close to silence that no heart exists it cannot calm" is the gorgeous opening line of Mark Helprin's The Oceans and the Stars. From that line forward, Helprin took me across the world from the halls of Washington DC, to the desert of Somalia.War stories are not my genre, but Helprin drew me into Stephen Rensselaer's story. Even his name evokes the mystery of the Hudson valley that Helprin drew in his masterpiece A Winter's Tale.Even though the prose is luscious and evocative, Helprin's narrative kept me turning the pages. Rensselaer falls in love with a beautiful woman longing for their reunion when he returns home. But as captain of the Athena, he has to make life and death decisions as the ship comes under fire. Doing so, he risks his life and career because he disobeys orders in order to save people's lives. It's refreshing to spend time with a hero who acts with integrity and bravery.In The Oceans and the Stars Helprin has drawn several oceans in all their moods and beauty. We see the ugliness and tragedy of war. When I closed the book, I was sorry to see it finish, and sighed with a deep sense of satisfaction. I can't recommend The Oceans and the Stars highly enough. This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. Thank you.

This author has an encyclopedic knowledge of ships, weapons, and warfare in general. The story is timely and compelling. A minor complaint is a tendency for the author to become preachy. But overall I enjoyed the book very much.

This book had everything I wanted in a book: a solid story, lots of sea going action, amazingly accurate detail and a lyrical love story.Mark Helprin is one of the most compelling authors I’ve ever encountered and I highly recommend this book.

Damn, it has been SO long since I could give one of Helprin's books 5 stars. This one earns it.No, it's not as beautiful nor as profound as Winter's Tale, which I consider to be the most beautiful book ever written in the English language. It's not quite as beautiful as Soldier Of a Great War, though more profound, I think. Whereas every sentence in Winter's Tale feels crafted (with the possible exception of the Jesse Honey incursion), the evident yield of 5 or more lavish cycles of editing and polishing, the first 20% of The Oceans and the Stars feels like the yield of two lavish cycles of editing and polishing, and the balance of the book the yield of three or maybe three and a half. Almost as if Helprin was trying to "get back on the horse" after generating lesser works. But the reverence Helprin manifests for the human experience, the human capacity for joy, love, agency, shines through in this book even so. And even with "only" two seeming cycles of editing, just stands head and shoulders better crafted than any other best seller over the past two years.In addition to the frequently beautiful language, and the exultation of the human spirit, the arc of the story is highly satisfying. Narrative and pacing are fully competent and engaging. Characters are rich, motivations feel entirely natural, the logic of the plot fluid, organic, and believable. The book benefits from, but is not gratuitously reliant on, the action scenes and Helprin's understanding of the art of war-- those are necessary to the story, but are neither the purposes nor the core of it.To calibrate me, I detested Memoirs From Antproof Case, and I thought Freddy and Frederika was frivolous and unworthy, albeit humorous. After them, I gave up on Helprin until Oceans. I guess now I will have to circle back and try Sunset and Paris. If you liked Winter's Tale, Soldier Of a Great War, and Helprin's better short stories, I think you will be rewarded by reading Oceans.

I just finished Mark Helprin’s new novel “The Ocean and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story.”I loved it. LOVED. Some of you might, too. I’m compelled write about it at some length.To like “The Ocean and the Stars” you’ll have to like Helprin’s rich writing. If you liked “A Soldier of the Great War” I know this is for you. Nabokov fans should rush to buy it. If you prefer Hemingway to Turgenev, all of Helprin’s books will be too lush, poetic and philosophical (critics will say preachy) for you.The novel never glorifies war, but two-thirds of it is a war story; so if that doesn’t work for you, skip it. It’s never naturalistic, but it has frank descriptions of violence, some of it terrorist violence against vulnerable people. It is upsetting - not gratuitously and not often. But it is.It’s certainly not pro-war, but it’s not Erich Maria Remarque, either. Helprin’s world view includes a tragic necessity of violence in response to evil, and respects those who step up to that terrible task. It acknowledges that evil exists, which will not sit easily in the minds of moral relativists. It is frank in presenting Helprin’s view of the clash between Islam and the West. If you are OK with that, it’s like what Tom Clancy might dream about having written if he could have added some Tolstoy to his DNA.Its love story is classic Helprin - Peter Lake and Beverly Penn stuff. Stylized and almost too perfect. But beautiful to me.It tries to be apolitical, but Helprin was a speech writer for Dole…I’m a liberal and never found it off-putting. And neither Helprin nor Bob Dole are or were MAGA-style, infantile, populist fools. It never bothered me.