Don't Go Near the Water by William Brinkley 1956 HC/DJ

Don't Go Near the Water
William Brinkley
New York: Random House
Third printing
Copyright 1956
373 pages

The binding is in good condition, the pages are clean but lightly tanned. The cover is faded on the edges. The jacket is price clipped and edge worn, the price is written in pencil. Good in acceptable dust-jacket. Hardcover.

The story concerns a unit of land-locked mariners for whom the immortal naval watch-word Don't Give Up the Ship became Don't Go Near the Water. They were Public Relations officers, and most of them, like their leader, Lieutenant Commander Clinton T. Nash, were commissioned "without the corrupting effect of any intervening naval training." By 1945, the time our story begins, they had bravely faced the wartime adversities and shortages existing on the remote island of Tulura and had converted it into a kind of Radio City of the Pacific.

One of the greatest adversities, of course, was the short supply of women; but they met this problem with the same ingenuity and devotion that they applied to all others: they met it, if not head-on, at least halfway, and made do, so to speak, with what supply there was. It all adds up to a rousing entertainment, broadly farcical, but with-as a counterplot in another mood-a gentle and tender love story running through it all.   (#0000408)