The official publication release date for my next book, Crucibles: How Formidable Rites of Passage Shape the World’s Most Elite Organizations (again co-authored by my writing partner, Rear Admiral Jim McNeal), is one week away from today, hooray! Some pre-orders have already shipped, so we’re hearing from folks who have already gotten a copy in their eager mitts, and their responses to the book have been very favorable to date. We’ve also had some great quotes from early readers that will be appearing as “gush blurbs” on the book jacket, website promotional pages, and other marketing platforms. What do these folks have to say about Crucibles? Here’s a sampler of their responses:

Co-Authors Rear Admiral Jim McNeal and J. Eric Smith know how to tell a story that informs, influences and leaves a lasting impact with the reader. They’ve done it with a previous book and succeeded again with Crucibles. Each has tremendous credibility writing about formidable rites of passage in elite organizations because each displayed their own measure of outstanding “Teamwork, Tone, Tenacity” while serving in unique locations and organizations such southwest Asia combat zones and the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program. What’s especially intriguing about this fascinating topic of Crucibles is the wide professional and geographic diversity of organizations that are examined across modern and ancient times. Want to be educated and entertained? Read one of Jim McNeal’s and J. Eric Smith’s books!

Rear Admiral Paul Becker, USN (Ret)
Former Director for Intelligence (J2), Joint Chiefs of Staff

Always looking for gems in the hidden and unique aspects of history, both McNeal and Smith know how to select appealing and interesting topics that pull a reader into an engaging book. With their unique ability to assimilate disparate historical facts, in this book they are experts at how to methodically conduct a thorough examination of the distinct and usually shielded world of rituals required to enter certain groups or societies. Each author possesses that special ability to expose a reader to the mental, physical, and social commitments that makes one experience an enlightening lesson in how people interact and why they are willing to conform themselves to belong to groups or societies. At times funny, serious, and disarming, both authors are brilliant writers who will create a book that pulls readers into wanting to know more about how the social need to belong affects group dynamics and why individuals choose to become part of the fabric of those groups.

Commander Kirk S. Lippold, USN (Ret)
Former Commanding Officer, USS Cole (DDG 67)

As a U.S. Marine, Naval Academy graduate, and someone who has participated in combat operations, I know firsthand how intense training and real-world challenges shape individuals and teams. This book offers a timely and powerful look at how the hardest trials create the strongest leaders. Whether you’re in the military, business, or simply fascinated by elite performance, this is a must-read.

Matthew “Jerry” Glavy
Retired Lieutenant General, U.S. Marine Corps

A must-read for those looking to better understand the rites of passage most will never attempt

Joe Cardona
Team Member, NFL’s New England Patriots

This enlightening and entertaining survey shows the wide range of what a crucible can be. The insights from participants (and even some leaders) provide an intimate view inside each example, and the authors offer pithy takeaways that help guide those trying to understand their own crucibles or developing new ones.

Steve Bowen
Retired Captain, U.S. Navy

As I’ve written at length in various earlier posts here, pre-order numbers play a big role in buying, selling, and reviewing decision-making by brick-and-mortar book stores and magazine and newspaper book critics. We’ve done well to date, but Jim and I would really like to hit this out of the park over the final week of the pre-order season, so if you’re interested in getting a copy of Crucibles (or copies . . . they’ll make great Father’s Day gifts, promise), then please visit my books page for links to place your order, the sooner the better, with our thanks! I also have ten signed copies here that I can dedicate or inscribe with whatever message would please a reader, so if that’s of interest, shoot me an email, and I’ll get one flying your way with all due speed.

Once you’ve gotten and read a copy, we’d also be much obliged if you could take a couple of minutes to leave an online rating/review on Amazon, your own website, or anyplace else where you think we might make some good connections with good potential readers. Jim and I remain deeply proud of this book, and excited to finally share it with the world at large, so thanks, thanks, thanks to all who follow along here for your faithful support of my never-ending stream of piffle and tripe. It means a lot to me, truly.

 

Since the publication of Side By Side in Eternity: The Lives Behind Adjacent American Military Graves in 2023, and as I’ve been marketing the forthcoming Crucibles: How Formidable Rites of Passage Shape the World’s Most Elite Organizations, I’m frequently asked just how my writing partner (Rear Admiral Jim McNeal) and I came to be co-authors, and how exactly that process works. It’s a fair and interesting question, I suppose. While people don’t seem to struggle with the concept of collaboration when it comes to music (e.g. Lennon-McCartney, Jagger-Richards, Rodgers-Hammerstein, etc.), it’s true that there aren’t that many books, outside of compilations, that feature multiple authors. When I look at my various lists of all-time favorite novels, for example, the only co-credited pair on the list is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who wrote several tremendous books together (e.g. The Mote in God’s Eye, Lucifer’s Hammer, Inferno, etc.) So as Jim and I are already hard at work on our next book (provisionally titled Born and Made: How Leaders Emerge, Why Leadership Matters), it seems a nice time to write the answer to the question of co-authorship down, so I can just point people here when it next comes up.

First: how did our partnership emerge? We went to the Naval Academy and Naval Supply Corps School together, so we’ve known each other a long time. Our careers took us in radically different directions and to opposite sides of the country, but we kept in touch over the years, usually regarding mutual support for the various masochistic fundraisers we both like to endure (epic bike rides, swims, treks, and such) and over our shared interest in the music that formed the soundtracks of our times together in Annapolis and Athens.

Around 2017, Jim’s long-time friend from junior high school days, Scott Tomasheski (who had already published several works of fiction) saw a report about the Herndon Climb, the Naval Academy’s traditional “Plebes No More” ceremony. (I was just there for the Climb earlier this week). Scott called Jim and said it was an amazing event with an amazing story, and inquired if a book had been written about it. A bit of research disclosed that, no, there was no Herndon book out there, so Jim and Scott, being go-getter types, set about correcting that literary oversight. They successfully pitched the concept to the Naval Institute Press, who brought The Herndon Climb: A History of the United States Naval Academy’s Greatest Tradition to market in 2020.

Jim documented the next step of the process of our partnership in what became the prologue to our first collaborative book. Here’s how he told the tale:

What “birthed” this book was an epiphany I had after I spent the day selecting photographs for my first book, The Herndon Climb: A History of the United States Naval Academy’s Greatest Tradition, with apologies for that shameless plug. I was walking down the hill from the offices of the Naval Institute Press (who published the Herndon book) when I passed by the United States Naval Academy (USNA) Cemetery. No, I wasn’t whistling, I never got that saying. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a grave that had some recent flowers laid there and looking to my right, I saw it was the final resting place of Senator John McCain (USNA ’58), who had been buried the previous year. Lying next to Senator McCain was his best friend, Admiral Charles R. Larson, also from the USNA Class of 1958. Best friends since their time as Midshipmen, they chose (along with their spouses) to rest together forever.

The McCain/Larson grave sites, photo by Jim McNeal.

Admiral Larson was the Superintendent at the Naval Academy the last three years that my co-author here, J. Eric Smith, and I attended USNA. Senator McCain served for 31 years in the United States Senate, but he first became known to the American public through his experience in the prisons of North Vietnam, most notably the Hỏa Lò prison, or as the prisoners derisively called it, the Hanoi Hilton. He was released as a POW in Operation Homecoming in March of 1973 and passed away after a hard fought and public battle with brain cancer in 2018.

Two very accomplished men, best friends, who chose to lie side-by-side in perpetuity, is a nice story but certainly not unique. What is unique (at least to me), is that while Admiral Larson was at the top of his class and served as the Brigade Commander his senior year at the Academy, his best friend, John McCain, finished a lowly fifth from the bottom of their class and as McCain himself described it: “My four years (at USNA) were not notable for individual academic achievement but, rather, for the impressive catalogue of demerits which I managed to accumulate.” My epiphany was simply “Wouldn’t their friendship make an interesting book?”

I have been a fervent admirer of Eric’s writing for a long time and was thrilled when he agreed to work with me on this project. As Eric and I worked to flesh out a book pitch, I had lunch with a friend and when I told him about the Larson/McCain book idea, he said something that had been lurking in both of our minds: “Do you think that this subject matter is enough for a whole book?”

Rather than present a critique with no solution, he followed that up with what became the central theme of our book: “You know there are a lot of other stories like that as well? For example, Admiral Crowe and Admiral Stockdale, who are also buried side-by-side in the Naval Academy Cemetery, were best friends as well”. The Crowe/Stockdale story became our key sample chapter, and its strength is what set the bar for our subsequent stories, which ironically do not include Larson/McCain in this final version of our book, as we sensed that their story had already been told frequently and well in recent years.

Side by Side in Eternity was published in the summer of 2023, by which time we’d already gotten to work on our next book. Where did we get the idea for Crucibles? During a 2021 Homecoming Weekend event at the Naval Academy promoting The Herndon Climb and other recently -published Naval Institute Press books, Jim discussed the then-forthcoming Side by Side in Eternity, and was unexpectedly asked by the event’s moderator to preview his next planned book project. We had not actually thought or talked about that yet, but being quick on his feet and reading his audience well, Jim posited a tome about the evolution of the Plebe Summer experience over the years. And as that which is said in public must be treated as truth, we soon began to churn that concept a bit, eventually deciding that instead of a single-topic deep dive of The Herndon Climb variety, a themed multi-topic tome in the Side by Side in Eternity style might serve the varied concepts of rigorous organizational rites of passage better, for us as writers and researchers, and for the readers who may elect to acquire our work.

In early 2023, I participated in a writing retreat in Hawai’i organized by Writing Workshops. I had a first draft proposal in hand for my completed short story manuscript, Ubulembu and Other Stories, along with some of our early work on Crucibles. My priority at the workshop was to woodshed Ubulembu a bit, and perhaps make some good connections to bring it to print. But a couple of days into the workshop, one of the event’s instructors, author Ying Compestine, told me that she believed another of the workshop’s instructors, agent Mark Gottlieb of Trident Media Group, might be more interested in the Crucibles proposal.

So for the final event of the workshop, I took Ying’s advice and read from a Side by Side in Eternity chapter about brothers Quentin and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., noting that our planned Crucibles project would be built around a similar story-based structure, instead of reading a story or two from Ubulembu. Ying was right: Mark did like it, and even before I’d gotten home from Hawai’i, Jim and I had a call with Mark, who agreed to represent us for Crucibles. Soon after I got home, Mark got our Crucibles concept in front of Doug Seibold at Agate Publishing, who accepted our proposal and offered us a book contract. Mark and Doug (and their teams) have been absolutely superb to work with, and we have been most happy with their enthusiasm and support for the Crucibles project. And, as it turns out, Ubulembu won the Unleash Book Prize a month or so after I got back from Hawai’i, with a cash prize and a publishing contract, so all worked out perfectly on both projects, from my perspective.

So that’s the history. What about the mechanics of how we do what we do? Here’s our description of our process and partnership, taken from our proposal-in-process for Born and Made:

About Our Partnership: We view our successful collaborative approach in cinematic terms, where Jim serves as our producer, and Eric serves as our director. We frame our projects together, establish their structures and forms, and then closely collaborate on crafting a cohesive final manuscript from many disparate pieces. Jim focuses on the research, interviews, logistics, business, communications, and documentation aspects of the project, while Eric shapes the scenes and deploys the creative writing touches required to create a robust and entertaining narrative, carrying a distinctive voice, viewpoint, and perspective. Both elements of our partnership are equally critical to the products we produce, and we have established a timely and thorough collaborative approach for telling complex stories in accessible and entertaining fashions. This cinematic approach to our writing is purposeful, as we see each of the component stories within Side by Side in Eternity, Crucibles, and Born and Made as complete, standalone entities, visual in their construction, and worthy of reinterpretation in film, video, or television formats.

We work with superb support from Scott Tomasheski’s wife, Nancy, who serves as our interview transcriptionist, doing as good a job with that often thankless task as it is possible to do. (That was probably my biggest bugaboo during my music journalist days, as I just hated the interview transcription phase of the process, since I had to do it all myself; needless to say, I have been most pleased to have a true professional at our disposal to assist with that important piece of the creative and documentation puzzles). Nancy and Scott assisted with editing Crucibles, as did my wife, Marcia. They did fine work, affirmed when our content and copy editors at Agate Publishing said the final manuscript we submitted was in excellent order and shape.

While it’s possibly tacky to bring this up, people do ask me this question, so, yes, we do split all of the advances and royalty proceeds equally. Our books wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t be as good as we think they are without each of us doing our essential parts. When we’re in production mode, we talk on the phone weekly, and we can generally be in “leap frog” mode throughout the process, Jim researching/interviewing for one chapter, while I’m writing/editing the one before it. It’s a great partnership, and a great way to pursue areas of mutual interest and share them with the world, which is quite satisfying for a couple of “gentlemen of a certain age,” as we are at this venerable point in our lives.

Jim and I will be working to find a publishing home for Born and Made, which based on prior experience and timelines will hopefully see publication in the summer/autumn of 2027. By which time, of course, we will likely be deep into our next project, though we don’t quite know what that will be yet. Hopefully one of us will get ambushed with a leading question somewhere and have to come up with a quick-yet-brilliant answer, soon.

I got back from a (very) quick trip to Annapolis last night, where my writing partner (Rear Admiral Jim McNeal) and I sold and signed copies of our forthcoming Crucibles: How Formidable Rites of Passage Shape the World’s Most Elite Organizations (along with two earlier books) at the annual Herndon Monument Climb, where the Naval Academy’s Class of 2028 achieved their “Plebes No More” moment after 11 months of rigorous struggle.

Our framing device for Crucibles centers upon a retelling of our own Plebe Year experiences in 1982-83, and the Herndon Climb was for us (and every other plebe class since the early 20th Century) one of the climactic moments of our definitive personal rite of passage. So it was great to be able to share our book with the parents and friends and family visiting the Yard to watch their own plebes complete the climb. It was even greater that our excellent publisher, Agate Publishing, was able to work with the Academy’s Mid Store to get hard copies of the book to Annapolis almost a month before its official publication date. It was very pleasing to sell a hard copy of the book, sign it, and hand it over immediately, as opposed to the pre-order campaign we’ve been running for the past two and half months. Best of all: one of our Naval Academy classmates bought the first physical copy from us. Thanks, Lenny!

With three and half weeks left until the official June 10th release of Crucibles, we’re still pressing hard on pre-orders, so if you’re interested, we would once again be most grateful if you’d be willing to get your pre-order in, at the online outlet of your choice. I’ve consolidated ordering links on my books page, here. I also had some downtime after the Climb was completed, so rambled about my old stomping grounds taking photos of some sites of personal significance, along with some action snaps of the Herndon Climb.

We congratulate Navy’s Class of 2028 for completing their great crucible, especially Midshipman Fourth Class Gus Russo, who successfully summited the Monument, replacing the Plebe’s “Dixie Cup” hat with an upper class midshipman’s combination cover. By tradition, the plebe who conquers the Monument will be the first to earn Admiral stars in the class. In reality (and per Jim’s research into his Herndon book), this has never actually happened. But why let facts muddle a great myth, right? Right. The class’ official time was 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 31 seconds. I kind of wish they’d rounded up so the Class of 2028 could say they completed their climb in 2:28, but I have a hunch that the class of 2027, who worked on the greasing and preparation of the monument, and on logistics for the event, may have fudged a few seconds to keep that ’27 in there. Numbers are magical at Navy, and one is always on the lookout for opportunities to promote one’s class year. Especially when you can do at the expense of another class’ magical number.

To see my full photo album of the trip, you can click on the photo of Jim and I at our selling/signing station, just adjacent to the Herndon site. A great visit, a great tradition, and (if I say so myself) a great book, coming soon to bookstores and bookshelves near you. Hopefully including one in your own home or office!