Last week I read and finished
Neptune's Inferno, which is about the naval fighting during the Guadalcanal campaign. The author didn't "go there", but the USN's unpreparedness and crappy destroyer torpedoes (they ran deep, the magnetic exploder was utterly unreliable, and the contact exploder was approximately as bad ... what's not to love!
While the Mark XIV submarine torpedo is most infamous, the destroyer and air-launched Marks shared the same defects) were both largely the consequence of FDR's gutting defense to fund his social programs. The author accessed a lot of contemporaneous sources - action reports, crewman interviews/accounts, etc..
One interesting point about the battle of November 13th (US cruisers vs. Hiei and Kirishima) is whether Adm. Callaghan viewed the impending battle (he knew what he would be facing) as so suicidal that plowing into the IJN formation might have been intentional, since USN 8" guns could penetrate Hiei's and Kirishima's battle cruiser grade armor at close ranges. The view of his actions I'd heard before was that he cluelessly blundered into the IJN formation and the consequent melee was totally unintentional. The mental image of USN DDs firing into Hiei's superstructure while so close that Hiei's secondaries could not depress low enough still amazes me.
Next up, hopefully arriving from Amazon in the next day or two, will be
Chinese Girl in the Ghetto. The author, Ying Ma, moved from Guangzhou to Oakland when she was 10YO. I'm sure it'll cover much more, but it goes into the anti-Asian racism that has long been common among some blacks.
