Doug Most's "Launching Liberty"

Doug Most is a veteran journalist in Massachusetts, a native of Rhode Island, the author of three books, and now the Executive Editor and an Assistant Vice President at Boston University. He's worked at newspapers in Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and New Jersey. He spent 15 years as magazine and features editor at The Boston Globe, and has had feature stories appear in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing. His new book, Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War, tells the human story behind the epic race to build the Liberty ships of World War II. His previous book, The Race Underground, is the narrative history of Boston and New York struggling with dangerously overcrowded neighborhoods and desperately searching for relief through the painstaking construction of subway tunnels beneath their streets. That book was optioned for a PBS/American Experience documentary called The Race Underground. Most's first book, Always in Our Hearts, was a true-crime story based in New Jersey and Delaware about two teenagers who hid their pregnancy from their parents and killed their baby to avoid responsibility.

Most applied the “Page 99 Test” to Launching Liberty and shared the following:

When writing a book about World War II, the greatest challenge is finding an original, character-driven, human interest story that has not yet been fully told in narrative and historical depth. I hope Launching Liberty achieves that, zeroing in on a critical, defining aspect of the war that has been overlooked and underappreciated—the building of America’s Liberty ships, an emergency fleet of nearly 3,000 cargo ships that were needed to carry President Roosevelt’s famous Arsenal of Democracy to our troops around the world.

Page 99 is an important page in Launching Liberty, as it turns out, because it’s the start of a new chapter. Chapter Thirteen is titled “A Boy’s Dreams.”

Before the Liberty ships could be built, they had to be designed down to their last screw—and the boy in “A Boy’s Dreams” is a young child named William Francis Gibbs, who would go on to become the greatest ship designer in the world in the early to mid-20th century. But at the start of the chapter, he is just a boy, eight years old, standing in Philadelphia alongside his younger brother and their father on a blustery morning, November 12, 1894, to see the launching of the largest ocean liner ever built, the SS St. Louis. President Grover Cleveland was also there. The Gibbs boys watched as music faded and, the first lady, Frances Cleveland, smashed a champagne bottle across the 550-foot hull, and the ship slide down into the Delaware River.

I described the ship this way: “The St. Louis was almost as long as two football fields, built of steel, decorated from bow to stern with colorful flags from around the world, and powered by a pair of reciprocating engines that could propel her forward at a speedy twenty knots.”

Because page 99 is the opening of a new chapter, it does a great job of showing the reader how the book is really a narrative, built around dates and events and people, the characters who drive the story forward. There are no Liberty ships without William Francis Gibbs and his brilliant ship designs, and his inspiration for becoming a famous shipbuilder began on that blustery fall morning in Philadelphia, as a wide-eyed eight-year old boy.

Learn more about the book and author at Doug Most's website, Facebook page, Instagram home, and Threads page.

My Book, The Movie: The Race Underground.

--Marshal Zeringue