A Commodore of Errors

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Description

A Hilarious Comedy on the High Seas Commodore Robert S. Dickey, the pompous second-in-command at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, desperately wants the top job, presently occupied by the skirt-chasing Admiral Johnson. So Dickey goes into cahoots with Mogie Mogelefsky, the imperious, bullying mayor of neighboring Great Neck, to oust Johnson. When they succeed in exposing Johnson in yet another peccadillo, Mogie suddenly reneges on their deal--he is tired of dealing with the WASPs at the Academy and declares he wants a Jew to run things instead. The Commodore is quick to point out that the Academy's by-laws require the Superintendent to have sea-going experience and that, unfortunately, it will be nearly impossible to find a Jewish captain. Enter Mrs. Tannenbaume. Coincidentally, her sonny boy is captain of a ship! But Mrs. Tannenbaume has spent her entire life proclaiming it's Tannenbaume with an E, and that she's not Jewish. While the Commodore secretly plans to expose Captain Tannenbaume as a Gentile in the end, Mrs. Tannenbaume joins her son's ship in Singapore to teach him and his new bride, a nineteen-year-old Thai bar girl, to be the perfect Jewish couple. The crew on the MV God Is Able have never seen the likes of Mrs. Tannenbaume before, and they sit back and watch as she "takes the conn" from her son and everyone else who stands in her way. A Commodore of Errors is a bawdy, sea-going romp full of lively oddballs and convoluted plot twists in the PG Wodehouse vein. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction--novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Reviews

"A dash of Catch-22, a smidgen of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and a pinch of HMS Pinafore spice up this wildly original comic concoction that you'll savor from start to finish." --Steven D. Price, editor of 1001 Funniest Things Ever Said "A ribald and rollicking debut--does for the Merchant Marine what the Keystone Kops did for the police department." --Laurence Shames, author of Florida Straits and Tropical Depression "Jacobsen has written the sea (and land) story that all mariners have inside of them--based in fact, embellished with every telling, and ultimately delivering a message." --Captain Carolyn J. Kurtz, master mariner and harbor pilot

Author Bio

John Jacobsen, a graduate of the United States Merchant Marine Academy, spent fifteen years plying the world's oceans as a ship's officer on cargo and passenger vessels. Today, Jacobsen is a harbor pilot in the Port of Miami and the chairman of the Biscayne Bay Pilots. He lives in Miami, Florida.