About our Author Presenters - Marc Liebman

Marc Liebman, Citizen Sailor, Businessman and Author

Marc retired as a Captain after twenty-four years in the Navy and is a combat veteran of Vietnam, the Tanker Wars of the 1980s and Desert Shield/Storm.  He is a Naval Aviator with just under 6,000 hours of flight time in helicopters and fixed wing aircraft.  Captain Liebman has worked with the armed forces of Australia, Canada, Japan, Thailand, Republic of Korea, the Philippines and the U.K.

He has been a partner in two different consulting firms advising clients on business and operational strategy; the CEO of an aerospace and defense manufacturing company; an associate editor of a national magazine and a copywriter for an advertising agency.

Marc’s latest career is as a novelist and five of his books – Cherubs 2, Big Mother 40, Render Harmless, Forgotten and Inner Look have been published. A sixth book, Moscow Airlift will be released in April 2018 and a seventh, The Simushir Island Incident will be released in November 2018.  Big Mother 40 was ranked by the readers who by books on Amazon as one of the top 100 war novels.  Forgotten was a 2017 Finalist in Historical Fiction in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, a Finalist in Fiction in the 2017 Literary Excellence Awards and rated as Five Star by Book Favorites.  Inner Look was also rated Five Star.

The Liebmans live near Aubrey, Texas.  Marc is married to Betty, his lovely wife of 48+ years.  They spend a lot of time in their RV and visiting their four grandchildren.

About our Author Presenters - James Hornfischer

James D. Hornfischer’s books have led reviewers to rate him as one of the most commanding naval historians writing today. His most recent book is “The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944–1945” (Bantam, 2016).

“The Fleet at Flood Tide,” recipient of the 2017 Commodore John Barry Book Award, is a major narrative of the U.S. Navy’s Central Pacific drive in World War II, covering the air, land and sea operations that seized the islands of Saipan, Tinian and Guam, as well as the strategic air operations conducted from the Marianas that ended the war.

Hornfischer’s “Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal” (2011), a New York Times bestseller, was chosen as a best book of the year by numerous book reviews. “Ship of Ghosts” (2006) told the story of the cruiser USS Houston (CA-30) and the odyssey of its crew in Japanese captivity. “The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors” (2004), a combat narrative about the Battle off Samar, won the Samuel Eliot Morison Award and was chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books on “war as soldiers know it” and by Naval History magazine as one of “a dozen Navy classics.” Hornfischer has also collaborated with Marcus Luttrell, the bestselling author of “Lone Survivor,” on Luttrell’s second autobiography, “Service: A Navy SEAL at War” (2012).

All of Hornfischer’s books have been selections of the Chief of Naval Operations Professional Reading Program, managed by the office of the Chief of Naval Operations and the U.S. Naval War College. He is a regular contributor for the Wall Street Journal and has written for Smithsonian, Naval History, Naval Institute Proceedings, and other periodicals. He has lectured at the U.S. Naval Academy, Marine Corps University at Quantico, the National WWII Museum, the National Museum of the Pacific War, and other venues. He serves on the board of the Naval Historical Foundation.

Hornfischer’s motivation to write about the U.S. military reaches back to his childhood, from his explorations of his elementary school library’s 940.54 Dewey Decimal section, building Monogram and Revell model ships and aircraft, watching “Baa Baa Black Sheep” on NBC (horrible as history, but redeemed by Robert Conrad’s winning portrayal of Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington of VMF-214), and absorbing the epic intonations of Sir Laurence Olivier in “The World at War” on PBS.

A native of Massachusetts, Hornfischer is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Colgate University (international relations and German) and holds a degree from the University of Texas School of Law. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and their children.