In Billy’s War, James C. McKay, the prominent Washington attorney (first in his class at Georgetown University Law School who, as special prosecutor under the Reagan Administration, investigated Attorney General Edwin Meese in the Wedtech pipeline scandal), has written a semi-autobiographical novel, taking us from a Maryland farm boy’s first unworldly days at Cornell University’s Agricultural College to the command of a warship during one of the most critical battles of World War II-the first Allied invasion of Europe against the might of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. A coming of age tale in a world on the brink of war, McKay’s prose is heartwarming and honest as we follow Billy from small town innocence to confront the cynical elitism of wealth and privilege in the Ivy League halls of academia. Then to constant danger and sudden death on the decks of a warship in the midst of a historic battle against one of the worst threats to humanity in modern times.