A Handful of Emeralds: On Patrol with the Hanna in the Postwar Pacific By: Joseph C. Meredith (191 pages: photos, drawings, maps) Reviewer: Terry Miller Overall Rating: Four Stars--Highly recommended. An excellent book. Joseph Meredith was commanding officer of the destroyer escort USS HANNA (DE-449) late in the Korean War and afterward when the ship was assigned to patrol the Trust Territories of Micronesia. Meredith interweaves history and his own impressions of the peoples and places he saw, bringing to life these exotic islands and their natural beauty. He is able to capture and express the feeling of standing on deck and looking at lush tropical vegetation or approaching an island in a small boat and seeing the rusting Japanese guns that just a few years before had defended the isles from the approaching Americans. Meredith takes the reader back to the earliest sailing times and describes the international politics of Imperial Europe as first one empire and then another sought control of the region for their own purposes. He brings to light the savage side of some of the native population and the internecine warfare among the various tribes populating some of the island groups. Most importantly, his prose is calming like a tropical breeze, allowing the reader to set his own pace yet encouraging the turning of the next page. Helpful maps and the author’s own sketches and a few photos complete this most pleasant overview of post-war Micronesia and describe a time in the U.S. Navy little discussed in most action-oriented accounts. This is as pleasant a read as I have had in some time and I thoroughly recommend it.