WORKS IN PROGRESS
One of the best ways to stay productive is to stay busy. Many Sarantakes writing projects overlap. There is a danger in this approach in that if you are writing eight things at once, you really are not making much progress on any of them. At the moment, though, Sarantakes has five major projects.
Books
1. In 1984 Los Angeles hosted the Olympics and will be doing so again in 2028. The next book will be on the 1984 Games with the working title: The Reagan Olympics. This project is based on research at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the files of the International Olympic Committee at the Musée Olympique in Lausanne Switzerland, and the records of the Los Angeles Olympic Committee housed at UCLA. This book is in the writing stage.
2. The next project will be a group biography looking at the five men who were five-star generals: Arnold, Bradley, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Marshall. This book will examine them not as military commanders, but as strategists. The working thesis: they developed the strategy that won not only World War II, but also the Cold War. This project is still in the research phase.
3. A third Sarantakes book project is a study of the home front in World War II that focuses on the activities of the Boy Scouts of America. This project offers a unique perspective to look at American society during this era and is national in scope. As a result, Sarantakes did research in all 50 states. This undertaking is in the writing stage.
Articles
1. As part of the 1984 Olympics project, Sarantakes is writing an academic journal article on how sports reporters covered the Games.
2. Since he is a professor at the Naval War College, Sarantakes writes on naval matters every once in a while. He currently is working to have an article on the economics of naval expansion in Imperial Germany published in a popular history magazine. The topic is more interesting than it sounds.
3. Guess what: the military and the media got along in Vietnam much better than legend would hold. That is the working thesis of an article Sarantakes is finishing with publication aimed at an academic journal.