The individual biographies of these four admirals and their contemporaries are listed in the bibliography. I particularly recommend Thomas B. Buell, The Quiet Warrior: A Biography of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), and John B. Lundstrom, Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006).
More recent titles of note include James D. Hornfischer, Neptune’s Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal (New York: Bantam, 2011), a gripping saga of the full Guadalcanal campaign; Craig L. Symonds, The Battle of Midway (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), which is a powerful narrative of the first six months of the war; and Barrett Tillman, Enterprise: America’s Fightingest Ship and the Men Who Helped Win World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), a gritty tale of the “Big E.”
Other classics include Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (New York: Harper, 2009); Evan Thomas, Sea of Thunder: Four Commanders and the Last Great Naval Campaign, 1941–1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); and Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (New York: Penguin, 1991).