A crisp, well-executed reconstruction of naval warfare’s darkest chapter: the sinking and abandonment of the USS Indianapolis.
Men’s Journal editor Stanton sets out to vindicate Captain Charles McVay and to force the navy to declassify information relating to one of the worst disasters in naval history. After fulfilling a secret mission (the delivery of atomic bomb parts from Guam to Tinian) in July 1945, the cruiser Indianapolis was sent for gunnery practice in Leyte—without destroyer escort, and without classified information regarding Japanese submarine activity. The ship was torpedoed and sank in approximately 12 minutes, spilling about 900 sailors into the Pacific. On shore, her hurried SOS message was intercepted, then disregarded, by the radioman’s commanding officer. Furthermore, she was not noted missing by naval administrators for more than five days. Following a suspenseful account of the sinking, Stanton assembles a detailed chronology of the horrors endured by the floating survivors via a risky device: He narrates the sinking and its aftermath by assuming the voices of Captain McVay, the ship’s doctor, and one of the few surviving Marine guards. The latter two (and other survivors) were interviewed by Stanton; McVay, the only Navy captain ever court-martialed for losing his ship in wartime, shot himself in 1968 after years of torment. The author’s minute depiction of their privations—from shark attacks that killed an estimated 200 to homicidal dementia—is appropriately terrifying; he captures his characters’ surreal horror at watching their comrades needlessly perish prior to a belated rescue (which is also dramatically rendered). The conclusion explores the remaining survivors’ efforts to officially clarify what really happened (and McVay’s actual heroism), but the dark heart of the tale lies in its sustained, gruesome survival narrative.
Stanton’s prose has qualities of jittery brightness, but this dramatic recreation plays to his strengths and feels passionate and correct. His personal veneration of the survivors sustains a positive tone, despite uglier historical truths.Pub Date: May 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6632-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MILITARY | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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