ISLE PAGES
Captain prosecuted
in sinking redeemed
with authors’ push
Abandon Ship!
By Richard Newcombe
(Harper Collins, 326 pages, $25 hardcover)
Review by Burl Burlingame What goes around, comes around. Just as a U.S. Navy court of inquiry has recessed to figure how guilty Cmdr. Scott Waddle is -- does anyone have any doubt about the predetermined verdict? - Richard Newcombe's seminal history of the USS Indianapolis disaster has been re-released, with a new introduction and afterward by Peter Maas.
Star-BulletinThe ordeal of the crew, torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese, then ignored by Navy rescuers during the closing days of World War II, became one of the classic and tragic sea stories of all time.
The crew essentially treaded water for a week in mid-ocean, steadily decimated by fatigue and sharks, and then after they were recovered, the Navy's prosecution of skipper Charles McVay - father of Honolulu promoter Kimo McVay -- was relentless, reckless and mean-spirited, as they were determined to blame an individual rather than the system that placed the crew in harm's way.
Incredibly, thanks to a spate of newspaper stories, best-sellers and a Florida boy's history project, Congress recently rejected the Navy's findings on McVay's culpability. The boy, Hunter Scott, was inspired by an account of the Indianapolis disaster in the movie "Jaws," notes Maas.
All of this is due to "Abandon Ship!," which, when first published in 1958, was much-debated. It remains one of the most readable and thoughtful accounts of the incident, and Maas' additions bring it up to date.
New releases from Hawaii authors,
compiled by Burl Burlingame:
THE LITTLEST PANIOLO, by Ellie Crowe, illustrations by Barbara KaMille (Island Heritage, 40 pages, $8.99)Mika, the little blond Hawaiian cowboy, leaps out of bed, goes to the rodeo and has various adventures with animals and other kids. The story is engrossing for kids, and adults will appreciate the capsule history of paniolo life added in the back.
The truly cool stuff in the book are the "illustrations" by KaMille, actually heavily modified photographs of darling kids and animals. KaMille has an excellent sense of color and motion.
MANULI'I & THE COLORFUL CAPE, by Kimo Armitage, illustrated by Scott Kaneshiro (Island Heritage, 28 pages, $8.99)
A little Hawaiian boy is nice to some birds and they later repay him with a feather cloak in this localized retelling of "Androcles and the Lion." The pictures are very brightly colored, so much so that you wouldn't want to read this under a black light.
LAND OF ALOHA, by Cheryl Lee Tsutsumi, photographs by Veronica Carmona, Ann Cecil, Ron Dahlquist, Philip Rosenberg, (Island Heritage, 120 pages, $24.99 hardcover)A coffee-table book filled with beautiful photographs of beautiful sights around the islands. Fabulously printed and gorgeous to look at, but otherwise undistinguished from others of the same type. The text runs to typical travelogue hype - "In a word, western Kauai is extraordinary." - but at least it's not expensive. An ideal gift for mainland relatives.
WILL'S WAY, by Rob Benton (Xlibris, 292 pages, $16 paperback, $8 eBook)
This is a straight-forward and not-fancy novel about a character's struggle with alcoholism in the "multicultural society" of Hawaii, with realistic depictions of the everyday life of a street person.
The tone is observational. Author Benton, who has adopted Hawaii as his home, admits on the jacket that his own decline into homelessness is a result of alcoholism, so the book certainly has an authentic tone. It is also a product of Random House's Xlibris program, which makes writers into their own publishers by new-fangled "print on demand" technology that allows books to be printed a few at a time. It is a good way for new writers to break into the market and become authors, and if sales warrant it, perhaps get picked up by a big-time publisher. Bookstores can order the title for you, or you can go on-line and order from Xlibris.com or Amazon.com. An "eBook" version, essentially an electronic version for reading on a computer, is also available at a lesser price.
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