Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I purchased this book as a gift for an uncle who was an ARIZONA survivor who had preceeded me in my Naval career. He survived to serve twenty more years in the Navy after the sinking of his ship, including surviving having another ship sunk beneath him. Unfortunately he died before I had the chance to give it to him--though prehaps not so unfortunate in one respect. He was a stickler for details and he would probably have been disappointed in the story of his ship as told in this book.
The book is a dramatic story of a dramatic event that shaped world history. Having said that, there's not much else to say about it. It is the result of collaboration by three authors, one of whom is a retired U.S. Marine. It reads as though they each took one part of the story to write and the book was hurriedly cobbled together to meet a publishing deadline without adequate reconciliation of the different parts. Other than the personal accounts of the individual survivors quoted, I can find little new material in the book that isn't published elsewhere. I was disappointed in the inconsistant data in the books--such as calling ADM H.E. Kimmel an Admiral (4 stars), a Rear Admiral (2 stars) and a Fleet Admiral (5 stars) in the space of a page and a half. That part was obviously not written by the Marine, who would never make such a mistake in rank. There was also a discription of one of the surviors who, also in the space of a couple of pages was referred to as a "chief warrant officer", a "warrant officer" and "eligible for warrant officer" (a chief petty officer). Other similarly discordant data jangled the attention of a reader. Nautical terminology was sometimes used, sometimes misused, sometimes disregarded entirely. Many of the scenes were decribed repetatively and inconsistantly, not just from the different viewpoints of the different survivors but from the narative matrix connecting the stories. Details about the ship and the people were erratic and kept the reader off balance, trying to construct a picture of the events. The pace and feel of the book was inconsistant throughout and not of the caliber I'd have expected of a book recording events from the perspective of sixty years later.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The USS Arizona: The Ship, the Men, the Pearl Harbor Attack, and the Symbol That Aroused America
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