A true tragic short story of an historical event
581361
I knew nothing about this tragic historical event before I read Patrick Spencer's excellent narration of it. Spencer tells what happened in a very readable, even suspenseful manner. After reading it, it made such an impression upon me that for the past few days, I think of it frequently. The six short chapters of the book reads like a well-edited fictional short story.
It is about the USS Indianapolis which was torpedoed on July 30, 1945 by a Japanese submarine. Only 321 of its sailors survived. They were in shark infested water without food or drink for five days.
The ships captain was court martialed with two charges against him. He allegedly failed to give his crew orders to abandon ship and failed to zigzag in submarine infested water during a time of good visibility.
Patrick Spencer shows that the charges were wrong. Even the Japanese submarine commander who bombed the ship testified at the court-martial that Captain McVay acted properly. It was impossible to communicate with the crew because the communication system on the ship was damaged by the torpedoes. And visibility was not clear. It was dark.
The Indianapolis sent messages for help. The messages were received but because of incompetence and other reasons, they Navy did not send help during the five days that many in the crew died in the water, some from the sharks, some by drinking the sea water.
I recommend the book. The end of the story is tragic.
2522271
This is a wonderful story of a very tragic time in history and of how this man not only survived but went on to build a great life for himself and his family.  I would recommend it to everyone who wants to be inspired.
2655936
This book was amazing. It was heartbreaking, based on a true event in history and one that is little known. I consider myself a bit of a history buff, but I had never heard of this tragic event.

The story focuses on 4 young adults; each with a different background, from different countries and  how they are living and trying to survive through WWII. The story is told in short chapters and switches point of view each chapter between these characters. One is a young pregnant Polish girl, one a young woman who was studying to be a nurse from Lithuania, one a young man from Prussia who is attempting to sneak a precious artifact out of Germany to embarrass Hitler and the fourth a German boy who was conscripted to serve on a ship evacuating the eastern section of Germany before the Russians advance.

The background is that the Russians are continuing to march into Germany and the civilians need to evacuate. They are being killed quickly so this needs to be done with urgency, unfortunately, the Germans are pretty slow with this order so many are risking their lives to get to the harbour. When the little group arrives, the area is chaotic with so many trying to get on a ship to get to safety. Several refugees are left on-shore. Others are "lucky" enough to get passage on overcrowded ships. The Wilhelm Gustloff is one such ship carrying over 10,000 passengers on a ship built to accomodate just under 1,500. Lifeboats are also limited (they have less than half the normal complement). All but one of the small group gets passage on this ship, including the "shoe poet" and young boy. When Russian torpedoes hit the ship, it sinks pretty quickly with almost all the passengers perishing.

The main characters in this story were easy to like, all except for one, the young sailor. The lives of the characters gradually unrolled as you read the book and got to know them. I found myself rooting for them and their survival. The sacrifices that many took in this story is amazing. I have read many book about this time period and was not sure if I wanted to read another, but I am glad I did. This opened my eyes to what regular civilians in eastern Europe dealt with during this time. It was horrendous. Make sure you read the author's remarks at the end and for more information visit this website:[...]

I recommend this book to anyone, especially those who read historical fiction or those that like reading about WWII. This book is listed as YA but I believe adults will definitely enjoy it as well.
1500884
The author brings this horrible tragedy in our nation's history, to life through the eyes of a young chaplain who experiences the atrocities of the U.S. Calvary upon the Indian people. This piece of historical fiction kept me reading and  put me in the midst of the struggle between a nation of people trying to survive and the corruption that was allowed in the government of that time. Great read!!!
4436617
This is one of the shortest books I've read in the past few years. I was able to finish it in under two hours.

A young girl (of unknown nationality) goes about her complacent routine until one day a tragedy befalls a nearby city and she loses her entire family. Told by the girl herself, it tells of her hope that her family will return, her denial that they won't return after time passes, her fears at being alone, her grief at losing those dear to her. We learn how she copes with being alone in a time of turmoil; her acceptance that there are others worse off than she; and of how she learns that life goes on regardless of what happens around us.

A compelling, gripping story; packs a lot of punch into a few pages.
1235288
"This is not a story to go down easy, and the backwash still got hold of us today. The history of a family. The history of a country. ... Wasn't no riot like they say...it was a massacre."

In 1873, five years after the Louisiana Constitution grants citizen rights to former slaves, the black men of Grant Parish risk their lives to vote, electing a Republican sheriff. When the Democratic incumbent refuses to step down, a group of black militiamen blockade the courthouse. Expecting the U.S. government to uphold the election results, the militants wait for federal reinforcements, but weeks pass and no relief appears. The white attackers finally break the impasse by setting fire to the courthouse; and a massacre ensues that includes the slaughter of four-dozen unarmed blacks. Sam Tademy and Isaiah Smith (the author's great-great-grandfathers) are two of the few survivors of the "Colfax Riot".

With a deft hand, Lalita Tademy intertwines historical events with her own ancestral story to create a novel about two families struggling to build a better world for the generations that follow. Her varied characters are unforgettable, her forthright descriptions are vivid, and her unusual use of the present tense provides immediacy while propelling the story forward.

It is accomplishment enough to write a novel that so poignantly exposes the indignities endured by one group of people during one small period of history, but the author's stunning achievement is to tell a story that, despite its specificity of time, place, and race, universalizes both the suffering and the sacrifice. More than a family saga, Red River is a clear glass that illuminates the misery of injustice and the magnificence of sacrifice, wherever they are found. Bravo!

Nancy J. Attwell (author of&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/The-Fool-s-Path-A-Tale-from-the-Lothemian-Legacy/dp/1933142138/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">The Fool's Path: A Tale from the Lothemian Legacy</a>; a novel set in 13th century Europe.)
1699692
Being about the Warsaw Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust, this is a very sad story of heroic people.  The characters are not actual persons who were involved, but the story is based upon research into the facts.  I found it to be well written.
1411048
For reasons that we many of us can readily imagine, the true story of the service and acts of heroism in World War II among the African-American troops of the U. S. Army ("Buffalo Soldiers") was "buried" for many years.  The acts of supreme sacrifice by men such as Lieutenant John Fox from Ohio deserve to be told, appreciated, and celebrated.  For decades these men were denied the recognition that they so richly deserved and earned; once "lost records" were found, seven of these men, including Lt. Fox, were belatedly granted the Congressional Medal of Honor.

This true story comes from an unlikely source, an English boy who with his Mother returned to a tiny northern Tuscan village for their summer vacation with relatives there in 1940.  Shortly after their arrival, the actions of Hitler and Mussolini made it impossible for them to leave until more than a year after the war was over.

For these years, this young boy observed the impact of the war upon the residents of this isolated small town: first in trying to produce or acquire enough food or medical care to keep them alive, and finally in late 1944 -- at Christmas -- when the village becomes a focal point of the major battle that occurred on Tuscan soil during the entire war.  His mother had assumed that they would be safe in this tiny remote village, but she became the first casualty of the war there when she sustained a serious head wound in an artillery bombardment.

This is also an intimate story of village life and village people in this old community founded by the Romans -- Sommocolonia, Italy -- who ultimately were forced to endure the direct and terrible impacts of war when more than half of the houses and other buildings in the village were destroyed, changing their fates and their future.

Sommocolonia of today, with fewer than 50 full-time residents, is still a lure to English-speaking people, most of whom have family ties to the village.  Its high vantage point provides a magnificent view of the mountains that surround on all sides.  But the real and horrible wounds of war, though superficially hidden, are still there for all to see, both in the buildings and in the families of the remaining residents.

This is a compelling tale of real life in war by a man who as a young boy had a unique, unlikely, and unwelcome opportunity to observe first hand.  It deserves to be read.
3180905
The author, Patrick Spencer, shares his findings as he worked his way through the loss of more than half the crew of the sinking of USS Indianapolis. It is a tragic story which highlighted the malfunctions of the American Navy if it were run as a finely tuned machine.

It was clear to surviving members of the crew that the outcome of the trial was decided upon long before the trial even began. For many years ahead of the survivors were nightmares, reliving the terrible  tragedy they had endured. This book is well written and creates a visual story of one of America's saddest losses. I feel privileged to give my opinion on this book.
3057165
Told in the first person, mostly in Lady Jane's voice, this novel meticulously details this tragic and heartbreaking tale of a young aristocratic girl who lived in England in the mid-1600s during the outbreak of the religious wars.  Because Lady Jane had the misfortune to be living in a very dangerous period of English history surrounded by brutal and irresponsible people, she was executed for treason at the age of sixteen.
Lady Jane Dudley ne Grey was distantly related to the Tudors, and during the period of time when there was a power vacuum in the country between the death of the Calvinist King Edward VI and the accession to the throne of his Catholic sister Mary I, Lady Jane Grey was made Queen of England by her father-in-law the Duke of Northumberland. Because of this, Lady Jane is also known at the Nine Day's Queen.
Naturally, a teenager could not really be a traitor, and Alison Weir's outstanding novel details how her self-absorbed and selfish parents betrayed Lady Jane by acting irresponsibly in ways that contributed directly to her death.  The tragedy is not just that a young life was lost to no purpose, but that Lady Jane was an outstanding young woman.  She was highly intelligent and a gifted scholar of Latin and Greek, who already was developing a correspondence with some of the leading intellectuals of her day.  By forcing her to marry at the age of fifteen - especially to the son of a person with dangerous pretensions to the throne - her parents showed that no only did they not appreciate Jane, but they were willing to sell her off for political and financial gain.  Such actions were not unusual in aristocratic families of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and in a forthcoming novel I discuss this issue myself.  But what makes this story so tragic is that Lady Jane was exceptional, not only in her academic gifts but also in her level of maturity and piety.
3989267
On Memorial Day, 1889 the South Fork Dam, fourteen miles from Johnstown Pennsylvania failed and a torrent of water was released with the force of the Niagara River as it leaps the falls destroyed the steel town in its path.

2,209 men, women and children died, or so says the official count, but it is a number which was never been credited with precision. Like all catastrophes there are tales of heroism, cowardice, generosity, luck and misadventure. Like all calamities there are questions of where to place the blame. Was it an Act of God or was it the result of criminal negligence?

This book was written nearly fifty years ago. It describes the flood like it happened yesterday,
2700292
I believe, as I have since the event, that this version of events as told by the sole survivor, is what really happened.  While conspiracy is most interesting, I am frankly quite amazed at how unwilling people are to  believe that some things happen simply as accidents, although with a cause.  My overwhelming opinion is Mr. Al Fayed's dogged pursuit of a scapegoat is  simply to deal with his personal anguish at having played a part in the  tragedy.  Mr. Rees-Jones' suffering is quite apparant, and one can only  sympathize with his difficulty in defending himself.  This is his story, as  he knows it, and nothing published from other sources makes me think the  horrible accident that killed the Princess of Wales happened any other way.  This books illustrates how the simplest explanation, of which the author  provides evidence, is often the most difficult to accept.  One can only  wish Mr. Rees-Jones well, if in nothing else than in re-establishing his  anonymity.  Good on you, Trevor.
1062760
Noted historian Walter Lord, author of "A Night to Remember", a renowned account of the Titanic tragedy, has put together a brief, but compelling account of one the most horrific days in U.S. History, December 7th, 1941; the "Day of Infamy" in which the Japanese attacked our naval base in Pearl Harbor and drew the United States into World War II.  The politics behind the attack and the revisionist histories that want to lay culpability at the feet of Franklin Roosevelt are irrelevant in this book.  Walter Lord's compelling account deals briefly with the groundwork the Japanese laid to execute this attack.  Then it rolls right into a gripping minute-by-minute account of the pre-attack activities, the attack itself, and the response in the aftermath.

History, when presented in the worst form, can seem static and boring.  When history is presented in its best form, it comes alive, captivating the reader and transporting them to the events and making them know the people they are reading about.  Though a brief account, Walter Lord's "Day of Infamy" succeeds admirably in making that day come alive.  It transports the readers to Hawaii on that terrible December morning and involves them in the events of that day.  That, alone, makes this a book worth reading.
3276392
Smyrna 1922 is upsetting to read: there is always a disaster lurking in the background, and when it happens it is horrible indeed.  The consequences of war are all too often visited on innocent civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this, the closing chapter of the Ottoman Empire, is no exception.

Giles Milton once again has picked out a little bit of history and expanded a complete story out of it (Nathaniel's Nutmeg is an example of a tiny hinge of fate, for instance).  This time around, the focus is on Smyrna (Izmir), once a thriving trade port on the coast of Asia Minor.  The Levantines - European expats - ran a mercantile community, employing a large chunk of the local populace.  Smyrna was a mixed city, with Greeks, Armenians and Turks, as well as the Europeans, and a thriving American expat community.

All this was lost with the disastrous expedition into Anatolia by the Greek army in 1922.  There is an early wrinkle in with the revocation of the concessions - trade relaxations - on which this foreign fortune was built, with this being a source of apparent pride among local Turks, but this merely silent foreshadowing of the disaster to come.

In between, we see Smyrna during WWI under Rahmi Bey, and under Greek annexation in 1919.  Through all this there is a "ancien regime" feeling in the air: old power and wealth about to be lost in a sea of blood.  As it turns out, the blood was largely shed by the servants of the Levantines - a point deftly made by Milton - and Smyrna stands a proxy for the genocide of the period, by Greek and Turk alike.

Others have covered the facts of the book neatly; I won't all over again in any greater detail than I have above.  What is horrifying (and occasionally uplifting) is the reactions of various civilised men and women to the fall of Smyrna, and how much easier it is to do evil to others than to do good in such a time.

This is an excellent study of little-known history, told like a novel.  This is the horror of war, from the point of view of the civilians who suffered rather than the soldiers that fought and died.
4647480
A well written tale of an event few know about.  It is a shame how many of histories stories are unknown?
2402399
Self-described as a memoir, not a history textbook, When Angels Wept is the poignant story of a Polish family caught between two evils: the Nazis and the Soviets. The story traces the lives of a Polish couple (the author's aunt and uncle) together with other relatives from Tsarist times before World War I to the interwar period to their deaths in 1942 in Auschwitz.  It is, as the author says, the story of a "diabolical reality," the "terror ethic" visited on Polish patriots in equally heinous ways by both the Nazis and the Soviets. The account gives a picture of how one had to live in evil times. Among the items of interest is a post card sent from in 1942 from mother, then in Auschwitz, to her daughter.  The card was supplied by the Nazi administrators and is complete with the seven regulations regarding communications with the outside world.  Mother offers words of comfort--"I am healthy and work"--in a way that masks the brutal reality of Nazi death camps. Sadly, the mother had only weeks to live.  The author weaves the fragments of the lives of those who perished with an informed historical account of what was happening at the time--and how these larger events affected individual daily lives.  We would like to know more about these Polish patriots but people who were in hiding and who perished leave only fragments behind.  It's all we have sometimes. Yet enough is known of the suffering betrayal and treachery of this era to warrant a faithful telling.  The book concludes with this epitaph for those who were murdered in Auschwitz: "Somewhere in this desolate graveyard of human misery and anguish repose Jan and Marta, two among two million, lost but not forgotten."  It's a personal story that we all can share. It's good history.

Readers interested in history as autobiography may want to look at other recent works in this genre, including Omer Bartov. (2007). Erased: vanishing traces of Jewish Galicia in present-day Ukraine; Kate Brown. (2004). A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland; and Modris Eksteins (1999) Walking Since Daybreak : A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century.
1818981
Although short, and written for a younger audience, grades 9-12, this is an urgently needed book for anyone of any age wanting to comprehend the horror of the Holocaust. How do you rate a book that alternately made you cry in sorrow, boil in anger and righteous indignation, ashamed to be part of any group that either participated in or ignored the cries for help, but also sometimes made you shout for joy at the tenacity and elegance of human spirit of those who were persecuted that enabled them to survive? The only answer to the question comes by gritting your teeth, and recognizing the urgency of letting everyone know what really happened, mainly in Germany and surrounding countries, but also, unbelievably, all over the world.

"We Remember..." is filled with pictures of survivors and Holocaust atrocities. Thankfully, they are all black and white pictures. Color would have rendered them even more obscene than the events they pictured were. (I use the word `obscene' here not to indicate vulgarity, but rather the intensely evil nature of the events themselves, as in "abhorrent to morality or virtue".)

David A. Adler does a masterful job of gathering the first hand eye-witness testimonies of those who actually were there, most either as children, or young adults. The story is appalling: the indifference of world leaders to the events themselves, and to the plight of those onboard a ship trying to escape for their lives. One ship with 769 Romanian survivors was turned away at every port, and finally sunk by a Soviet submarine (p. 45).

He tells of Hitler's attempted takeover of the government in 1920 and his meteoric rise to power; of  Neville Chamberlain's attempt at a policy of appeasement of Germany, and its failures; how many of the German people welcomed him with open arms; how a few non-Jews, but only a few at first, had the courage to resist the government mandated persecution; and, he does so in a manner that is both riveting and engaging. As I read, I jotted down words that came to mind: shocking, distressing, outrageous, inhuman, ungodly and unchristian were some of them.

The one thing that impressed me as Adler told his story is that not only did the world refuse to believe that the Nazis were doing this terrible thing, but that the events were so horrible, and so indescribably unbelievable that many of the Jews themselves didn't believe the warnings and stories at first. As they went to the death chambers, they did so thinking the best of the situation, and hoping for the best outcome.

One young reader reviewed this book in 2000 using the word "fun" to describe his experience. I attribute that description simply to his age and lack of understanding of the use of the word "fun".  Let me assure anyone who reads this, they will NOT have fun reading it. If they are human, they will find themselves cursing (not literally) anyone that could even imagine doing such things to another human being. They will weep. And, their righteous indignation will well up inside themselves with a determination to either tell others about this unbelievable but true story, or be sure others know. And that is why David A. Adler took the time to make us all sick at our stomachs.

Read it. Please. Pray that it never happens again. Five monstrous stars for a cautionary story told very, very well.