4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The ARIZONA Story - commercial version, August 15, 2005
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.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
THE USS ARIZONA: Down At Pearl And Down The Memory Hole., March 18, 2006
This review is from: The USS Arizona (Hardcover)
This poorly written book reads in part like some dollar tourist brochure available at any Honolulu newsstand. And those are some of the better parts. This is all said in respect to the ship and its men, more respect than they are shown between the covers of this book.
THE USS ARIZONA was written by three authors (Jasper, Delgado and Adams), and was obviously written in haste with little collaboration and less intelligent editing. As it reads it is almost an affront to the memories of the men who fought and died on board, and to those who lived to tell about it. It gets two stars in their honor. The oral histories of that terrible December day are worthy of remembrance.
The memoirs of Regular Navy swabbies who called the ARIZONA home in the late 1930's and early 1940's are priceless. They give the reader a fine sense of what being a sailor on a battleship in peacetime was like: A spartan man's world of honest hard work punctuated by liberty calls in one of the world's most exotic ports of call.
The terrible and sorrowful recollections of the men who lived through Sunday, December 7th are likewise to be treasured. They are a testament to an America that was blasted out of a dolorous drowse of peace and yet immediately showed its best side. ARIZONA men tried to defend Hawaii, protect their ship, save their buddies, and turn back the invader. That the ship and her crew died in the doing takes nothing away from them at all.
Unfortunately, the book's flaws are so glaring that they detract from these finer points. The seams of the story, where one author left off and another began, stand out like scars. The tense shifts from third to first person, depending on who is writing. The changes in tone and changes in pace are jarring. So is the repetition of information. For example, we are told five times (and three times in two pages!) of the same modification made to Japanese aerial torpedoes.
It's a shame the authors were not up to their task. The book's recounting of the early history of the ARIZONA is spotty. We find out that the ARIZONA once ferried President Hoover, but we never find out where or why. Technical information on the ship is virtually nonexistent. The ship underwent several major refits in her career but almost nothing is said about them. Likewise, relatively little is actually said about Pearl Harbor, the ARIZONA's role there, the attack, or the damage to the ship.
Much of this is probably not so much the fault of the authors (whose qualifications to write this book are exemplary) as much as of the editors who simply did a BAD job, unworthy even of a high school "alternative" newspaper, such as:
"At 7:55 AM the sky was dark over Oahu...the sun glinted off the wings of the Japanese planes."
Hawaii is an admittedly amazing place, but even there the sun does not shine at night in the morning. Nor does gloom of night last until eight bells. We are told that the ARIZONA had taken on "a million" or "millions" of gallons of oil prefatory to sailing, but in other spots we are given precise (but varying) amounts which seem far too small, such as 3,300 or 5,000 gallons, a huge discrepancy. It would seem relatively easy to find out what the oil bunker capacity of the ship was (4,630 tons, or 9,260,000 gallons according to outside sources) but the authors leave us, carelessly, not knowing. Disdaining fact-checking as a luxury, apparently the editors confused oil tonnage and gallon capacity in their rush to get this book into print for the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
The book also lacks maps and diagrams, an unforgivable oversight in any book involving Pearl Harbor and its ships. The photograph on the cover of the Mass-Market Edition is NOT that of the ARIZONA, but of a much smaller vessel. Several of the photographs within the book are also of other ships misidentified as the ARIZONA. THE USS ARIZONA is peppered throughout with this kind of editorial slovenliness. It ruins this book.
Meant to be a paean to the ship and its crew, THE USS ARIZONA fails miserably, except where ARIZONA survivors speak in their own voices. It would have been profound to write a quality history of the ship instead of this patchwork job in which so much is unremembered, half-remembered and distorted.
Someone looking for the ARIZONA is well-advised to tread cautiously amongst the memory holes that Jasper, Delgado and Adams leave behind them. A visit to the Memorial, where one can experience the presence of the ship is a far, far better thing than this overall disappointing book.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, June 4, 2002
This review is from: The USS Arizona (Hardcover)
I should have followed the advice of my fellow reviewers. I was extremely disappointed in this book. I have read many books about Pearl Harbor and the Arizona, and this has to be the worst. There are many factual mistakes in this book. For example, the authors state that there was no lull between the first and second Japanese attack waves. This is simply untrue. In fact, there was about a twenty minute lull between the first and second waves. This allowed the Navy to unlock the ammunition and to fight back. Hence, the Japanese suffered their greatest losses in the second wave due to the lull. The authors also state that "luckily, no American planes were shot down" by friendly fire. Again, this is untrue. The USS Enterprise was returning from delivering fighters to Wake island and launched several SBD Dauntless dive bombers to scout ahead and land on Ford Island. Indeed, several of these were shot down and several pilots and crewmen were killed due to overanxious American gunners. Finally, the authors say that a dive bomber dropped the bomb wich ultimately destroyed the Arizona. Untrue. The bomb was dropped by a high-level bomber. The bomb was too heavy to be carried by a dive bomber.
There was also too much repetition in the book. I grew tired of hearing how many different men shined the decks or worked in the messhalls.
I did learn a few things from the book. I was unaware that both the Captain of the ship and the battleship division admiral were killed on the bridge during the attack. Also, some of the survivors did give excellent personal renditions of life aboard the Arizona and the attack itself.
However, overall, I was disappointed in this book. There are much better books available on the Arizona and Pearl Harbor than this one.
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