Beneath the Radar

Sometimes a book doesn't get its due, and sometimes it gets lost in the mass of information that flows, especially at Christmastime.

I just finished this book and can tell you it's a story I never knew before. From what I had known about Admiral Halsey, I admired him. My admiration is not lessened after reading this, but my empathy for our WWII naval personnel certainly increased.

I'm going to cheat a bit (I still don't have Internet at home) by using a general piece from the publisher to describe the book, but here's a piece of trivia. Admiral William Halsey was colloquially known as "Bull" - and his personality fit the moniker. But Halsey hated the name. He said he didn't want to acquire such a name simply because a drunken journalist type "u" instead of "i" in a dispatch, but the name, intended or not, stuck.

Halsey and his superior, Adm. Chester Nimitz, were both awarded a fifth star at the conclusion of the war, the first ever awarded.
In December 1944, America's most popular and colorful naval hero, Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, unwittingly sailed his undefeated Pacific Fleet into the teeth of a powerful typhoon. Three destroyers were capsized, sending hundreds of sailors and officers into the raging, shark-infested waters. Over the next sixty hours, small bands of survivors fought seventy-foot waves, exhaustion, and dehydration to await rescue at the hands of the courageous Lt. Com. Henry Lee Plage, who, defying orders, sailed his tiny destroyer escort USS Tabberer through 150-mph winds to reach the lost men. Thanks to documents that have been declassified after sixty years and dozens of first-hand accounts from survivors--including former President Gerald Ford--one of the greatest World War II stories, and a riveting tale of survival at sea, can finally be told.

Halsey's Typhoon by Tom Clavin and Bob Drury
ISBN 9780871139481 November 2006 Atlantic Monthly Press (Hardcover) $25

Here Speaking English

The post's title is an inside joke, revolving around a language book we know of called Here Speeching American. That's a book that "takes a hilarious look at the challenges confronting English-speaking travelers around the world, from less-than-coherent road signs, to odd sounding food and drink, to impossible-to-follow directions, to other lighthearted examples of fractured English."

If you want to get serious, then you'll be interested in Andrew Roberts' new tome, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. It's the kind of book I love, and based on our history here in New Albany (English-speaking and otherwise), I think it will appeal to many of you.

Here's an excerpt:

John F. Kennedy was puzzled that Americans rated Theodore Roosevelt so highly, considering that he never led the nation through any war (an estimation that might more profitably be extended to JFK himself). Roosevelt filled the White House like no other peacetime president; Mark Twain accorded the fact that he was 'the most popular human being that ever existed in the United States' to his 'joyous ebullitions of excited sincerity'. Yet there were solid achievements too: he won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 and began constructing the isthmian canal that linked his country's western ocean to its eastern, thus saving US warships from having to make the ninety-day journey around Cape Horn.

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 by Andrew Roberts

ISBN 9780060875985, Feb. 2007 (HarperCollins) $35 (Hardcover)

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