Richard F Newcomb's gripping "Abandon Ship!" squares off against tradition and describes the incident in which the battle-scarred heavy cruiser was sunk as she steamed independently in the Pacific after delivering components of the atomic bomb.
Controversy and horror concerning the sinking of what happened afterward resulted in horrible fates of "INDY's"crew and the subsequent court-martial of her skipper.
Newcomb's book may not satisfy everyone who was impacted by the tragedy, but it saw a captain exonerated after years of fighting for truth and his good name - but not soon enough to keep him from dying, an exhausted, broken man.
"The rest is history,"so the saying goes, but vindication is not always a part of the finding. "Abandon Ship!" (1958, Henry Holt; re-published 2000, Harper Collins) is well worth the read. Steve Myers
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