October Book of the Month: Left for Dead

The book of the month I read for October was "Left For Dead" by Pete Nelson. Ms. Basko had recommended plenty of books for me and this was the one that stuck out the most. I'm mostly into non-fiction books and i had heard of the tragedy behind this story from many documentaries on Discovery Channel. Therefore, i had some information behind the story and it intrigued me.
      The story behind this book is a boy named Hunter Scott was watching Jaws one day when he had first heard of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. Curious, he investigated further, and discovered a shocking story behind what should have been a tale of heroism and patriotism. Torpedoed by a Japanese submarine, the Indianapolis went down in minutes, taking more than 800 sailors with it. Many were killed within minutes of the sinking and more went down with the ship. Several hundred still survived, but only after spending days in the open sea with sharks depleting hourly. This is only part of the tragedy, however. In an effort to make an example of the ship's captain, and to use captain Mcvay as a scapegoat, the U.S. Navy unfairly court-marshaled the captain, painfully changing the lives of all the men involved. Basing much of his text on young Hunter Scott's research, author Pete Nelson does a fine job of presenting this story through the eyes of many of the survivors. Old and new photos allow readers to know many of the men of the ship, and personal accounts reveal the horrors of those days in the ocean.
      I believe that the theme to this book is determination. The solder's that had to go through pain and suffering and wait days to be rescued. Some of them even went insane and started to hallucinate and resort to cannibalism. Some even started to kill each other because they thought they were part of the Japanese subs that had sunk the Indianapolis. However, some survivors had survived off of pure willpower, not giving in to drinking sea water or killing each other. These men survived and had lived to tell their story.
       Over all I thought that this was a very good book. It's descriptions and pictures through out the story help give you images of the past. The story was very well written and was chronologically put in order so it was easy to understand. One thing that I didn't like was the switch from person to person which kind of screwed up the chronology but it was still going by days.