Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5426
EAN num: 9780312993511
ISBN number: 031299351X
Label: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: November 17, 2003
Publishing house: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Sale Popularity Level: 593476
Studio: St. Martin's Paperbacks
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In the very first terrifying moments of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the crew of the USS Arizona could not have imagined the horrors that awaited them on that 'Day of Infamy,' December 7, 1941. The battleship Arizona exploded when an armor-piercing bomb ignited its forward munitions, creating a thunderclap that rocked the skies; 1,177 men were killed on the Arizona-more than half the casualties at Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona gives a riveting account of the terrible events that violently thrust America into World War II. From accounts of what it was like below deck and topside to its fiery aftermath, we see the attack unfold through the eyes of survivors. Accompanied by 16 pages of photographs, this stirring chronicle tells the story of the famous battleship as few other writers or historians have, detailing its construction, covering life on board the peacetime Arizona, and revealing the unshakeable bond its sailors shared with their ship. Most of all, The USS Arizona captures the ship's transformation into a potent symbol of American grit and resolve-a symbol that resonates yesterday at the final resting place of the USS Arizona and the sailors and Marines who perished with her.
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Rated by buyers 
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I am glad I didn't read all the reviews on this book before reading it,as I might not have read it at all. There are a lot of good things about this book,but it seems there are a lot of things that prevent it from becoming a great book.
The attack on Pearl Harbor has been covered in many books and films. It was an event that had so much to it that one wonders whether it can ever be covered perfectly. Even people who were there that terrible day;would have seen it very differently.
The thing about this book that is different, is that it concentrates as much as possible,on the USS Arizona;but not entirely.The fact that this ship's story has to be seen in its relationship to what went on around it that day.
The book does a good job of showing what it was like to sail on the Arizona from its earliest days and what it was like to be part of the crew the day she was destroyed.
As much as possible,the book concentrates on the personal experiences of several survivors who were lucky enough to live to tell their stories.
The book also tells what efforts were made to retrieve the bodies of the victims ,salvage operations,visits to the wreck by divers;and the decisions and things that were done to create the memorial that now exists. Complete lists of all the casualties,as well as survivors is included in appendix B&C.Also included in appendix D are all the funeral services held at the memorial for Arizona Men who were aboard the Arizona that fateful day,but have since died and requested it be the final resting flace of their remains with their friends.
The book includes 33 B&W photographs.
No one book can say everything that needs saying about the Attack on Pearl Harbor,so this book should be taken in that light.
I don't know ,nor do I imagine does anyone else,what details are correct and what are errorerous or simply careless researching.It seems others have critizied the book on these points,so I guess many of the details must be taken with caution.
Rated by buyers 
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The USS Arizona by Joy Waldron Jasper, James P. Delgado, and Jim Adams was great. Granted to the perfectionist this is not a flawless. This isn't a detailed, stats filled book. It is more of a holistic view of a ship that has become an icon of America told by 3 people. I believe this book is perfect for your everyday person wanting to learn about the Arizona and not meant for your core historian. I have read many books and seen many shows about Pearl Harbor and the ships, sailors and battle of December 7th. This book takes these 3 individuals, a journalist, a historian and a Marine, who all have been connected in some way to the Arizona and tell the ships story from a Ship of War to a Symbol of America.
The interviews of the survivors and history that covered the time before December 7th was something new for me in that it gave me a new perspective of life on the Arizona. I did not really think about the fact that battle ship was over 20 years old and been around the world. It was good to be reminded of the daily routine of the sailors and how much the ship was their life and home. It gave me a new appreciation of the impact her loss and the other ships' of Pearl Harbor had on the sailors that served in them.
The part afterwards about the memorial and the ship yesterday was a good conclusion. Understanding the Navy's attempts at salvage and finally settling on leaving her as a memorial shed new light on how she got the way she is. I really appreciated the accounts of the burial of survivor's ashes back aboard the sunken ship. All in all I felt a certain closure with this book and have a better understanding of what the USS Arizona means to me and other Americans.
Rated by buyers 
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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 sailour 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 very 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.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers -
I bought my copy of "The USS Arizona" after a trip to the 'Arizona' memorial in Hawaii last year. I have always been interested in Pearl Harbor and World War Two in the Pacific Theatre, and have read extensively on it (I particularly like the Gordon Prange books, especially "At Dawn We Slept".) I found the 'Arizona' memorial to be a place of beauty and tranquility, yet amazingly solemn and haunting. After the visit, I decided to learn more about the 'Arizona' herself. This is a great book for a start. It is an interesting amalgam of operational history, information on the attack, including an excellent section debunking myths surrounding the attack, personal recollections, and historical preservation efforts today.
The bulk of the book deals with recollections of crewmembers on shipboard life, with emphasis on December 7, 1941, obviously. These recollections form a valuable oral history of the ship, and though there are minor conflicts between the stories on a couple of details, they are heartfelt, well told, captivating, and historically irreplaceable.
Equally important is the story of the current preservation efforts of the National Park Service to manage the wreck. In particular, the stories of survivors who elect to rejoin their fallen comrades when they are interred in Turret Four are moving beyond all expectations, and reinforce the significance of the Pearl Harbor attack in their lives.
There are some minor errors in the book, many of which are typographical, for instance using "savage" instead of "salvage". Some of the errors are a bit more careless as in a reference to 'General Yamamoto', when he was, of course, and Admiral, and going back and forth on whether the 'Arizona' was tied up at quay F-7 or F-8 (I believe it was F-8.) These are pretty nit-picky, but need to be mentioned. The book does have a couple of standout features in the five appendices. Appendix A is an excellent, if brief, overview of the key events in the Pacific war, Appendix B is an 'Arizona' casualty list, Appendix C is a list of 'Arizona' survivors, and Appendix E is a list of ship casualties of Japan in World War Two. Appendix E makes a sobering statement, that I have never heard anywhere else and found utterly fascinating: "Of the attacking Japanese fleet that initiated the war against the United States on December 7, 1941, all ships ended up on the bottom of the sea by the war's end except one midget submarine." As horrible as Pearl Harbor was for the American forces, the whirlwind reaped by Japan, in the end, was no less ferocious.
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