Reviews A Sailor's Story by Sam Glanzman (Dover Pub!., Mineola, NY, 2015, 163pp, graphic novel, ISBN 978-0-486-79812-7; $19.95hc) Should a comic book be reviewed in Sea History? Probably not under ordinary circumstances, but Sam Glanzman's graphic telling of his World War II experience (1943-1945) serving in the fireroom of USS Stevens (DD 479) is so well done and compelling, that it is most worthy of attention in serious nautical journals.
The detail in Glanzman's frames are eye-catching and impressive. Only experienced destroyer-men and students of naval architecture will be able. to judge the authenticity of renditions of ships, but this former Marine was surprised and impressed to see recognizable sketches of a BAR in the hands of Marines making a beach landing and fighting ashore. Other Marines are shown armed with Ml Garand riBes and Ml carbines. Wonderful detail. A Sailor's Story comprises several parts. The first book relates Glanzman's personal experience, from his departure from home, through his US Navy career, and back home again. Book II is a little less organized. Ir is a rendition of the action of the Stevens, reinforced with detailed drawings and explanations of various parts of a World War II destroyer. The writing and story line are superior in Book I, bur the artwork is splendid throughout the volume. Following Book II is a series of twenty tributes to Glanzman and his work-some short, more long, and a few illustrated. SEA HISTORY 155, SUMMER 2016
"Even Dead Birds Have Wings" comes next, a story of the Battle of Midway illustrated in pen and ink. Finally, a number of WWII-era photographs of Glanzman, followed by an afterward, bring the chic graphic novel to a close. A reading of A Sailor's Story is a fun way of reviewing destroyer action in World War II and primes the reader for a similar volume setting out the history of USS Stevens set to debut in June of 2016. DR. DAVID 0. WHITTEN Auburn, Alabama
tonic, sinking the 1,250-ton warship in minutes. The bold attack turned our to be a suicide mission-Hunley and its eightman crew were lost. Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons of the Civil War tells the story of the men who designed and built the submarine, as well as Boating mines that menaced Union vessels. Author Mark K. Ragan, who was project historian during Hunley's excavation and recovery in the 1990s, has produced the definitive history of some of the Confederacy's most advanced weapons, not to mention some of its most secret. Most records of the South's clandestine operations and sabotage missions were destroyed as the war ended, forcing Ragan to reconstruct the exploits of the Confederacy's underwater warriors from scattered news clippings, surviving reports, and other sources, including Harriet Middleton's newly discovered letters. A core group of steam engineers, machinists and tradesmen based in Port Lavaca, Texas-midway between Galveston and Corpus Christi-graduated from
THE GLENCANNON PRESS
Confederate Saboteurs: Building the Hunley and Other Secret Weapons ofthe Civil War by Mark K. Ragan (Texas A & M University Press, College Station, 2015, 296pp, illus, biblio, index; ISBN 978-162349-278-6; $35hc) In the summer of 1863, Charleston, South Carolina, resident Harriet Middleton discovered that a "wonderful fish-shaped boat" was being tested in the harbor. "It goes entirely underwater, has a propeller at one end, and a torpedo at the other,'' she wrote in a letter to a friend-a new weapon to be unleashed on the Union Beet blockading and bombarding the port. "We are full of hope,'' she told her sister in another missive. "May it be successful." The strange vessel was the Hunley, the world 's first combat submarine, and in early 1864 it delivered an explosive charge that blasted a hole in the side of USS Housa-
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