With Labor Day Weekend upon us, it is the perfect opportunity to read one final book before work and school ramp up, and we will look at three books perfect to dive into on those final moments of vacation and lazy days: Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine, by Charles Lachman; The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano; and A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, by David Gribbin.
Codename Nemo: The Hunt for a Nazi U-Boat and The Elusive Enigma Machine
By Charles Lachman
Diversion Books; hardcover, 352 pages; $28.99
Charles Lachman is the executive producer of the nationally syndicated news magazine Inside Edition, and he has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, History, Lifetime, C-Span, and Sirius/XM. He is the author of four previous books, Footsteps in the Snow, The Last Lincolns, A Secret Life, and the crime novel In the Name of the Law.
Codename Nemo is Lachman's new book, and it is an engrossing work that tells the white-knuckled war saga of the US Navy task force who achieved the impossible on June 4, 1944, when it captured Nazi submarine U-505, its crew, technology, encryption codes, and an Enigma cipher machine.
It was the first seizure of an enemy ship in battle since the War of 1812, and one that certainly shortened the length of World War II, as it was just two days before D-Day.
US antisubmarine Task Group 22.3 was led by a nine-man boarding party and the maverick Captain Daniel Gallery, and it captured U-505 in a mission called Operation Nemo. This book is told from the eyes of men on both sides of Operation Nemo - American heroes, such as Lieutenant Albert David ("Mustang"), who led the boarding party that took control of U-505 and became the only sailor to be awarded the Medal of Honor in the Battle of the Atlantic; and Chief Motor Machinist Zenon Lukosius ("Zeke"), a Luthuanian immigrant's son from Chicago who dropped out of high school to enlist in the Navy and whose quick thinking saved the day when he plugged a hole of gushing water that threatened the sink U-505, and the German U-boaters.
Three thousand American sailors participated in this extraordinary adventure, including nine ordinary American men who channeled extraordinary shill and bravery to bravely finish the job, and then did not say a word about it until it was over. Nothing leaked out, and in Berlin, the German Kriegsmarine assumed that U-505 had been blown to bits by depth charges, with all hands lost at sea. They did not realize that the U-Boat and all its secrets, which were to be used in cracking Nazi coded messages, were now in American hands. The Germans were also unaware that the 59 German sailors captured on the high seas were imprisoned in a POW camp in Ruston, Louisiana, until they were released in 1946 when they were permitted to return home to family and friends who thought they had perished.
To find out more about Codename Nemo on Amazon, please click here.
The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
By Tricia Romano
PublicAffairs; hardcover, 608 pages; $35.00
Tricia Romano began her eight-year career with the Village Voice as an intern, and as a contributing writer, she wrote features and award-winning cover stories about culture and music. Her column, Fly Life, gave a peek into the underbelly of New York nightlife. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, Elle, and the Los Angeles Times. Romano has been a staff writer at the Seattle Times and served as the editor-in-chief of the Stranger, Seattle's alternative newspaper.
Any discussion of media outlets that had a major impact but no longer exist in the same form must start with the Village Voice. Twenty years ago, towards the end of their heyday, this writer would anticipate Wednesdays because it meant the Voice, New York Observer, and the relatively New York Press were on the newsstands, all with a unique perspective you wouldn't find in the daily papers. The Press would fade away soon after, and the Observer kept changing formats and was eventually killed by one Jared Kushner. The Voice, the biggest loss of the trio, had a slower decline, eventually fading away by 2018 before a revival a couple of years later.
In the richly detailed The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, Romano gives the history of the paper, which chronicled sixty years of New York like no other, in an oral history style, through the two hundred interviews she conducted, and also turned to surrogates for those who have passed on and archival interviews to give the full picture.
Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, and Norman Mailer, it captured a moment of time when the literary world was centered in Greenwich Village. It was an outgrowth of the three of them being constantly asked at parties, "Why doesn't the Village have a good newspaper?" Since they wanted it to be a different kind of newspaper than what was around at the time, they experimented with hoe they would report on things, inventing new forms of criticism and storytelling, while spawning many copycats.
The Voice earned an reputation early for being an advocate of saving New York City landmarks, including their reporting on Mary Nichols' efforts to stop urban planner Robert Moses from having traffic go through Washington Square Park.
The paper covered politics with what would now called a hyperlocal focus, starting with their first battle being the overthrow of the boss of Greenwich Village Carmine DeSapio, and replacing him with a young Reform upstart named Ed Koch. The Village Independent Democrats was Koch's political club, and he gave the paper a lot of inside information on the stands they were taking. Koch eventually became New York City Mayor, serving from 1978 to 1989, so he is all over this book.
Wayne Barrett was one of the first to uncover what a con artist Donald Trump was before anyone else was paying attention. In the part on Trump's ad calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, Tom Robbins says in this book, "He was always a vicious, horrible man. Forget about being president. If you'd asked me, 'Who is the worst person in New York?' I would have said 'Trump' at any time over the last twenty years."
There also is a lot of history you learn about, such as Richard Goldstein, in describing how he became a rock critic at The Voice, said, "I covered a concert at Yankee Stadium called Soundblast '66. The bill on this concert was Stevie Wonder, the Beach Boys, the Young Rascals, Ray Charles. I wrote the article, I gave it to the Voice, and when the paper came out on Wednesday, there it was on the front page, out of nowhere. No drug rush has ever affected me as intensely as that. From there I wrote another one and another one, and within a very short time I had a column, which I called Pop Eye."
There is a lot on how the Voice dealt with the AIDS crisis, giving it a lot more seriousness and urgency than other outlets like the Times, one of many to dismiss it as a gay disease. There was a battle with activist Larry Kramer, whose paper was the New York Native, and contended in 1986 that he was giving the real story on AIDS, while the Voice was spotty and unimaginative. That and the details on how the Voice editors debated how deep to go on AIDS are some of the most fascinating parts of the book.
They also tried to branch out into separate publications, such as the creation of the Voice Literary Supplement in 1980, which Paul Berman described as, "We thought we were a youth insurgency, and that we were against the New York Times Book Review, which just seemed stuffy and hopeless. And we were against the New York Review of Books, because it seemed so establishmentarian and respectable and pompous. We were against everybody."
The Voice was the first paper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. There are interviews with post-punk band Blondie, sportscaster Bob Costas, and drummer Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.
A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks
By David Gribbin
St. Martin's Press; hardcover, 304 pages; $32.00
David Gribbin is an internationally bestselling author known for the Jack Howard novels, which have sold over three million copies all over the world, and are published in thirty languages, and the Total War series of historical novels. He has worked in underwater archaeology throughout his professional life, and he is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world.
In the compelling new book A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, Gribbin shares the tales of them, having visited half of the twelve shipwrecks personally, to provide snapshots of different eras.
These are not just stories about the ships themselves, but also the people who sailed on them and the cargo and treasure they carried. It is a story of the spread of people, religion, and ideas around the world, from the Bronze Age to the world of imperial Rome, and from Tudor England to the exploration of the Arctic.
One of those ships is one that set sail at the pinnacle of classical Greece, and it was loaded with amphoras of wine en route to Athens. It remained undisturbed for over two thousand years after it sank until it had human visitors in 1996.
Other ships Gribbin examines that capture a moment in time include early sea traders of prehistory in 2nd millennium BC, royal cargoes in Tutenkhamen's time in the 14th century BC, a shipwreck from the height of the Roman Empire in the 2nd Century AD, and the Mary Rose (1545), which was the flagship of King Henry VIII.
Gribbin writes of the inspiration for an undertaking like this, "The historian Fernand Braudel in his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II wrote that the sea 'is the greatest document of its past existence.' When he first published those words in 1949, he could not have known how true they would become. The aqualung, or self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (scuba), had only been perfected a few years earlier by Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan; divers were just beginning to use that freedom to explore the seabed. Very soon wonderful discoveries were being made off the south coast of France, Roman ships filled with cargoes of wine and fine pottery, and divers had begun to explore elsewhere around the world. The excavation of a Bronze Age wreck off Turkey in 1960 convinced archaeologists that scientific recording could be carried out underwater; a year later, the raising from Stockholm harbour of the Vasa, King Gustavus Adolphus' flagship from 1627, showed the extraordinary preservation that was possible. Sixty years on more than two thousand wrecks from classical antiquity have been discovered in the Mediterranean, and many thousands of all periods globally. A discipline was born that has breathed new life into archaeology, resulting in dazzling discoveries equal to those of the pioneer land archaeologist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and bringing the past alive in a uniquely exciting way."
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