The 2020 One Book Yuma selection is Indianapolis: the True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in US Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic. Make this a true community-wide reading event! Pick up your copy of Indianapolis at your local library.
Sara Vladic will visit Yuma Tuesday, February 25th, to lead two community discussions. There is no charge to attend.
Tuesday, February 25th • 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Yuma Main Library
1st Floor Meeting Rooms
2951 S 21st Drive Yuma, AZ 85364
Tuesday, February 25th • 6:30-8:00 p.m.
AZ Western College/Northern Arizona University
Theater Building
2020 S Avenue 8E Yuma, AZ 85367
In 1945 the Indianapolis, alone, was torpedoed by one of the few Japanese submarines still operational and sank. Almost 900 men survived, but the ship had slipped off the Navy’s tracking system, and it took four days before they were spotted, too late for more than 600 men who died from thirst and exposure or were eaten by sharks. Vincent and Vladic juxtapose the crew’s harrowing ordeal with the Navy’s desperate efforts to discover what had gone wrong and cover it up. The designated culprit was the ship’s captain: court-martialed on skimpy evidence, found guilty of endangering the vessel, and eventually driven to suicide. A subsequent investigation led to his exoneration, but the systemic oversights and misjudgments that enabled this tragedy remained obscure until this investigation, which drew upon new sources clarifying how the file was amended.
Sara Vladic, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, is one of the world’s leading experts on the USS Indianapolis, having become obsessed with the story at the age of thirteen. Over the next two decades, Vladic met and interviewed 108 of the ship’s survivors, and in 2016 she released an award-winning documentary film on the disaster, USS Indianapolis: The Legacy. She has published new research on Indianapolis in Proceedings, the official journal of the US Navy, and appeared as an expert commentator on PBS’s USS Indianapolis: Live from the Deep, which explored the ship’s wreckage. She and her husband, Ben, live in San Marcos, California.
One Book Yuma is brought to you by Arizona Western College/Northern Arizona University-Yuma Academic Library, Yuma County Library District, and the Friends of Yuma County Libraries, Inc.
For more information, call (928) 783-5415.