USS Arizona

The story of the USS Arizona encompasses far more than the milli-second BOOM! that split her hull and snuffed out the lives of 1,177 men aboard her. The huge battleship led a fascinating life before her demise and - as a poignant symbol of the attack that thrust the United States into World War II - has impacted millions of lives since. She lays where she sank in the silt of Pearl Harbor, spanned now by a graceful white memorial that pays tribute to her dead. MacKinnon Simpson's newest book USS Arizona - Warship, Tomb, Monument pays tribute to the ship, her crews and her symbolism through the years. Packed with many rarely-before seen images, the book includes such unlikely characters as Elvis Presley, whose benefit concert helped trigger the fund-raising for the Memorial, and Henry Williams, a three-year-old boy who placed the first bolt in her keel in 1915 and read a newspaper by the light of her raging fires as a lieutenant at Pearl Harbor in 1941.