The Castaway S War

Shipwrecked on a South Pacific island, a young US Navy lieutenant waged a one-man war against the Japanese In the early hours of July 5, 1943, the destroyer USS Strong was hit by a Japanese torpedo. The powerful weapon broke the destroyer's back, killed dozens of sailors, and sparked raging fires. While accompanying ships were able to take off most of Strong's surviving crewmembers, scores went into the ocean as the once-proud warship sank beneath the waves--and a young officer's harrowing story of survival began. Lieutenant Hugh Barr Miller, a pre-war football star at the University of Alabama, went into the water as the vessel sank. Severely injured, Miller and several others survived three days at sea and eventually landed on a Japanese-occupied island. The survivors found fresh water and a few coconuts, but Miller, suffering from internal injuries and believing he was on the verge of death, ordered the others to go on without him. They reluctantly did do, believing, as Miller did, that he would be dead within hours. But Miller didn't die, and his health improved enough for him to begin searching for food. He also found the enemy--Japanese forces patrolling the island. Miller was determined to survive, and so launched a one-man war against the island's occupiers. Based on official American and Japanese histories, personal memoirs, and the author's exclusive interviews with many of the story's key participants, The Castaway's War is a rousing story of naval combat, bravery, and determination.

The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened with his father as the kitchen radio announced that the liner Lakonia had caught fire and sunk in the Atlantic. It was Christmas 1963, and airline travel and Cold War paranoia had made the images of an ocean liner's distress--the air force dropping supplies in the dark, a freighter collecting survivors from lifeboats--seem like echoes of a bygone era. But Stilgoe, already a passionate reader and an aficionado of small-boat navigation, began to delve into accounts of other disasters at sea. What he found was a trunkful of hair-raising stories--of shipwreck, salvation, seamanship brilliant and inept, noble sacrifice, insanity, cannibalism, courage and cravenness, even scandal. In nonfiction accounts and in the works of Conrad, Melville, and Tomlinson, fear and survival animate and degrade human nature, in the microcosm of an open boat as in society at large. How lifeboats are made, rigged, and captained, Stilgoe discovered, and how accounts of their use or misuse are put down, says much about the culture and circumstances from which they are launched. In the hands of a skillful historian such as Stilgoe, the lifeboat becomes a symbol of human optimism, of engineering ingenuity, of bureaucratic regulation, of fear and frailty. Woven through Lifeboat are good old-fashioned yarns, thrilling tales of adventure that will quicken the pulse of readers who have enjoyed the novels of Patrick O'Brian, Crabwalk by G nter Grass, or works of nonfiction such as The Perfect Storm and In the Heart of the Sea. But Stilgoe, whose other works have plumbed suburban culture, locomotives, and the shore, is ultimately after bigger fish. Through the humble, much-ignored lifeboat, its design and navigation and the stories of its ultimate purpose, he has found a peculiar lens on roughly the past two centuries of human history, particularly the war-tossed, technology-driven history of man and the sea.

‘For seventy years now Desert Island Discs has managed that rare feat – to be both enduring and relevant. By casting away the biggest names of the day in science, business, politics, showbiz, sport and the arts, it presents a cross-sectional snapshot of the times in which we live. As the decades have passed, the programme has kept pace; never frozen in time yet always, somehow, comfortingly the same.’ Kirsty Young BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs celebrates its seventieth birthday in 2012. Since the programme’s deviser Roy Plomley interviewed comedian Vic Oliver in January 1942, nearly 3,000 distinguished people from all walks of life have been stranded on the mythical island, accompanied by only eight records, one book and a luxury. Here the story of one of BBC Radio 4’s favourite programmes is chronicled through a special selection of castaways. Roy Plomley, inventor of the programme as well as its presenter for over forty years, quizzes the young Cliff Richard about ‘these rather frenzied movements’ the 1960s pop sensation makes on the stage. Robert Maxwell tells Plomley’s successor Michael Parkinson that ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it.’ Diana Mosley assures Sue Lawley that Adolf Hitler was ‘extraordinarily fascinating’ and had mesmeric blue eyes. And Johnny Vegas tugs Kirsty Young’s heart-strings with his account of a childhood so impoverished that family pets were fair game: ‘My dad had always claimed that rabbits were livestock, but we’d never eaten one before.’ Desert Island Discs is much more than a radio programme. It is a unique and enduringly popular take on our lives and times – and this extensively illustrated book tells in rich detail the colourful and absorbing story of an extraordinary institution.

An analysis of the under-studied sitcom Gilligan’s Island that addresses key questions about American social life in the 1960s.

In this provocateive book, a prominent theologian and a leading Christian editor speak to all Christians who have grown mistrustful of the church's involvement in religio-political power-plays and are seeking the way home. Robert E. Webber and Rodney Clapp examine the dilemma so many Christians face--what to do if you are an enthusiast for neither the New Right nor the Old Left but still take seriously the church's social and political responsibility. 'People of the Truth' offers a biblical solution to this perplexing question. The authors show how American Christians have come to depend on the nation, rather than the church, as their primary instrument of social change and communal influence. They call for teh church to move beyond the dead end of civil religion to affirm the authentic role of the worshiping community in effecting social change. The church should dare to lay down its life, the authors write, to give up its ill-begotten political leverage; to turn aside from success and stop counting heads (or dollars); to stand at the side of forgotten poor and oppressed; to be a sign and a witness of humanity's insufficiency and God's all-sufficiency. Drawing upon the works of many esteemed theologians and historians, the authors trace the growth of Christianity and offer a fresh apporach to the history of the church in the world. They reveal how the church's identity and vision have become confused, how they can be recovered, and how Christians--by living out their distinctive story as a worshiping community--can heal society's ills. 'People of the Truth' provides concrete examples of how the church, by realigning itself with its Christ-centered mandate, can effectively respond to such urgent problems as poverty, drug abuse, violence, pornography, AIDS, and the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Here is at once a summons and a guide for the church to become in fact what it has always been ideally: the only people charged with proclaiming this Christ . . . a people of the truth.

The Castaway Carnival: fun, mysterious, dangerous. Renowned for its infamous corn maze...and the kids who go missing in it. When Olive runs into the maze, she wakes up on an isolated and undetectable island where a decades-long war between two factions of rival teens is in full swing. Trapped, Olive must slowly attempt to win each of her new comrades’ hearts as Will—their mysterious, stoically quiet, and handsome leader—steals hers. Olive is only sure about one thing: her troop consists of the good guys, and she’ll do whatever it takes to help them win the war and get back home. But victory may require more betrayal, sacrifice, and heartbreak than she’s ready for.

A wide-ranging and appreciative literary history of the castaway tale from Defoe to the present Ever since Robinson Crusoe washed ashore, the castaway story has survived and prospered, inspiring a multitude of writers of adventure fiction to imitate and adapt its mythic elements. In his brilliant critical study of this popular genre, Christopher Palmer traces the castaway tales' history and changes through periods of settlement, violence, and reconciliation, and across genres and languages. Showing how subsequent authors have parodied or inverted the castaway tale, Palmer concentrates on the period following H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau. These much darker visions are seen in later novels including William Golding's Lord of the Flies, J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island, and Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory. In these and other variations, the castaway becomes a cannibal, the castaway's island is relocated to center of London, female castaways mock the traditional masculinity of the original Crusoe, or Friday ceases to be a biddable servant. By the mid-twentieth century, the castaway tale has plunged into violence and madness, only to see it return in young adult novels—such as Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins and Terry Pratchett's Nation—to the buoyancy and optimism of the original. The result is a fascinating series of revisions of violence and pessimism, but also reconciliation.

In 1996 I took a long lease, with option, on a 2-storey building in Johor Baru, just across the Causeway from Singapore. I then spent most of my remaining money on fixing it up as the Restorant Eurasia, in anticipation of my Eurasian wife’s return from America. She had gone there on a ridiculously cheap ticket, courtesy of a nephew who worked for Singapore Airlines. Unfortunately she had no insurance cover. One day while walking down a street in Florida, she suffered a stroke, and subsequent complete coma, at the age of 38. I tried to run the restaurant as well as I could, but she was the one with restaurant experience, having managed a successful Thai restaurant in Singapore, with her magic touch. When the Gods frown, they do so in earnest. After a couple of months, the owner of the building, having seen what I’d done with it, and heard about my wife, decided he wanted it back. Being a proper Malaysian gentleman, and a Haji (done his trip to Mecca) to boot, he didn’t come and discuss it with me. Instead, he went to see his friends at Immigration, who then started making problems for me, over my lack of a work permit to run the restaurant. I argued – with the help of my friend at Immigration – that, as the Managing Director of the owning company, I was entitled to direct the management of the restaurant. Eventually my Immigration friend was suddenly posted out, and I was informed that my current visa would not be renewed. Fortunately, at the time of taking the lease on the building, I had also pre-paid a two-year lease on a charming brand new 3-bedroom, 2 bathroom terrace house in Taman Johor Jaya. I had to give up the restaurant, then rent out my house, and flee to Thailand on the last day of my visa. This is the story of my subsequent 9 months living in a cheap village house in a Malay kampong not too far from the Thai border.