Far From The Customary Skies

Ewing Galloway [Photographer] New York, N.Y. Random House, 1953. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. [8], 372, [4] pages. Includes chapters on The Training Cruise, The Machine, Going Stale, and The Quietus. This is a novel of men at sea in time of war. The author began writing this book while he was in graduate school, and has been writing fairly steadily since leaving graduate school. The author was a well-regarded published author, a respected creative writing teacher at Louisiana State University and a World War II Naval veteran. In 1942, he enlisted in the Navy, serving aboard the USS Dyson, a destroyer in Arleigh Burke's Little Beaver Squadron. This squadron was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for it's exploits in the Solomon Islands. After the war, he graduated from Gettysburg College, started writing and attended graduate school at the University of Virginia. Based on his life experiences, Warren published three hardback books. His first novel published in 1953, Far From the Customary Skies, a NY Times bestseller, was about the men and life on a destroyer during the WWII Pacific campaign. In the novel No Country For Old Men, Warren revealed life during the Great Depression through a Pennsylvania youth's eyes. He wrote of struggles for power, love, revenge and disillusionment surrounding steel mill workers and their families. The third novel, The Goblins of Eros, was set in Narayit, Mexico. His interest in the villager's lives, Huitchole Indians, and conflicts with the Mexican military were the inspiration for this story of revolution filled with an intimate look into the lives of the infinitely diverse people living in Las Iguanas. Derived from a Kirkus review: Warren Eyster has enormous talent- and- what is all too rare today, a recognition of the possibility of writing vigorously, passionately, without punctuating his text with expletives and four letter words. He has- as have Herman Wouk and Nicholas Monsarrat, the faculty for making one feel the individualities of the men who make up a crew. This book is absorbing reading not for plot interest, but for the controlled awareness of the tensions and impulses and emotions of men who become real people and whose futures somehow become involved in one's own reckoning. One follows the life on a destroyer, as the crude makings of its complement of crew are brought into unity; one lives the daily round, the areas of boredom, the little tensions that make up the big issues; the violence and antagonism and kinship and linking that provide variants in human relations. One gets some flashbacks into the men's lives, but little except as their pasts project themselves into occasional dreams of futures. One goes through storm and battle and attack by air and undersea. One senses the changing attitude towards danger, the minimizing of fear, the heightened awareness. There's a succession of climaxes until the destroyer Dreher is torpedoed- and Malone, to whom it is all or nothing, sacrifices his fellows to the slim chance of his own brief glory and Polock alone, who had dared escape, is left to the chance of the vast sea reaches of the Pacific.... Even if you feel glutted with war stories, don't miss this. Condition: Good / Fair.

Keywords: Destroyer Squadron Twenty-three, Naval Operations, USS Dreher, Naval Training, Unit Cohesion, Pacific Theater, Marianas, Sinking, Ewing Galloway

[Book #80807]

Price: $50.00

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