Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION SAL | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
An extraordinary literary event, a major new novel by the PEN/Faulkner winner and acclaimed master: a sweeping, seductive, deeply moving story set in the years after World War II.
From his experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, Philip Bowman returns to America and finds a position as a book editor. It is a time when publishing is still largely a private affair--a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe--a time of gatherings in fabled apartments and conversations that continue long into the night. In this world of dinners, deals, and literary careers, Bowman finds that he fits in perfectly. But despite his success, what eludes him is love. His first marriage goes bad, another fails to happen, and finally he meets a woman who enthralls him--before setting him on a course he could never have imagined for himself.
Romantic and haunting, All That Is explores a life unfolding in a world on the brink of change. It is a dazzling, sometimes devastating labyrinth of love and ambition, a fiercely intimate account of the great shocks and grand pleasures of being alive.
Author Notes
James Arnold Horowitz (June 10, 1925 - June 19, 2015), better known as James Salter, his pen name and later-adopted legal name, was an American novelist and short-story writer. Originally a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, he resigned from the military in 1957 following the successful publication of his first novel, The Hunters.
Salter published a collection of short stories, Dusk and Other Stories in 1988. The collection received the PEN/Faulkner Award, and one of its stories ("Twenty Minutes") became the basis for the 1996 film, Boys. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. In 2012, PEN/Faulkner Foundation selected him for the 25th PEN/Malamud Award.
Salter Died on June 19, 2015. He was 90.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The 87-year-old PEN/Faulkner Award-winner's (Dusk and Other Stories) first full-length novel in more than three decades spans some 40 years and follows the accidental life, career, and loves of book editor Philip Bowman. After serving in the Pacific during WWII, Bowman stumbles into publishing at a time when small houses reigned. During extravagant literary parties and travels through Europe, Bowman shares his thoughts on authors both real and imagined. And yet his career is merely a vehicle for his loves and losses, connections made and missed. The women in his life somehow never suit and his many endings are always inexplicable to him. But Salter renders the first blushes of Bowman's loves exquisitely-their giddiness, occasional illicitness, eroticism-and his bewilderment after the relationships fail feels achingly real. By way of counterpoint, the author illustrates the happy but tragic marriage of a close friend, which parallels rather than intersects, since Bowman fails to connect with anyone. The number of characters who parade through the book can frustrate, and Salter's choice to render, for a chapter, a well-known character anonymously was unnecessary. But Salter measures his words carefully, occasionally punctuating his elegant prose with sharp, erotic punches. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
For decades, Salter has been an artistic standard-bearer. His first novel in many years begins percussively in 1944 with the unrelenting battles in the Pacific. Naval officer Philip Bowman, virginal and close to his mother, makes it safely home, moves to New York, and finds professional contentment as an editor at a small publisher. Even though he falls hard for Vivian, a wealthy southerner, he remains hermetically sealed. Their marriage fizzles quickly, and Bowman is smitten again, but he never gets it right. His obliviousness to women's inner lives leads to a shocking betrayal, and his crueler revenge. Still, this is a desultory, oddly slippery novel as Salter slides back and forward in time, glides into the lives of other characters, and considers the decline of the novel. The many sex scenes are doleful; the pegs to world events wobbly. Yet resonant passages bloom, including one that captures the book's subdued spirit: The landscape was beautiful but passive. The emptiness of things rose like the sound of a choir making the sky bluer and more vast. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S been almost 35 years since the publication of James Salter's previous novel, "Solo Faces." In the meantime, he's written two volumes of stories and one of poetry, a memoir, a collection of travel essays and, with his wife, Kay Eldredge Salter, a book about food. He has not been idle. Still, any or all of those books, excellent as they are, might suggest a career in twilight, with grand gestures and major lifts all in the rearview mirror. And why not? Salter is 87, with a reputation so secure he has nothing left to prove. If there were a Mount Rushmore for writers, he'd be there already. He could have published nothing, and no one would have thought less of him. Apparently no one told Salter, who, with the publication of "All That Is," an ambitious departure from his previous work, has demolished any talk of twilight with a single stroke. Moreover, this novel casts the last four decades in a completely new light, not coda but overture. The brilliantly compressed stories in which life is lit by lightning flash, the humane memoir that generously exalts, more than anything, the lineaments of ordinary existence - it's all here, subsumed and assimilated in the service of a work that manages to be both recognizable (no one but Salter could have written it) and yet strikingly original, vigorous proof that this literary lion is still very much on the prowl. In the preface to his 1997 memoir, "Burning the Days," he wrote: "If you can think of life, for a moment, as a large house with a nursery, living and dining rooms, bedrooms, study, and so forth, all unfamiliar and bright, the chapters which follow are, in a way, like looking through the windows of this house. Certain occupants will be glimpsed only briefly. Visitors come and go. At some windows, you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen." That apt description of his engaging reminiscences might easily serve to introduce this novel. In the past, Salter's fiction has concentrated with near savage intensity on specific, revealing moments in its characters' lives. "A Sport and a Pastime" chronicles the span of a love affair. "The Hunters" and "Cassada" are bound by military tours of duty, "Light Years" by the history of a decaying marriage. The mountain climbers in "Solo Faces" contend against both gravity and the vagaries of age. Behind all these stories is the sound of a ticking clock. Going long where those previous narratives were almost cruelly terse, "All That Is" gobbles the whole arc of a man's lifetime as its subject, opening near the end of World War II, when Philip Bowman is a junior naval officer on a ship bound for Japan. Over the next several decades, we see him married and divorced, and watch him make his way as a book editor at a literary publishing house in New York. Other romances follow, the most significant one curdled by a cruel betrayal that Bowman ultimately repays with commensurate viciousness. Friends fall away, new friendships are forged, houses are bought and sold, parents die, and one by one the bonds of love and attachment weaken and fade. In one of our last glimpses of Bowman - he's just old enough to be thinking hard about death - he's pondering a trip back to the Pacific, last seen from a warship's deck, "where the only daring part of his life lay." The clock ticks in this book too, but not so audibly, and sometimes not at all. Set beside the flyboys and climbers of Salter's previous books, Bowman looks unremarkable, a loner with a lowercase life and a profession to match: "The power of the novel in the nation's culture had weakened. It had happened gradually. It was something everyone recognized and ignored. All went on exactly as before, that was the beauty of it. The glory had faded but fresh faces kept appearing, wanting to be part of it, to be in publishing which had retained a suggestion of elegance like a pair of beautiful, boneshined shoes owned by a bankrupt man." Here, as always, this writer so at war with the obvious uncovers radiance in even the most melancholy circumstance, applying to it the same rigor he uses to scrutinize and dismiss any easy, conventional notions about heroism or the honorable life. What redeems the otherwise ordinary Bowman - what gives him grace - are his unstinting capacity for watchfulness and his embrace of memory as a bulwark against oblivion. Supplying his own epigraph, Salter opens the novel with this note: "There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real." Bowman insists at one point that he's no writer, but, like the man who created him, he doesn't miss much: "The first voice he ever knew, his mother's, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child. He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home - the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned." WITH his customary knack for scenes and characters chiseled with a stonecutter's economy, Salter constructs Bowman's world out of dozens of glistening miniatures and tossedoff portraits, each bristling with life. There are the troops at Tarawa, "slaughtered in enemy fire dense as bees," and Bowman's uncle, a New Jersey restaurant owner who "had taught himself to play the piano and would sit in happiness, drawn up close to the keyboard with his thick fingers, their backs richly haired, nimble on the keys." There is an upper-crust London party that might have been drawn by Hogarth, where an "older woman with a nose as long as an index finger was eating greedily, and the man with her blew his nose in the linen napkin, a gentleman, then." (Actually, the artist Salter most closely resembles is Degas, with his icy regard and discerning, sensual eye.) And while there is a generous amount of carnality, as might be expected from the author of "A Sport and a Pastime," the sex is always lyrically economical and never ever laughable, except when it means to be: "They made love simply, straightforwardly - she saw the ceiling, he the sheets." The everyday may be one of the hardest things to write about - the quotidian doings, including the outright tedium, of ordinary life. Writers from Flaubert to David Foster Wallace have attempted it, and its difficulties may be gauged by the fact that only writers of that caliber even consider trying. But to pull it off, to succeed in conjuring the "unbreathing stillness" of an August dawn just before a storm or the vertigo ignited by the news of a mother's death, to indelibly record the trivial and the portentous with the same ravenous affection, thereby persuading us that there may be no difference between the two when assaying the worth of a life or divining its mystery - that is a crowning achievement and it's Salter's to claim. The artist Salter most closely resembles is Degas, with his icy regard and discerning, sensual eye. Malcolm Jones is the author of the memoir "Little Boy Blues."
Guardian Review
"Only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real," goes a line in the epigraph to James Salter's novel. The preserving impulse must have special urgency for an author in his ninth decade. At any rate, the fast-flowing scenes that depict the 40-year passage from youth to middle age of protagonist Philip Bowman have a burn and clarity intense even by Salter's standards. When we first encounter him, Bowman is a young naval officer on his way to Okinawa, where his ship will face the final kamikaze assaults. Returning to New York, he gets a job at a publishing house. Marriage to a girl from Virginia's snobbish horse country follows, ending, unsurprisingly, in divorce. Then come a succession of affairs that never quite work out. His essential loneliness isn't stated, but it is deeply felt. That's about it for plot. But the final effect is to leave you feeling as if you have lived all the lives that make a single life. Though it's fewer than 300 pages long, the book's sharpness and abundance of observed detail give it an epic quality. - James Lasdun Only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real," goes a line in the epigraph to James Salter's novel. The preserving impulse must have special urgency for an author in his ninth decade. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
In his first fiction since the story collection Last Night (2005), the acclaimed veteran author chronicles the life and loves of a Manhattan book editor over a 40-year period. Okinawa, 1945. The Americans and Japanese are preparing for the climactic battle of the Pacific. Salter's sweep is panoramic but his eye, God-like, is also on the sparrow, a 20-year-old officer in the U.S. Navy, Philip Bowman. It's a stunning opening, displaying a mastery of scale that will not be repeated. Bowman is the protagonist: loyal, conscientious, a virgin (there's no rush), from a modest home in New Jersey. He's very close to his schoolteacher mother (father absconded in his infancy). After Harvard, Bowman is hired by the high-principled owner of a small literary publishing house. He meets Vivian at a bar. She's from Virginia, part of a rich, horsey set. As lovers, they transcend mortality, becoming gods and goddesses. Everyday life is more difficult. Bowman believes the unlettered Vivian, now his bride, is educable; she's not. At a Christmas house party in Virginia, the young couple is obscured by hard-drinking minor characters with easy morals. The narrative is studded with these striking vignettes; in retrospect, they're a swirling mass, losing their particularity. In London on a business trip, Bowman meets a married woman, just as rich, and scales new heights of passion with her; their affair will fizzle out, like his marriage to Vivian. Bowman's work gets less attention. Salter writes with cosmopolitan ease but avoids the nitty-gritty of the business; Bowman floats above all that, while somehow acquiring the respect of his peers. His third great passion is a disaster. An ill-defined American woman with a teenage daughter appears to be his soul mate; then she cheats on him. Four years later, Bowman uses the daughter in a shockingly cruel way; to make matters worse, this thoughtful man fails to examine his conduct. Without his self-knowledge, there is nothing to knit the novel together. There are incidental pleasures here but, overall, a disappointing return.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Navy man Philip Bowman returns from World War II uncertain about his future. He takes a job at Braden and Baum, a small New York literary publisher, and though he is gradually promoted, romantic relationships form the center of his life. Bowman meets his first wife shortly after starting his job, but his New Jersey background is very different from Vivian's horse-country Virginia upbringing, and their marriage dissolves. While on a business trip he meets Enid, an Englishwoman whose background is equally different from his own. The two begin a torrid affair that distance eventually cools. On a cab ride following another business trip, he encounters Christine, a realtor, and begins another affair. -VERDICT Salter's tone combined with the post-World War II setting gives this work the feel of something from an earlier generation. With the ever-changing panorama of New York City and New York publishing as background, Salter addresses time, love, and the mystery and wonder of life itself. [See Prepub Alert, 5/1/12.]-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Break of Day All night in darkness the water sped past. In tier on tier of iron bunks below deck, silent, six deep, lay hundreds of men, many face-up with their eyes still open though it was near morning. The lights were dimmed, the engines throbbing endlessly, the ventilators pulling in damp air, fifteen hundred men with their packs and weapons heavy enough to take them straight to the bottom, like an anvil dropped in the sea, part of a vast army sailing towards Okinawa, the great island that was just to the south of Japan. In truth, Okinawa was Japan, part of the homeland, strange and unknown. The war that had been going on for three and a half years was in its final act. In half an hour the first groups of men would file in for breakfast, standing as they ate, shoulder to shoulder, solemn, unspeaking. The ship was moving smoothly with faint sound. The steel of the hull creaked. The war in the Pacific was not like the rest of it. The distances alone were enormous. There was nothing but days on end of empty sea and strange names of places, a thousand miles between them. It had been a war of many islands, of prying them from the Japanese, one by one. Guadalcanal, which became a legend. The Solomons and the Slot. Tarawa, where the landing craft ran aground on reefs far from shore and the men were slaughtered in enemy fire dense as bees, the horror of the beaches, swollen bodies lolling in the surf, the nation's sons, some of them beautiful. In the beginning with frightening speed the Japanese had overrun everything, all of the Dutch East Indies, Malaya, the Philippines. Great strongholds, deep fortifications known to be impregnable, were swept over in a matter of days. There had been only one counter stroke, the first great carrier battle in the middle of the Pacific, near Midway, where four irreplaceable Japanese carriers went down with all their planes and veteran crews. A staggering blow, but still the Japanese were relentless. Their grip on the Pacific would have to be broken finger by iron finger. The battles were endless and unpitying, in dense jungle and heat. Near the shore, afterwards, the palms stood naked, like tall stakes, every leaf shot away. The enemy were savage fighters, the strange pagoda-like structures on their warships, their secret hissing language, their stockiness and ferocity. They did not surrender. They fought to the death. They executed prisoners with razor swords, two-handed swords raised high overhead, and they were merciless in victory, arms thrust aloft in mass triumph. By 1944, the great, final stages had begun. Their object was to bring the Japanese homeland within range of heavy bombers. Saipan was the key. It was large and heavily defended. The Japanese army had not been defeated in battle, disregarding the outposts--New Guinea, the Gilberts, places such as that--for more than 350 years. There were twenty-five thousand Japanese troops on the island of Saipan commanded to yield nothing, not an inch of ground. In the order of earthly things, the defense of Saipan was deemed a matter of life and death. In June, the invasion began. The Japanese had dangerous naval forces in the area, heavy cruisers and battleships. Two marine divisions went ashore and an army division followed. It became, for the Japanese, the Saipan disaster. Twenty days later, nearly all of them had perished. The Japanese general and also Admiral Nagumo, who had commanded at Midway, committed suicide, and hundreds of civilians, men and women terrified of being slaughtered, some of them mothers holding babies in their arms, leapt from the steep cliffs to their death on the sharp rocks below. It was the knell. The bombing of the main islands of Japan was now possible, and in the most massive of the raids, a firebombing of Tokyo, more than eighty thousand people died in the huge inferno in a single night. Next, Iwo Jima fell. The Japanese pronounced an ultimate pledge: the death of a hundred million, the entire population, rather than surrender. In the path of it lay Okinawa. Day was rising, a pale Pacific dawn that had no real horizon with the tops of the early clouds gathering light. The sea was empty. Slowly the sun appeared, flooding across the water and turning it white. A lieutenant jg named Bowman had come on deck and was standing at the railing, looking out. His cabinmate, Kimmel, silently joined him. It was a day Bowman would never forget. Neither would any of them. "Anything out there?" "Nothing." "Not that you can see," Kimmel said. He looked forward, then aft. "It's too peaceful," he said. Bowman was navigation officer and also, he had learned just two days earlier, lookout officer. "Sir," he had asked, "what does that entail?" "Here's the manual," the exec said. "Read it." He began that night, turning down the corner of certain pages as he read. "What are you doing?" Kimmel asked. "Don't bother me right now." "What are you studying?" "A manual." "Jesus, we're in the middle of enemy waters and you're sitting there reading a manual? This is no time for that. You're supposed to already know what to do." Bowman ignored him. They had been together from the beginning, since midshipman's school, where the commandant, a navy captain whose career had collapsed when his destroyer ran aground, had a copy of A Message to Garcia, an inspirational text from the Spanish-American War, placed on every man's bunk. Captain McCreary had no future but he remained loyal to the standards of the past. He drank himself into a stupor every night but was always crisp and well-shaved in the morning. He knew the book of navy regulations by heart and had bought the copies of A Message to Garcia with money from his own pocket. Bowman had read the Message carefully, years later he could still recite parts of it. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba--no one knew where . . . The point was simple: Do your duty fully and absolutely without unnecessary questions or excuses. Kimmel had cackled as he read it. "Aye, aye, sir. Man the guns!" He was dark-haired and skinny and walked with a loose gait that made him seem long-legged. His uniform always looked somehow slept in. His neck was too thin for his collar. The crew, among themselves, called him the Camel, but he had a playboy's aplomb and women liked him. In San Diego he had taken up with a lively girl named Vicky whose father owned a car dealership, Palmetto Ford. She had blond hair, pulled back, and a touch of daring. She was drawn to Kimmel immediately, his indolent glamour. In the hotel room that he had gotten with two other officers and where, he explained, they would be away from the noise of the bar, they sat drinking Canadian Club and Coke. "How did it happen?" he asked. "How did what happen?" "My meeting someone like you." "You certainly didn't deserve it," she said. He laughed. "It was fate," he said. She sipped her drink. "Fate. So, am I going to marry you?" "Jesus, are we there already? I'm not old enough to get married." "You'd probably only deceive me about ten times in the first year," she said. "I'd never deceive you." "Ha ha." She knew exactly what he was like, but she would change that. She liked his laugh. He'd have to meet her father first, she commented. "I'd love to meet your father," Kimmel answered in seeming earnestness. "Have you told him about us?" "Do you think I'm crazy? He'd kill me." "What do you mean? For what?" "For getting pregnant." "You're pregnant?" Kimmel said, alarmed. "Who knows?" Vicky Hollins in her silk dress, the glances clinging to her as she passed. In heels she wasn't that short. She liked to call herself by her last name. It's Hollins, she would announce on the phone. They were shipping out, that was what made it all real or a form of real. "Who knows if we'll get back," he said casually. Her letters had come in the two sackfuls of mail that Bowman had brought back from Leyte. He'd been sent there by the exec to try and find the ship's mail at the Fleet Post Office--they'd had none for ten days--and he had flown back with it, triumphant, in a TBM. Kimmel read parts of her letters aloud for the benefit, especially, of Brownell, the third man in the cabin. Brownell was intense and morally pure, with a knotted jaw that had traces of acne. Kimmel liked to bait him. He sniffed at a page of the letter. Yeah, that was her perfume, he said, he'd recognize it anywhere. "And maybe something else," he speculated. "I wonder. You think she might have rubbed it against her . . . Here," he said, offering it to Brownell, "tell me what you think." "I wouldn't know," Brownell said uneasily. The knots in his jaw showed. "Oh, sure you would, an old pussy hound like you." "Don't try and involve me in your lechery," Brownell said. "It's not lechery, she's writing to me because we fell in love. It's something beautiful and pure." "How would you know?" Brownell was reading The Prophet. " The Prophet. What's that?" Kimmel said. "Let me see it. What does it do, tell us what's going to happen?" Brownell didn't answer. The letters were less exciting than a page filled with feminine handwriting would suggest. Vicky was a talker and her letters were a detailed and somewhat repetitive account of her life, which consisted in part of going back to all the places she and Kimmel had been to, usually in the company of Susu, her closest friend, and also in the company of other young naval officers, but thinking always of Kimmel. The bartender remembered them, she said, a fabulous couple. Her closings were always a line from a popular song. I didn't want to do it, she wrote. Bowman had no girlfriend, faithful or otherwise. He'd had no experience of love but was reluctant to admit it. He simply let the subject pass when women were discussed and acted as though Kimmel's dazzling affair was more or less familiar ground to him. His life was the ship and his duties aboard. He felt loyalty to it and to a tradition that he respected, and he felt a certain pride when the captain or exec called out, "Mr. Bowman!" He liked their reliance, offhanded though it might be, on him. He was diligent. He had blue eyes and brown hair combed back. He'd been diligent in school. Miss Crowley had drawn him aside after class and told him he had the makings of a fine Latinist, but if she could see him now in his uniform and sea-tarnished insignia, she would have been very impressed. From the time he and Kimmel had joined the ship at Ulithi, he felt he had performed well. How he would behave in action was weighing on his mind that morning as they stood looking out at the mysterious, foreign sea and then at the sky that was already becoming brighter. Courage and fear and how you would act under fire were not among the things you talked about. You hoped, when the time came, that you would be able to do as expected. He had faith, if not complete, in himself, then in the leadership, the seasoned names that guided the fleet. Once, in the distance he had seen, low and swift-moving, the camouflaged flagship, the New Jersey, with Halsey aboard. It was like seeing, from afar, the Emperor at Ratisbon. He felt a kind of pride, even fulfillment. It was enough. The real danger would come from the sky, the suicide attacks, the kamikaze--the word meant "divine wind," the heaven-sent storms that had saved Japan from the invasion fleet of Kublai Khan centuries before. This was the same intervention from on high, this time by bomb-laden planes flying directly into the enemy ships, their pilots dying in the act. The first such attack had been in the Philippines a few months earlier. A Japanese plane dove into a heavy cruiser and exploded, killing the captain and many more. From then on the attacks multiplied. The Japanese would come in irregular groups, appearing suddenly. Men watched with almost hypnotic fascination and fear as they came straight down towards them through dense antiaircraft fire or swept in low, skimming the water. To defend Okinawa the Japanese had planned to launch the greatest kamikaze assault of all. The loss of ships would be so heavy that the invasion would be driven back and destroyed. It was not just a dream. The outcome of great battles could hinge on resolve. Through the morning, though, there was nothing. The swells rose and slid past, some bursting white, spooling out and breaking backwards. There was a deck of clouds. Beneath, the sky was bright. The first warning of enemy planes came in a call from the bridge, and Bowman was running to his cabin to get his life jacket when the alarm for General Quarters sounded, overwhelming everything else, and he passed Kimmel in a helmet that looked too big for him racing up the steel steps crying, "This is it! This is it!" The firing had started and every gun on the ship and on those nearby took it up. The sound was deafening. Swarms of antiaircraft fire were floating upwards amid dark puffs. On the bridge the captain was hitting the helmsman on the arm to get him to listen. Men were still getting to their stations. It was all happening at two speeds, the noise and desperate haste of action and also at a lesser speed, that of fate, with dark specks in the sky moving through the gunfire. They were distant and it seemed the firing could not reach them when suddenly something else began, within the din a single dark plane was coming down and like a blind insect, unerring, turning towards them, red insignia on its wings and a shining black cowling. Every gun on the ship was firing and the seconds were collapsing into one another. Then with a huge explosion and geyser of water the ship lurched sideways beneath their feet--the plane had hit them or just alongside. In the smoke and confusion no one knew. "Man overboard!" "Where?" "Astern, sir!" It was Kimmel who, thinking the magazine amidship had been hit, had jumped. The noise was still terrific, they were firing at everything. In the wake of the ship and trying to swim amid the great swells and pieces of wreckage, Kimmel was vanishing from sight. They could not stop or turn back for him. He would have drowned but miraculously he was seen and picked up by a destroyer that was almost immediately sunk by another kamikaze and the crew rescued by a second destroyer that, barely an hour later, was razed to the waterline. Kimmel ended up in a naval hospital. He became a kind of legend. He'd jumped off his ship by mistake and in one day had seen more action than the rest of them would see in the entire war. Afterwards, Bowman lost track of him. Several times over the years he tried to locate him in Chicago but without any luck. More than thirty ships were sunk that day. It was the greatest ordeal of the fleet during the war. Excerpted from All That Is by James Salter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
