Far from the customary skies

the long version

"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 little sense of mounting climax- rather 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."--Kirkus Review.