USS Arizona: Warship - Tomb - Monument

by Mackinnon Simpson

The story of the USS Arizona encompasses far more than the milli-second BOOM! that split her hull and snuffed out the lives of 1177 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. USS Arizona  -  Warship Tomb Monument tells a story that needed to be told, of why the Arizona is still so important to people from around the world who trek to visit her each year.

116 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2008

About the author

MacKinnon Simpson was raised on a family farm in Pottersville, in rural northern New Jersey.

He was a father of two and tutu kane to a pair of rambunctious grandkids. He settled in Honolulu, where his occupations ran the gamut from motorcycle sales to cable TV executive.

Simpson self-identified as a writer since the third grade. Ultimately, he returned to writing and wrote his first book, WhaleSong, in 1986. WhaleSong was the first real book written and designed on an Apple Macintosh computer, and was called by the head of Time-Life Books “the book which changed the face of American publishing.”

He went on to write, design, and publish more than 25 large-format illustrated books. In addition to books on Hawaiʻi’s history, he wrote silliness for the Tiger Magazine, the occasional radio jingle, a computer manual, and all the exhibits for a maritime museum.