Indianapolis: left adrift in the Philippine Sea to battle dehydration, sharks, insanity, and each other

Authors Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic will speak at Third Place Books on Wednesday 6/19/19 at 7:00pm.

Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic draw upon years of original research and extensive interviews to unearth vivid, raw details that turn a distant WWII tale into an urgent, heart-stopping drama.

This account includes the fifty-year fight to exonerate the ship’s captain after a wrongful court martial.

Vincent and Vladic reveal the untold stories of the crew left adrift in the Philippine Sea as they battled dehydration, sharks, insanity, and each other. 

Indianapolis stands as the definitive account of one of the most remarkable episodes in American history.

Sara Vladic became interested in the ship when she was 13. For nearly a decade, she wrote letters to the survivors, and in 2001, at 22, she started attending reunions, befriending and interviewing them, and compiling reams of new research. 

In the 17 years since then, she has interviewed 107 survivors — 13 of whom survive to this day — and recorded eye-opening stories about their harrowing four days adrift in the Philippine Sea.

Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic

Lynn Vincent, a US Navy veteran, is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and coauthor of eleven nonfiction books with more than sixteen million copies in print. 

Her best-known titles are Same of Kind of Different as Me (with Ron Hall and Denver Moore) and Heaven Is for Real (with Todd Burpo). 

A veteran journalist and author of more than 1,000 articles, her investigative pieces have been cited before Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. She lives in the mountains east of San Diego with her husband and their three Labrador retrievers.

Sara Vladic, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, is one of the world’s leading experts on the USS Indianapolis. In 2016 she released an award-winning documentary film on the disaster, USS Indianapolis: The Legacy. 

She has published new research on Indianapolis in Proceedings, the official journal of the US Navy, and appeared as an expert commentator on PBS’s USS Indianapolis: Live from the Deep, which explored the ship’s wreckage. She and her husband, Ben, live in San Marcos, California.