Abandoned Ship

In Harms Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, by Doug Stanton (Holt, 333 pp.,$25)

JOHN Erskine’s famous essay, “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” was first articulated as his 1913 Phi Beta Kappa address at Amherst College. A year earlier, the Titanic had gone down off Nova Scotia with enormous loss of life, and Erskine had much on his mind the complacency of Capt. Edward Smith, who—despite multiple iceberg warnings—had sailed his ship at night into the ice field at 22.5 knots.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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In Harms Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, by Doug Stanton (Holt, 333 pp.,$25)

JOHN Erskine’s famous essay, “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent,” was first articulated as his 1913 Phi Beta Kappa address at Amherst College. A year earlier, the Titanic had gone down off Nova Scotia with enormous loss of life, and Erskine had much on his mind the complacency of Capt. Edward Smith, who—despite multiple iceberg warnings—had sailed his ship at night into the ice field at 22.5 knots.