Reviews for Stalin's silver :the sinking of the USS John Barry (Book)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Beasant tries to light a fire of suspense under the mysterious cargo carried by the torpedoed WWII liberty ship USS John Barry. He tries to charge the salvage operation with derring-do. He's unsuccessful at both. In the waning days of WWII the John Barry, a US merchant ship, was sunk off the coast of Arabia. It was known to be carrying three million silver coins minted in the US for Saudi Arabia. It was also carrying a substantial cargo that has never been identified, though it has long been suspected of being silver bars. An international group, for whom Beasant is the public relations man, won a salvage bid, and set into motion the deepest heavy-lift recovery operation yet accomplished. Beasant works hard'it's his job, after all'to make readers believe that sleeping with the John Barry are riches beyond a sultan's dreams, but the facts are these: His team recovered less than half the coins being sent to Saudi Arabia, and nothing more. For all his archive prowling and detective work'the cargo allocation sheets, approving certificates, ship's logs, manifests, vessel's performance reports, Master's tales, official documents, and interviews with a number of those involved'there is no proof of what the other cargo was. It could have been silver to stabilize British India's economy. Or silver or gold, diamonds even, for Uncle Joe: ``Roosevelt might well have thought that financial inducements would give him leverage to moderate Stalin's territorial ambitions'''hence the book's title. Or it could have been 100 million pickled eggs. As for portraying the recovery team as a bunch of swashbucklers, men who ``abhor life without the dignity of danger,'' what danger is there in sending an unmanned, deep-sea pincer-grasp into the water? Like the salvage job he represents, Beasant fails to deliver the goods.
