"SOS to the Rescue"

A few weeks ago I was looking at an old radio magazine from the year of my father's birth - 1936. In it was an ad for a newly published book that caught my eye. Long out of print of course, I wondered if I could find a copy at a reasonable price. Amazon to the rescue! A $25 copy in very good condition was soon on the way.

I don't normally enjoy reading older books - the prose is more formal and can often seems less personal and somewhat stilted to modern readers. Those that I do read, usually first-person accounts of historical events, are read for their information, not for entertainment.

"SOS to the Rescue", written by Karl Baarslag, was published in 1935. It is an immensely enjoyable book, written, for all intents and purposes, in contemporary English. Baarslag was a maritime radio operator in the 1920's and '30's and this book is a collection of maritime disasters that occurred in the first thirty years of radio's infancy, all told from the onboard radio operator's point of view.