Author James Scott will be the speaker at the Lanier Library’s Brown Bag Lunch on Feb. 18. Scott is a former award-winning reporter and investigative journalist with the Charleston Post and Courier, and has written two books, The Attack on the Liberty and The War Below: The Story of Three Submarines that Battled Japan.

Scott will speak primarily on The War Below, a book that focuses on the three top submarines – Silversides, Drum and Tang – that helped win World War II for the U.S. in the Pacific. These three vessels together sank 62 freighters, tankers and transports of Japan’s merchant fleet, an accomplishment that devastated the country’s economy by war’s end.

Scott’s research for the book included interviews with more than 100 submarine veterans as well as letters and diaries. A Washington Post review lauded him for having “a gift for dramatic narrative.”

The Attack on the Liberty, an account of the 1967 Israeli attack on an American naval ship that killed 34 crew members and wounded more than 170, won the 2010 Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Excellence in Naval Literature and Honorable Mention in History at the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival. Scott’s father, John, was a survivor of the attack that Israel maintained was an accident.

Brown Bag Lunches are held at noon on the third Tuesday of each month at the library.

The programs are open to the public and are free of charge. Those attending are welcome to bring a lunch to eat while enjoying the presentation.

For more information, call the library at 828-859-9535 or visit www.lanierlib.org.

– article submitted 

by Gina Malone