BOOKLIST
February 1, 2005

When TV journalist Hamann was covering the expansion of a sewage-treatment plant at Seattle’s Discovery Park some 18 years ago, a ranger told him of an odd headstone at the park, dated August 14, 1944, with an Italian inscription. The offhanded remark would lead Hamann to investigate an unsolved murder of Italian POW Guglielmo Olivotto at the park, which was then an Army base known as Fort Lawton. More than 10,000 military personnel were at the base at any given time during the war, including soldiers leaving for, or returning from, the Pacific; Italian prisoners of war captured by Allied troops in northern Africa; and a large contingent of segregated black soldiers who served primarily as porters to load and unload ships in the Pacific theater. The storyline that Hamann uncovers is compelling enough. But it is the crime's historical context—wartime racial dynamics, colossal Army incompetence, international political implications, and the (humane) treatment of POWs, for example—that makes the book so relevant now.

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