By Kevin Seabrooke

While the fighting raged in Europe and the Pacific during WWII, those on the homefront had to deal with all manner of threats—both imagined and real, maintaining constant vigilance in the hunt for spies and saboteurs, both homegrown and those landed on America’s shores by German submarines.

Obsessed with the USS Indianapolis disaster since the age of 13, Vladic would go on to become an award winning documentary filmmaker and a leading expert on the subject. She met and interviewed 108 of the ship’s survivors, and in 2016 she released an award-winning documentary film on the disaster, USS Indianapolis: The Legacy. Her 600-page book on the subject, Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man, was co-written with Lynn Vincent and published in 2018.

The Dangerous Shore: How a Motley Crew of Scientists, Mobsters, Double Agents, Retirees, Volunteer Pilots (and a Boy Scout) Stopped the Invasion of America (Sara Vladic, William Morrow, New York, NY, 624 pp., March 10, 2026 $42 HC)