An arguable but handy reference for students of world history and the war in the Pacific.
A document-grounded argument that Harry Truman made the right decision by dropping the atomic bomb.
Military historian Giangreco rejects the claim, by “revisionist historians,” that “none of the options explored by President Truman and his contemporaries—atom bomb, invasion, or both—was warranted.” The underlying premise of that idea was that Japan was preparing to surrender, which Giangreco further rejects. He argues that Japan was prepared to resist to the last with a still-powerful army, as well as that American losses in the event of an invasion could exceed the estimate of 1,000,000 that has often been cited. The planks of Giangreco’s case are repetitive but painstakingly laid out, and the author pursues several topics around which historical and popular controversy have formed. One, following Truman’s own memoirs, concerns his supposed ignorance of the Manhattan Project and its implications. Although he needed to be brought up to speed, a memorandum from Secretary of War Henry Stimson indicates that he was fully briefed on the matters. A second topic is the involvement of the Soviet Union, which declared war on Japan late in 1945—and which, thanks to a little-reported lend-lease program, was preparing to use American amphibious craft to invade northern Japan “before their embattled comrades in the Maritime Provinces and the port of Vladivostok finally ran out of bullets, borscht, and men.” The most important documents involve those casualty figures, and by Giangreco’s account, they support his often stated contention that the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima saved millions of lives—not just Americans, who were suffering losses in conventional warfare of some 65,000 “killed, wounded, and missing each and every month during the ‘casualty surge’ of June 1944 to June 1945,” but also as many as 20 million Japanese.
An arguable but handy reference for students of world history and the war in the Pacific.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781640120730
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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