By the numbers but with a welcome payoff in giving credit where it’s due, albeit long after the fact.
A long and diffuse but generally satisfying account of the World War II hunt for a notorious Japanese strategist.
Hampton charts the killing of Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, a key planner of Pearl Harbor and of the Japanese war in the Pacific. After Midway and the Coral Sea, the Japanese perception of America as weak gave way to the realization that the enemy was tougher than anticipated; as the author writes portentously, “sand was leaking from the Japanese hourglass.” Yamamoto developed a three-pronged plan to tangle the Americans in island-hopping fighting in the Solomon Sea, invade southern New Guinea to threaten Australia, and finally “catch the U.S. fleet in open water and destroy it.” Such a formidable opponent had to be eliminated, and this became the objective of a group of elite American flyers who, working closely with intelligence units and cryptographers, divined Yamamoto’s location. Knowing that once a plan was formulated the Japanese seldom varied from it, they timed when his plane would pass within striking distance. As Hampton clearly chronicles, credit for the kill goes to an Oregon-born flyer named Rex Barber. Instead, a hot-dogging senior officer claimed credit and, by doing so, broadcast the plain implication that U.S. intelligence had cracked the Japanese code. An irate Adm. William Halsey thus shelved recommendations that the members of the air mission be awarded the Medal of Honor and instead demoted them to receive only the Navy Cross. Barber considers Halsey’s actions to be “contemptuous” and “ill-mannered,” but he reserves greater scorn for “Japanese hubris.” Though much of the big picture stuff has been covered more thoroughly in many of the standard WWII texts, the action sequences are vivid and engaging.
By the numbers but with a welcome payoff in giving credit where it’s due, albeit long after the fact.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293809-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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