A definitive account of complex political maneuvering that accomplished little.
The tortuous history behind America’s decision to insist on Japan’s unconditional surrender.
In this tightly focused narrative, history professor Gallicchio writes that when Franklin Roosevelt announced in 1943 that the war would end when Germany and Japan surrendered unconditionally, few objected. It became a controversy in 1945 when Japan’s defeat seemed inevitable to everyone except Japanese leaders, who maintained that all their countrymen would die before surrendering. Two administration camps existed. Secretary of War Henry Stimson led those convinced that Japanese leaders were more likely to surrender if assured that the emperor would keep his throne. Dean Acheson, who would become secretary of state in 1949, led those who argued that this would prolong the war by convincing the enemy that America was weakening. Harry Truman listened but did nothing, and the Navy was lukewarm to any assurance. Having annihilated enemy naval and air defenses, Navy leaders were certain that a blockade would starve Japan into submission. Army leaders, led by Gen. George Marshall, argued that this would take years and that war-weary Americans would lose heart. In any case, public opinion supported unconditional surrender. The Army argued for an invasion of the home island, an immense project. In the end, a second atomic bomb and the Soviet invasion persuaded Japan to give in. Its offer to surrender included a clause protecting the emperor, which the U.S. rejected, returning a softened version that Japanese leaders, after heated debate, accepted. But as the author points out, the controversy persisted. During the war and until the 1960s, advocates of modifying unconditional surrender were conservatives who proclaimed this would save American lives while liberals protested that “the real aim of the ‘emperor worshippers’…was to maintain Japan as a bulwark against Russia and revolution.” After the ’60s, matters reversed when liberal “revisionist” histories claimed that Japan was on the verge of surrendering and that Truman brushed off the evidence and insisted on dropping the bombs to intimidate Russia.
A definitive account of complex political maneuvering that accomplished little.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-009110-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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