An evenhanded, compassionate portrayal of the two deeply wounded sides to this story.
A poignant chronicle of the deeply complicated emotions surrounding the American-Japanese hostility stoked by World War II.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Obmascik (Halfway to Heaven: My White-knuckled—and Knuckleheaded—Quest for the Rocky Mountain High, 2009, etc.) narrates the multilayered tale of an aged American veteran of the ferocious battle of Attu Island who, decades later, visited the daughter of a Japanese surgeon he killed during that horrendous episode. This began a confluence of truth-seeking and reconciliation, a remarkable story that the author ably pieces together. He begins with the recovered diary that the Japanese surgeon, Paul Tatsuguchi, had left in his effects after his death. Tatsuguchi was raised by Japanese parents in California and became a devoted Seventh Day Adventist; as an adult, he returned to Japan with his new bride just before the war in 1939. The timing, of course, was terrible. Tatsuguchi was inducted into the Imperial Army as a physician, but due to the intense suspicion about his American background, he was not given the suitable rank of an officer. After the Pearl Harbor attack, Tatsuguchi was deployed overseas, ending up on the remote, forbidding Aleutian island outpost (and American possession) of Attu, which was seized by the Japanese in 1942. During the harsh winter he was stationed there, Tatsuguchi wrote his war diary, delineating the brutal conditions of his surgical duties amid the chaos of battle. Meanwhile, on the American side, Charles “Dick” Laird, a scrappy GI from Ohio, became part of the waves of invading U.S. troops determined to extract the Japanese from the island, but they were thwarted by their entrenched positions in foxholes and caves and mystified by their refusal to surrender. Obmascik has carefully and fairly sifted through the layers to this complex story, offering a tightly focused examination of the different, misleading translations of Tatsuguchi’s diary as well as Laird’s efforts to get the diary back to his family.
An evenhanded, compassionate portrayal of the two deeply wounded sides to this story.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7837-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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