A painful yet riveting history, especially valuable for historians and military buffs.
The first of a three-volume definitive history of the Asia-Pacific War.
As distinguished World War II scholar Frank (MacArthur, 2007, etc.), who served as a platoon leader in the Vietnam War, writes, after Japan conquered nearby Manchuria in 1931, local Japanese forces invaded China proper in 1937. “This volume,” writes the author, “attempts to restore the notion of a ‘Heroic China’ carrying on in the face of Japanese aggression, with horrific levels of death and destruction and with very sparse international support….The possibility that China could hold out in a conflict with Japan for more than weeks, or at most months, was wholly discounted throughout the world in 1937.” In the first half of this monumentally researched narrative, Frank recounts the war in China, where more fighting and deaths occurred than on all other fronts combined. Readers may be startled to learn that historical opinion of China’s leader Chiang Kai-shek has vastly improved. Frank agrees, maintaining that Chiang’s stubbornness and acumen converted the Japanese invasion into a quagmire, “a struggle that would prove ultimately fatal to Imperial Japan.” In 1941, galvanized by Hitler’s invasion of Russia and embargoed by America, Japan's army leaders yearned to invade Siberia, and the navy leadership sought to conquer resource-rich Southeast Asia, which risked war with the U.S. The morass in China probably tipped the balance. After an absorbing account of the planning and maddening negotiation that preceded the attack on Pearl Harbor, Frank enters familiar territory with gripping descriptions of the attack followed by Japan’s dazzling conquests from the South Pacific through the Philippines, East Indies, Singapore, and Burma. Readers may be surprised by the fact that Japanese troops were usually outnumbered (more than 2-to-1 in the Philippines) but better led. Frank’s sharp portraits of the Allied generals include the usual incompetent suspects (e.g., Arthur Percival in Singapore) but also two who emerged as heroes (Douglas MacArthur and Joseph Stilwell).
A painful yet riveting history, especially valuable for historians and military buffs.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00210-9
Page Count: 836
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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