the truth. (2 maps, 44 b&w photos, not seen)
Two veteran investigative reporters (Dragon Lady, 1992, etc.) assail several generations of Japan’s first family with the
deadliest weapons of all: research and keen analysis. This is not a pleasant tale. Beginning their story with the first postwar meeting between General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito on September 27, 1945, the Seagraves quickly establish a rather startling conclusion: "Money—not Shinto—is the state religion of Japan," where the various financial powers "milk [the country] like a cash cow." The picture grows only darker as the Seagraves shine their lights more brightly. They tell of unimaginable wealth and privilege (Yoshihito, who came to power in 1912, was the "first crown prince ever taught to dress himself"), about internecine struggles to pick the spouse of the emperor, about shadowy, enormously powerful figures in the background—bankers, industrialists—who manipulate both the imperial family and international events with the venal intent of enriching themselves and securing Japan’s prominence. Most alarming for American readers are the chapters dealing with WWII. The Seagraves cite "emerging" evidence that in 1941 both US and British officials knew in advance of the imminent attack at Pearl Harbor and did nothing: the desperate British needed US intervention, and the Roosevelt administration needed to mobilize prowar public opinion. The Seagraves describe the massive, desperate efforts of "Golden Lily," code name for the clandestine (and largely effective) Japanese operation to hide from Allied officials the billions of dollars of gold and other treasures the Japanese had plundered in the early years of the war—on a scale that has "never been seen before in human history." In addition, the Seagraves describe the reprehensible (and successful) efforts of MacArthur and other American officials to ensure that no member of the imperial family ever appeared before any war-crimes tribunal. A deeply disturbing chronicle of pervasive corruption and greed—of unspeakable violence visited upon people, values, and
the truth. (2 maps, 44 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7679-0496-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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