A fine account of an American diplomat who did his best to contain Japanese ambitions in the run-up to World War II.
How a skilled ambassador tried to rein in a wildly dysfunctional nation.
Historian Kemper speeds over the early life of Joseph Grew (1880-1965), who preferred travel to the lucrative family business. He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1904 and rose steadily. Appointed ambassador to Japan in 1932, he served until World War II broke out. Japan had a constitution and elected parliament but also a godlike emperor. “To ensure this infallibility,” writes the author, “he wasn’t allowed to make any decisions, nor could he be held responsible for decisions made by others.” The military swore loyalty to the emperor, not the constitution, so it was largely uncontrollable. Young, jingoistic officers regularly murdered their superiors or civilian officials who seemed insufficiently bellicose, proclaimed that they acted out of love for the emperor, and were treated with kid gloves. In this richly detailed narrative, Kemper emphasizes that Japan had genuine grievances against the West. The U.S. prohibited many Asian immigrants, and many states forbade Japanese from becoming citizens or owning property. Japanese leaders denounced Western imperialism—not because it was unjust but because they believed that Japan, not the West, deserved to rule the Asian world. Grew arrived after Japan had annexed Manchuria and would later invade China. This produced outrage in America, including among his superiors. Although equally unsympathetic, Grew explained that since America had no intention of using force, outrage alone produced irritation without accomplishing anything. His goal as a diplomat was to win respect from the Japanese and encourage more enlightened behavior. Grew himself did not rate his chances highly, and readers know how matters turned out, but Kemper’s compelling history gives him high marks for winning popularity among the people and trust from Japanese leaders—far more than other Western diplomats. He accomplished this despite understanding that he was dealing with a deeply flawed government willing to commit hara-kiri in pursuit of its goals, which it proceeded to do.
A fine account of an American diplomat who did his best to contain Japanese ambitions in the run-up to World War II.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-06474-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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