Meticulous, authoritative research informs a vivid narrative.
A satisfying follow-up to the author’s The War Beat, Europe (2017).
Drawing on a prodigious number of sources, including extensive media, government, and military archives; oral histories; newspapers and magazines; and published histories, memoirs, and biographies, Casey, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics, offers a cleareyed look at the experiences of war correspondents reporting on the Pacific front. Faced with tropical weather, insects, and disease, the correspondents confronted conditions very different from those in the European theater. “The jungle breaks everything down,” complained one reporter after a long stint in New Guinea, “typewriter, camera, papers. My glasses gave way this morning.” Most egregiously, reporters confronted censorship from military authorities, who insisted on vetting stories. Military regulations could be “suffocating, encompassing almost every aspect of the reporters’ daily lives, from what to wear at mealtimes to where to throw their cigarette butts.” Correspondents assigned to the Navy, whose oversight was especially strict, grew rebellious; those assigned to the Army soon realized that they would be rewarded by burnishing the reputation of the self-aggrandizing Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who believed that news of his challenges and triumphs would shift Franklin Roosevelt’s focus from Europe to the Pacific. Casey recounts in detail correspondents’ efforts to publish stories that the government wanted to suppress—of the Bataan Death March, for example, testimonies of atrocities from prisoners of war, and the destruction wrought by kamikaze raids. He creates deft portraits of a burgeoning population of correspondents as well as the editors and publishers who competed for—and helped to shaped—the news. Besides examining military engagements, he recounts reporters’ dangerous exploits as they sailed through treacherous waters, parachuted out of planes, and made their ways across forbidding terrain. Although most of these correspondents are little remembered today, Casey casts a well-deserved light on their commitment to truth and on the hardships they endured to convey the reality of war.
Meticulous, authoritative research informs a vivid narrative.Pub Date: May 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-005363-5
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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