An impressive one-volume history of the events leading up to the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan.
Jenkins offers a meticulous analysis of the diplomatic and strategic blunders that led to hostilities between the United States and Japan at the beginning of World War II.
Most readers familiar with American history are at least broadly aware of the events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and President Roosevelt’s subsequent declaration of war on Japan. Without a closer scrutiny of the political details (an assessment scrupulously provided by the author), that outbreak of war can seem as sudden as it was inexorable. Jenkins argues that there was ample opportunity to defuse the antagonism between the two nations, but a series of diplomatic mistakes and strategic errors, combined with grotesque miscommunications, led to catastrophe. The author looks at both sides and painstakingly (though concisely) unpacks each nation’s internecine conflicts. Roosevelt was often stymied by disagreements between the civilian leaders serving on his War Council and his military commanders. Secretary of State Cordell Hull had drawn up a plan for detente between the United States and Japan, an agreement that likely would have avoided war, but failed to advocate for it due to opposition from China and England. Likewise, Japanese prime minister Konoe worked hard for peace, but he was constantly opposed by his own foreign minister, Matsuoka Yosuke, and his aggressive military generals. Jenkins paints a detailed picture of the squandered opportunities for peace on both sides, and of the deadly aftermath of Japan’s attack, culminating in the naval battles at Coral Sea and Midway. For all of the book’s rigor and precision, the author appropriately acknowledges the limitations of historical analysis and the intractability of “imponderables of history.” This text is an astonishingly thorough treatment of the subject, despite its admirable brevity—Jenkins wastes no words, and leaves nothing essential out.
An impressive one-volume history of the events leading up to the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2022
ISBN: 9798986562605
Page Count: 402
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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