It's a great place for anyone interested in the attack to discover, or rediscover, what happened that fateful morning. If you're not interested in wading through thousands of pages of historical argument and just want a vivid portrait of the day of the attack, I cannot recommend Lord too highly. But keep coming back to Lord, to remind you that for all the talk of geopolitical strategy, individual human lives were changed (or ended) forever because of the attack.
interested in root causes will do well to study Prange and Toland and Stinnett and all the rest. Instead, he approaches this mainly as a storyteller, presenting us with 'a moment in time'. an in-depth historical study of what-happened-and-why is not really what Lord is after here. In summary, I'll quote from Andrew Rogers' review which I completely agree with. The above criticisms aside, Lord does present an interesting look at how people reacted, how what was happening took a while to click in for the people on the ground, and how complete chaos and pandemonium reign supreme when such events occur. You almost need to read about Pearl Harbor elsewhere, and then turn to this book for the personal quotes from hundreds of people who were there on that day to get the whole, big picture. The reader also gets very little context as to why the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and what America as a whole thought of the event. Since most of the Japanese participants were later killed in the war, their views and perspectives are mostly absent. This gets old after a while and no longer packs much of a punch. Nearly every paragraph contains at least one irony or statement intended to shock the reader. Plus, the quotes used are usually the most fantastic sentence the person said in their interview with Lord so, in total, the story sounds more like a legend than history. While this provides for a number of "accounts," they are rather superficial. Most of the people's background and story are told in a single sentence or two. The characters aren't developed at all and less than 24 hours after finishing the book I can't remember a single person's name. Rather than present the forest, Lord offers only the trees-and lots of them. The first few chapters, especially, are real page turners while Lord flashes back and forth between what was happening in Hawaii and what was happening in Japan and on the high seas in the days and hours before the attack. In this respect, Lord does not disappoint. Lord has assembled hundreds of yarns into this work of "non-fiction." Originally published in 1957, this edition was published in time for the 60th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack without any apparent changes or additions.Īn event that raised as many questions and was as "exciting" (if that term can be used for something that killed thousands) as Pearl Harbor was would be difficult to write about and not hold the reader's interest.
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