Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There is nothing more disillusioning to know a lot about a topic and then see how it's treated in the popular media. Mr. O'Reilly's book is a huge waste of time. It almost completely ignores a long string of events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor; it fails to develop sufficient historical perspective on the Pacific War; and it leaves out much of the first three years of the war including the battles for Guadalcanal, Saipan, New Guinea, Midway, Singapore, Guam, Tinian, Rabaul, New Georgia, Bougainville, Tarawa, The Aleutian Islands, and Burma, to mention a few. For some reason it devotes several pages to Peleieu, a controversial battle that some postwar analysts suggest that, like Tarawa, was a waste of time, equipment and lives. It gives cursory attention to Iwo Jima and Okinawa along with a brief coverage of the Battle for Manila, mainly focusing on heroic individuals. Instead, it gives considerable coverage on the last few months of the Pacific War up to the Atomic bombing of Japan, which it describes in grisly detail. If you wanted to develop a good perspective on World War II in the Pacific this book is not the place to go. It’s written on a 10th grade level, leaves you knowing very little about the subject and almost no understanding of why the war against Japan happened in the first place. Far better accounts of this subject can be found in Bankrupting the Enemy, by Edward S. Miller; Japan 1941, by Eri Hotta; Day of Deceit, by Robert B. Stinnett; A Time for War, by Robert Smith Thompson; and Operation Snow, by John Koster. It’s a complex subject and requires something far superior to O’Reilly’s book to even begin to understand.