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This book, to be honest, largely bored me. I found vast chunks of it to be completely irrelevant and, quite frankly, sleep-inducing. However, there was just enough interesting stuff within its pages that I managed to finish it. I highly doubt that I would ever read it again, and truth be told, I engaged in a rather elaborate back-patting orgy when I finally concluded it. If you manage to finish this, you may also engage in a little back patting as well. You truly deserve to.
After having trashed the book, let me now explain why I actually finished it. I thoroughly enjoyed the information provided about the hours leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Much of that was truly fascinating. I was left stunned by the number of warnings that the intelligence community, such as it existed at the time, had received. According to this author, they largely ignored those warnings, which ultimately enabled the attack. The author does an excellent job of putting a human face on the history. He shows you the conversations among the main characters and talks about what they were doing at the time the attack occurred. What bored me the most was the padded and irrelevant information about what was happening in Eastern Europe and elsewhere during the same hours that Japan prepared and executed its attack. I simply didn't care what was going on in Eastern Europe. There were vast chunks of this that made me wish I could skip more easily. There's a fair amount of information between each heading, and if you skip too much, you do run the risk of missing really good information. The best part for me was the description of the attack itself. Not just the description of the damage, but also the impact of what happened to those human beings who lost their lives and valiantly fought to retain them. The day still lives in infamy for me, and reading this book served as a reminder of why. The author is talented enough that he managed to build suspense into the narrative even though you know historically how everything ends. Some of the small facts he includes intrigued me immensely. On balance, this was worth the 29 hours I spent reading it. Well, I cheated a little; I ran the narrator at 2.87X. Her professionalism meant she could handle that speed just fine.
After having trashed the book, let me now explain why I actually finished it. I thoroughly enjoyed the information provided about the hours leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Much of that was truly fascinating. I was left stunned by the number of warnings that the intelligence community, such as it existed at the time, had received. According to this author, they largely ignored those warnings, which ultimately enabled the attack. The author does an excellent job of putting a human face on the history. He shows you the conversations among the main characters and talks about what they were doing at the time the attack occurred. What bored me the most was the padded and irrelevant information about what was happening in Eastern Europe and elsewhere during the same hours that Japan prepared and executed its attack. I simply didn't care what was going on in Eastern Europe. There were vast chunks of this that made me wish I could skip more easily. There's a fair amount of information between each heading, and if you skip too much, you do run the risk of missing really good information. The best part for me was the description of the attack itself. Not just the description of the damage, but also the impact of what happened to those human beings who lost their lives and valiantly fought to retain them. The day still lives in infamy for me, and reading this book served as a reminder of why. The author is talented enough that he managed to build suspense into the narrative even though you know historically how everything ends. Some of the small facts he includes intrigued me immensely. On balance, this was worth the 29 hours I spent reading it. Well, I cheated a little; I ran the narrator at 2.87X. Her professionalism meant she could handle that speed just fine.
