[.ca] Eagle And The Rising Sun (ISBN 0393326284)

A Truly Awful work:
When I first read about this book coming out, I was tremendously excited and couldn't WAIT to get it. I was wrong. This book (in my opinion) is a total waste of time and money - NOT because the author doesn't have some good things to say... he does, particularly about MacArthur's failings, Hirohito's guilt, and a couple of other "human" aspects.... but because of all the factual errors in the book, far too numerous to list here. How anyone can claim to write a history of the first year of the war and not even list Eric Bergerud's Land Touched with Fire, or Fire in the Sky, and Russell B. Frank's Guadalcanal in the bibliography is beyond me. Schom (as one other reviewer says) thinks Adm. Turner walked on water, but never says WHY. He totally neglects the fundamental role of starvation and disease in destroying the Japanese Army on the 'Canal. This book is a total waste because if you already know enough to see the factual errors in it, you know enough to not need it or be interested in it -- and if you DON'T catch the errors (the "Faruna" and her 16 14" guns(!), Tanaka fleeing with his 6 DD's while 7 are named, Gatch and Lee being responsible for sinking both the Hiei AND Kirishima, why Vandergrift didn't try to capture Mt. Austen immediately, the "Gifu sector" NOT being the same thing as Mt. Austen, Kenney and his skip-bombing that did (or didn't) start in Octorber 1942, etc), then the book will fill you with "facts that ain't so", and hamper any quest to truly understand what went on. I have never rated a book this low before --- and hope I never have to again. My Bottom Line to anyone reading this review: For now, stick with some of the basics: Spector's Eagle against the Sun, for example, or the Bergerud books cited above, or the Frank work, etc.

the eagle and the rising sun:
The author may have an ax to grind....but thats not the real problem , what we have here "is a faliure to communicate" this is a totally CONVOLUTED effort !!!

Worthless - a complete waste of time:
According to this book the entire first year of the war was faught on Guadalcanal. While the book claims to cover the pacific theater, it mentions Midway and New Guinea in passing, pays a small amount of attention to the Philippines, and that's it. No mention of anything else. The author thinks very highly of Admiral Turner - but never explains why. In fact, aside from some commanders he doesn't like, he doesn't explain much of anything. Finally, the book was not well edited. Plain instead of plane. Phrases repeated in sentences. Paragraphs repeated in separate chapters. - dave

The Propagation of Myths:
Alan Schom's book continues to propagate myths about the Pacific War that have long been discredited or revised by more recent scholarship. The most egregious is his treament of Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, the victor of the battles of the Coral Sea and Midway \ohe was the operational commander for both battles\c. Readers who want the real story on Fletcher need to read _Black Shoe Carrier Admiral: Frank Jack Fletcher at Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal_By John Lundstrom, who is a far more honest historian than Schom. I have no very high opinion of Schom and now it is even lower. He is about two decades behind in his scholarship. He practices what is known as low criticism--and in his case he shows a shocking lack of appreciation for the details of naval warfare in 1942--what was practical versus what was presumably theoretically possible. Schom is an ideological historian who usually has his mind made up about a topic before his writes about it and then uses the evidence to support the particular axe he is grinding. There are so many better books on the Pacific War \oRonald Spector's _Eagle against the sun_ and _Guadalcanal_ by Richard Frank\c, but Lundstrom is the latest scholarship and he corrects an injustice perpetrated by S.E. Morison and perpetuated by the likes of Alan Schom. John T. Kuehn, Ph.D. Commander U.S. Navy (retired) Associate Professor of Military History U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

Nice Touch:
I really enjoyed this book. Not one of the negative reviewers could point out that Schrom was wrong about any of his criticisms of the key players especially MacArthur. MacArthur has got a free ride for too long. So does the Japanese imperial familay for its part in the horrendous war crimes they committed. If you read a lot of miltary history and want something that adds new information, this book has it.