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A review by gustavius
Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War II by Robert Leckie
3.0
Here is a book that is easy to read (unless you end up reading about the gruesome death of an ancestor of yours), although it has not aged well. You certainly would not find a book with this vocabulary being written nowadays, but we shall give it a pass for "historical" reasons.
My main motive behind not giving it four stars is the constant sense of superficiality that permeates the second half of the book. In some parts it felt as if we were merely grazing over events and situations that certainly could not have been as straightforward in real life. So it feels as if something is being hidden from us, the readers, which becomes a bit worrisome when you start questioning if you are reading a simplified historical account or just propaganda. The feeling of unease is reinforced with the epilogue, which switches from the aforementioned historical account to a short (and still superficial) position paper on the merits and necessities of dropping the atomic bombs. I almost felt as if the author was saying "I wrote a fun book for you to read, now pay me back by agreeing with me on this one point".
You know when someone tells you something that you already agree with, but they present it in such a one-sided manner that you actually start questioning your original opinion? That's the sort of bad taste that this book left my mouth with, and therefore I cannot give it a higher rating. However, I did enjoy the added knowledge it brought me on many aspects of the Pacific theater.
My main motive behind not giving it four stars is the constant sense of superficiality that permeates the second half of the book. In some parts it felt as if we were merely grazing over events and situations that certainly could not have been as straightforward in real life. So it feels as if something is being hidden from us, the readers, which becomes a bit worrisome when you start questioning if you are reading a simplified historical account or just propaganda. The feeling of unease is reinforced with the epilogue, which switches from the aforementioned historical account to a short (and still superficial) position paper on the merits and necessities of dropping the atomic bombs. I almost felt as if the author was saying "I wrote a fun book for you to read, now pay me back by agreeing with me on this one point".
You know when someone tells you something that you already agree with, but they present it in such a one-sided manner that you actually start questioning your original opinion? That's the sort of bad taste that this book left my mouth with, and therefore I cannot give it a higher rating. However, I did enjoy the added knowledge it brought me on many aspects of the Pacific theater.