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A review by jamesmck486
Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by James Bradley
3.0
This is a hard book to review for me, since I did enjoy reading it, and tore through it quite quickly. But the pros and cons for the book sit on the opposite end of the spectrum for me.
First, I appreciate the author's prose (never bogs down), and his ability to gain interviews with so many different individuals involved with the story he is researching. By far, these primary sources are the highlight of this work, and the evenhandedness in how Bradley deals with how war, and the dehumanization it brings to those who fight, affects everyone it touches. This and Bradley's discovery and creation of the narrative of Chichi jima and the individuals lost there stand out as Bradley's greatest triumphs.
On the flip side, it strikes me, as an layman with some prior knowledge of Japan and the Pacific War, they he took a similar tact with this work as with his later book, The Imperial Cruise. He has a central story (chichi jima) which he then pads with what feels like a super condensed history of both Japan and the war in just a couple hundred pages. I can see how he specifically picked some of the more horrific accounts perpetrated by both Japanese and Americans, to bolster Bradley's apparent view that war's effects of degradation and horror affect all sides without regard. But Bradley's attempts to create an overarching narrative result in some sloppy conclusions, and more to my chagrin, an abundance of hyperbole. So much was the "greatest ever", "first in history", that I found it hard to trust these statements after I knew some of them to be false, or readily arguable. His parroting of secondary sources for his history of Japan did bring in some good, but I found it overall to be fast and loose. The best portions of the book dealt with chichi jima, and the actual research Bradley did, with people who were there to witness the events, and historical documentation. The summarizing of other historian's works and Bradley's conclusions leave some to be desired (a notion that I also see again in The Imperial Cruise).
In the end, a pleasurable read, bringing more enlightenment than frustration than most. It just reminds me to be on my toes, once again, and to read critically.
First, I appreciate the author's prose (never bogs down), and his ability to gain interviews with so many different individuals involved with the story he is researching. By far, these primary sources are the highlight of this work, and the evenhandedness in how Bradley deals with how war, and the dehumanization it brings to those who fight, affects everyone it touches. This and Bradley's discovery and creation of the narrative of Chichi jima and the individuals lost there stand out as Bradley's greatest triumphs.
On the flip side, it strikes me, as an layman with some prior knowledge of Japan and the Pacific War, they he took a similar tact with this work as with his later book, The Imperial Cruise. He has a central story (chichi jima) which he then pads with what feels like a super condensed history of both Japan and the war in just a couple hundred pages. I can see how he specifically picked some of the more horrific accounts perpetrated by both Japanese and Americans, to bolster Bradley's apparent view that war's effects of degradation and horror affect all sides without regard. But Bradley's attempts to create an overarching narrative result in some sloppy conclusions, and more to my chagrin, an abundance of hyperbole. So much was the "greatest ever", "first in history", that I found it hard to trust these statements after I knew some of them to be false, or readily arguable. His parroting of secondary sources for his history of Japan did bring in some good, but I found it overall to be fast and loose. The best portions of the book dealt with chichi jima, and the actual research Bradley did, with people who were there to witness the events, and historical documentation. The summarizing of other historian's works and Bradley's conclusions leave some to be desired (a notion that I also see again in The Imperial Cruise).
In the end, a pleasurable read, bringing more enlightenment than frustration than most. It just reminds me to be on my toes, once again, and to read critically.