![]() ![]() As with A Night to Remember, his book on the Titanic disaster, Lord impressively chronicles the little stories that sometimes get lost in the big picture: the heroism, the sacrifice, the bewilderment and, yes, sometimes the loss of nerve. ![]() If you are looking for a military history of the importance of the "battle" in the context of the war, of the preparations for it, and its effect on policymakers and the American public, Walter Lord's Day of Infamy isn't it.īut it is an excellent narrative of that day, pieced together from eyewitness accounts into a story that reads almost like a novel. ![]() ( )Ī great narrative of the events of December 7th, 1941 – and only December 7th, 1941. In addition, the narrative stands as a horrifying testimony for what it's like to be the target of such an attack, no matter who you are or where you live. Thereby, he has created a lastingly important document of what was experienced that day. Lord spends almost no time on the geopolitical context for the attack, nor on the many conspiracy theories that arose later. I raced through this book in three or four sittings. Time is spent, also, on the frustrating, tragic string of miscommunication and incredulity about early warning signs of trouble. This book is akin to Cornelius Ryan's book about D-Day, The Longest Day, which I read earlier this year, in that Lord ran down as many of the survivors/participants/witnesses to the Pearl Harbor attack as he could and created a "you are there" pastiche, from the planning of the attack by the Japanese, to the innocent, unaware early morning spent by so many around the harbor and the town, to the experience and horror of the attack and battle itself, to the aftermath. The author, Walter Lord, also wrote the classic history of the sinking of the Titanic, A Night to Remember. Day of Infamy, published in 1957, provides a minute-by-minute account of the Japanese attach on Pearl Harbor. ![]()
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