A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover of the Bantam paperback edition © 1983 Bantam Books  Nook edition artwork © 2018 Barnes & Noble On March 27, 1957, Holt Books published Walter Lord's Day of Infamy, a documentary-style nonfiction account of the Japanese attack on the American Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor and various other U.S. military installations on the island of Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, on Sunday, December 7, 1941. Based on meticulous research and interviews with over 80 eyewitnesses and participants on both sides - American as well as Japanese - Day of Infamy is a detailed, hour-by-hour look at the chain of events that took place between the night of Saturday, December 6 and 12:30 P.M. on December 8. 1941 - ending the narrative with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous "Day of Infamy" speech from which Lord derives the book's title. Unlike Gordon W. Prange's massive At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, Lord's slimmer - and mu...

(C) 1991 Warner Books When the late historian Gordon W. Prange and his two co-authors, Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, set out to write At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor , they realized that they had too much material for one book. The Pearl Harbor story, after all, is so vast and complex that, even without the ill-advised revisionist accounts and conspiracy theories that have become a cottage industry, one volume isn't enough to convey to a contemporary reader the import and impact that the "Day of Infamy" had -- and continues to have -- on American history and foreign policy. Indeed, after Prange's sudden death in May 1980, Goldstein and Dillon not only finished At Dawn We Slept , but followed that best-selling volume with four related books ( Miracle at Midway, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History, Target: Tokyo, and Dec. 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor. ) which delved deeper into topics that At Dawn W...

Just as Cornelius Ryan’s three major works about World War II (The Longest Day, The Last Battle, and A Bridge Too Far) focus on the last 11 months of the conflict in Europe, the late Gordon W. Prange and his collaborators Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon zeroed in on the Pearl Harbor saga and its aftermath. No less than five major books by Prange and Co. deal with the series of events that occurred before, during, and after. Of these, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor is the first and most important volume.  At Dawn We Slept covers nearly the entire 12-month period leading up to the “day of infamy” that marked America’s entry into World War II. It provides amazing insights into both the Japanese and American mindsets, and, most important, explodes the revisionists’ myth that Japan’s attack succeeded because President Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld critical information from Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii.  Prange researched the Pearl Harbor affair...