A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Photo Illustration: Pixabay Hi, there, Constant Reader. Well, it's Saturday, May 2, and it's late morning here in my corner of Florida. The current temperature is 71℉ (22℃) under mostly sunny skies. Looking at the forecast, it looks like it's going to be a warm, sunny day, with temperatures expected to reach a high of 84℉ (29℃), dropping at night to a low of 63℉ (17℃). No rain is expected to fall in our area today. Well, here we are in the fifth month of 2020, and we Floridians are still hunkering down in our homes due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Sadly, the Sunshine State is governed (for lack of a better word) by the Republican Party, and our governor, Ron DeSantis is a Donald Trump loyalist who is rarin' to reopen the state for business ASAP. This is not an attitude unique to our state; other Southern (and Republican-dominated) states like Tennessee and Georgia are reopening some businesses, although this is pretty much asking for trouble, as ...

© 2020 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Hi there, Constant Reader! Welcome to another edition of Bloggin' On, the no-reviews, no-politics section of my original blog, A Certain Point of View. Today is Sunday, April 12, 2020, and as I start this, morning is ending, and noon is not that far away. (By the time I'm done writing this, it'll be afternoon here in my corner of Florida.) Before I get to the main topic of this post ﹘ my reading list for April 2020 ﹘  I need to update you on what's going on with my blog and why I'm not posting here as often as I was before late March. I have had to slow my pace of one-post-per-diem on Blogger for one reason: Facebook has blocked this blog from its site. I have two theories as to why this was done, though I'm more inclined to put more weight on one of them above the other theory. Theory No. 1: Someone on Facebook, more than likely a Trump supporter, reported one or more of my posts to Facebook's Comm...

(C) 2017 Da Capo Press I was a precocious child when I started reading books about the Second World War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first published work I remember reading was the condensed version of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day in the Colombian edition of Reader's Digest. This was around the same time that I saw The Great Escape in a Bogota theater; these two early exposures to the topic via mass media awoke in me an interest in World War II that has never abated. In many of the books I read in the 1970s, the Battle of Midway was usually heralded as the engagement that turned the tide of the Pacific War against the Japanese Empire and in favor of the United States and her allies in the region. After all, Japan's loss of four of her big fleet carriers, 248 planes, a cruiser (plus a second cruiser badly damaged) in exchange for the carrier USS Yorktown,  the destroyer Hammann, and 150 aircraft stopped the Japanese advance to the east. But as decisive as...

(C) 1992 Penguin Books  Pros: Fascinating study of one of the most famous - and toughest - World War II battles. Cons: None. On August 7, 1942, eight months to the day after Japan's "dastardly attack" on Pearl Harbor and barely eight weeks after the Battle of Midway ended a 6-month-long string of defeats for the Allies in the Pacific, elements of the First Marine Division, supported by the largest U.S. fleet yet assembled, came ashore on the beaches of Guadalcanal and two nearby islands in a barely opposed initial landing. Their mission: to capture an airfield (which the Marines named Henderson Field, in honor of Maj. Lofton Henderson, who had died at Midway) that, if left in Japanese hands, could have helped cut the lifeline between Australia and the United States. The initial success of the landings, however, was followed by some of the fiercest land, air, and naval battles of the Pacific War. Japanese and American naval forces struggled ince...

American military history - as well as that of our adversaries - is full of controversies. And even though the Second World War is a rare case where the morality of the Allied cause is indisputable, the nature of the conflict and the fateful decisions made by the Axis and Allies still stir up heated debates about how it was fought - and how it was brought to an end. As historian Richard B. Frank writes in his introduction to Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, "[h]ow World War II ended in the Pacific remains one of the great controversies in American - and Japanese - history. At the center of this controversy is the atomic bomb. Indeed, almost all accounts of this period position atomic weaponry as the hub around which other considerations orbit. This approach, however, profoundly fails to recreate history as it originally unfolded." As a result of this fixation with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a mythology has been created in both the U...