January 1, 2023

Award-winning Vanderbilt historian Blackbourn rethinks Germany in the World, arguing that it was a persuasive force even before unification in the 19th century. Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a prolific historian, Borman (Crown & Sceptre) limns the historic significance ofAnne Boleyn & Elizabeth I. In Revolutionary Spring, Wolfson Prize--winning Clark refreshes our view of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. In Homelands, Oxford historian Garton Ash draws on both scholarship and personal experience to portray Europe post-World War II. In Soldiers Don't Go Mad, distinguished journalist Glass uses the friendship and literary output of outstanding war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen--both gay and both ultimately opposed to fighting--to show how an understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment first emerged during the industrialized slaughter of World War I. Journalist Hartman's Battle of Ink and Ice shows that the contention between explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both claiming to have discovered the North Pole, also sparked a newspaper war with all the earmarks of fake news. The long-anticipated My Friend Anne Frank recounts Holocaust survivor Pick-Goslar's friendship with Frank (she's called Lies Goosens in The Diary of a Young Girl), having been together with her at the Westerbork transit camp and eventually Bergen-Belsen. Also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, the Columbia River Bar forms where the river pours into the ocean off Oregon's coast and creates fearsome currents that have claimed numerous lives; like his abusive father, Sullivan risked crossing it, and he makes his book at once history, memoir, and meditation on male behavior at its extreme. Former undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, Vickers recalls a life in intelligence and special operations that arcs from his Green Beret days to his involvement in the CIA's secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the war on terror. In Road to Surrender, the New York Times best-selling Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) relies on fresh material to convey the decision to drop the atomic bomb from the perspectives of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, and Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific. In National Dish, three-time James Beard award-winning food journalist von Bremzen investigates the relationship between food and place by examining the history of six major food cultures--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. In Beyond the Shores, the Harriet Tubman Prize--winning Walker (Exquisite Slaves) considers why Black Americans leave the United States and what they encounter when they do, moving from early 1900s performer Florence Mills to 1930s scientists to the author's own grandfather. An historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Walton assays the century-long intelligence war between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, considering lessons that can be gleaned today in Spies.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2023
An exploration of the moral quandaries that surrounded the atomic bombing of Japan. Japan had barely surrendered, recounts Thomas, when Americans of goodwill began to question whether the nuclear destructions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been necessary. At the end of his life, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, one of Thomas' subjects, spoke of "the wrongness and folly of using nuclear weapons." Gen. Carl Spaatz, another of those subjects, reckoned that the campaign of firebombing Japanese targets would be better mounted with precision bombing of rail lines to prevent foods from reaching the heavily populated Kanto Plain, reducing Japan by famine and what was sure to be a resulting civil war. Yet, Thomas writes, despite the quiet workings of Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to maneuver his nation toward surrender, key Japanese military leaders had no intention of doing so. This leads Thomas to revisit, throughout his narrative, the old question of whether the atomic bomb was necessary, which, with a nuanced argument that's still likely to stir up controversy, he answers in the affirmative. Apart from averting a projected 1 million American casualties in an invasion of the homeland, he argues, "the atomic bombs not only saved many thousands and possibly millions of Japanese lives, they saved the lives of even more Asians beyond Japan." Even after the atomic bombings, hawkish military and government factions threatened a coup against the emperor in order to continue the war. The author's argument is well taken even though it does nothing to lessen the moral anguish that his principals--to say nothing of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and even Truman as well as generations after them--felt over the decision to unleash nuclear terror on their enemy. In addition, notes Thomas, there was another bomb waiting in the event of continued war, this one destined for Tokyo. A thoughtful study of nuclear war, its early discontents, and alternate scenarios that might have been worse.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 19, 2023
In this riveting chronicle, historian Thomas (Sea of Thunder) traces the agonizing decisions of three men “who faced nearly impossible dilemmas in the summer of 1945”—U.S. war secretary Henry Stimson, U.S. Air Force commander Carl Spaatz, and Japanese foreign minister Shigenori Togo. Stimson oversaw the production of the atomic bombs and had final say over the locations targeted; Spaatz led the American bombing campaign on Japan; and Togo persuaded Emperor Hirohito to make an unprecedented personal decision to end the war, overriding Japan’s Supreme War Council. Together, these “three unlikely partners averted a cataclysm of death beyond anything the world had seen,” writes Thomas, asserting that millions of lives would have been lost in a U.S. invasion of Japan, and that the Japanese war hawks could not have been outmaneuvered by Togo without the bomb as a manifest threat. Drawing on unpublished diary entries and interviews with family members of the three men, Thomas’s suspenseful narrative dwells on the existential angst that defined their actions. (Stimson had a heart attack the day he showed President Truman photos of an incinerated Hiroshima; toward the end of his life, Spaatz was full of regret and plagued by sleeplessness.) Regardless of whether the reader is convinced by Thomas’s moral argument in favor of the bomb, this transfixes.