At Dawn We Slept
The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor; Revised Edition
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Revisit the definitive book on Pearl Harbor in advance of the 78th anniversary (December 7, 2019) of the "date which will live in infamy"
At 7:53 a.m., December 7, 1941, America's national consciousness and confidence were rocked as the first wave of Japanese warplanes took aim at the U.S. Naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. As intense and absorbing as a suspense novel, At Dawn We Slept is the unparalleled and exhaustive account of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It is widely regarded as the definitive assessment of the events surrounding one of the most daring and brilliant naval operations of all time. Through extensive research and interviews with American and Japanese leaders, Gordon W. Prange has written a remarkable historical account of the assault that-sixty years later-America cannot forget.
"The reader is bound to feel its power....It is impossible to forget such an account." —The New York Times Book Review
"At Dawn We Slept is the definitive account of Pearl Harbor." —Chicago Sun-Times
Customer Reviews
At Dawn We Slept
A great history of one of the worst defeats of the American military. I re-read Prange's book in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, having first read it 25 years ago after a visit to Hawaii. The book remains a balanced, detailed, lucid, and readable account of the events leading up to, the attack on, and the aftermath of Pearl Harbor as seen from the Japanese and the American perspectives. One cannot but read this account post-9/11 and hear echoes of similar circumstances--the failure to appreciate capabilities and motivations of our adversaries, the use of novel modes of warfare, the failures of intelligence analysis and communication, and a complacent sense of American invulnerability. As an ebook, I have a minor complaint about the poor management and presentation of footnotes and endnotes. Asterisked footnotes in the printed version of the book send the reader to the bottom of the page, generally for brief reminders about topics dealt with earlier in this sweeping and complex narrative. As the ebook operates on my iPad that operates on the latest version of IOS-10, the note is hidden in a _tiny_ font above the top of a blank page which can only be accessed by dragging the page down and squinting hard at the text. While the endnotes are hypertexted to the notes section at the end of the book, shuttling back and forth between text and notes is clumsy and discourages any but the most diligent of readers from checking sources as one reads. Finally, there are numerous names and personalities to keep straight and one wishes that there was some easy-to-check list of dramatis personae to access to keep them straight as one reads. I assume all three of these issues can handled by the iBooks publishing platform, and addressing these issues would probably involve only a modest expenditure of editorial and/or programming labor. Bringing this book fully into digital format would serve its readers well and would justify the full price charged for a book that was first published more than 35 years ago.