I suppose this all just goes to show that I am not used to reading adult history books.
For one thing, it sometimes felt like a full 20% of the book was citations. Pretty much any time the author mentioned a date, event, person's name, argument, number, piece of cheese, or cat, he cited a source for it. (Note: I don't think he actually mentioned any cheese or cats in this.)
I have been assured that such things are normal in such books, but it kinda surprised me.
While reading a particular section, I was reminded of a line from a Cul de Sac comic: "I have only just begun to delve into the infinite possibilities of minutia." The section in question was about how many planes attacked the carrier Akagi during the battle; after citing more sources than I would have thought possible and writing down the thoughts on the matter of every eyewitness he could find, Rigby concluded that there were almost assuredly five planes attacking the Akagi, not three or eight.
The author spent a lot of time refuting the popular (apparently) opinion that McClusky didn't know what he was doing during the Battle of Midway. I think he succeeded, as I came away convinced that he did in fact know what he was doing. It got a little repetitive after a while, though.
About half the book was a biography of Wade McClusky himself. (I can never type his name right on the first try, by the way; I always mistype it McClusly or something and have to correct myself.) Then the other half was the battle of Midway, which sort of came in the middle of the biography. This makes sense, but it was still like "Biography biography biography !MIDWAY! biography biography."
Due to dragging in parts, I'm giving this three stars.
Were this a videogame, its subject matter would get rated: Like with my review of The Great War, M to AO. War is... not pleasant, y'all.
However, the book handles it in a way that's more: E10+. Fine for younger people, but they probably wouldn't want to read 350 pages of mostly nitpicking and citations.
As with every time I read and review something my mom also has, here's a link to her review.
I think this book has a particularly large number of citations, and is a stickler for them, because the author is refuting a widely-held piece of "common knowledge." It's been held/believed that Wade McCluskey just randomly happened to spot the Japanese ships, and has even been assumed/suggested that he wasn't really used to the kind of plane he was flying that day, so he didn't contribute much else to the battle. So this author tried to use every means he could to disprove all that without any room for doubt.
ReplyDeleteNot every adult history book/biography will be like that, in other words.
Good to know, thanks. That makes sense.
DeleteThis is one that I don't want to read, just because I'm not into war history that much. There's too much other good stuff to read out there... Grammy
ReplyDeleteYeah, you probably wouldn't like it much.
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