Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book advertises itself as a comprehensive history of the causes and conduct of the war. It accomlishes this goal very well.
Bright spots in the book where is compares favorably to other one-volume histories are the causes of the war going back to the opening of Japan, the Burma/India theater, the strategic wrangling between the Allies, and the wonderful maps.
Someone looking for blow-by-blow accounts of the battles will be disappointed, as Costello's refreshing perspective is to look primarily at the strategic implications of the battles. This is thoroughly appropriate for a one-volume history. Costello successfully resists the temptation to delve into exciting, but page-consuming, battle narrative. His intent seems rather to give you a framework with which you can fit together your other Pacific War books that have narrower settings.
Lastly, the photo pages in this book are the best I have ever seen. The selection of photographs, very few of which are trite, together with the masterful captions are in themselves a thumbnail of the plot of the book, not just eye candy or filler. Especially effective is how a inset of an important participant often appears in a photo of an event. Extremely impressive!
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