Empires On The Pacific

there are books too detailed and there are those too succinct for their topics. this belongs to the latter group. however, it is a fascinating read about china, japan, the united states, britain, the ussr all vying to control the pacific over the last 20 centuries in about 300 very small pages! it can be digested in a few evenings. i would buy it again unless i taught imperialist theory of the first two milleniums. dr vestal

The author portrays a very objective picture of what WWII in the Pacific theater was all about; i.e., competition among Western and Japanese colonial interests. The war was more about geopolitics and colonialism than about a "liberator" (the U.S.) defeating an evil empire (Japan). (In fact the U.S., the "Great Liberator", supported the French in their bloody quest to re-conquer and re-colonize Indochina right after WWII. The strategy was to use the French influence against the Chinese communists.)

This is a great book full of refreshing accounts of WWII and free of U.S. or Asian propaganda.Indeed WWII in the Asia-Pacific was a struggle among dying imperial powers - Britain, the Netherlands, Japan and the U.S. No one was interested in "liberating" the colonized Asian people. Asia became free not because of Japan or the U.S.; it became free because of the triumph of the independent movement and freedom fighters in each of the Asian nations.