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TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

War in the western pacific, 1944-1945.

by Ian W. Toll ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2020

A conventional but richly rewarding history of the last war that turned out well for the U.S.

The final volume in Toll’s fine Pacific War Trilogy.

The author begins with the July 1944 Honolulu meeting of the key American figures. He rocks no boats in his evaluations of Franklin Roosevelt (canny if slippery politico), Adm. Chester Nimitz (brilliant but colorless technocrat), and Gen. Douglas MacArthur (military genius with a massive ego). At the meeting, American officials reached a decision to invade Japan by way of the Philippines rather than Formosa. By 1944, Japanese leaders knew that victory was impossible but also believed that they were unconquerable. Once Americans, whom they considered technically advanced but soft, realized that every Japanese soldier, civilian, and child would fight to the death, they would lose heart and agree to a compromise peace. “There was a difference between defeat and surrender,” writes the author, a meticulous historian, “between losing an overseas empire and seeing the homeland overrun by a barbarian army.” Ironically, the first part of the Japanese strategy worked. Convinced that the Japanese preferred death to surrender, American military leaders did not quail but simply proceeded with that in mind. There is no shortage of accounts of the brutal island-hopping invasions (Peleliu in September, the Philippines in October, Iwo Jima in February 1945, Okinawa in April), but Toll’s take second place to none. Accompanying the Philippine invasion was the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in world history. The most effective submarines of the war were not Hitler’s but America’s, which crippled Japan’s economy and sank a torrent of warships. Toll’s account of the coup de grace, the atomic bomb, barely mentions the debate over its use because that began after the war. At the time, a few administration figures protested but did not make a big fuss, and it turned out to require two bombs and the Soviet invasion before Japan decided to surrender.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-393-08065-0

Page Count: 864

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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REVIEW: Twilight of the Gods by Scott Oden

• Book Reviews
• December 5, 2023
• By Robin Marx

It is the year 1218, and deep in the wilds of Scandinavia there is a sense that Fimbulvetr, the final winter presaging Ragnarök, is at hand. While the Norse, Danes, and Swedes neighboring them have adopted Christianity, the isolated Raven-Geat tribe reject the so-called “Nailed God” and cling to the old ways. Though surrounded by enemies, the Raven-Geats have a protector known as the Hooded One, immortal herald of the Tangled God Loki. As Twilight of the Gods opens, hot-blooded teenage girl Dísa Dagrúnsdottir has just been chosen by the Fates to serve as the Hooded One’s new priestess. She is shocked to learn that the truculent and mercurial guardian of her people is a literal monster: Grimnir, last of the kaunr , what we would call an orc. As Dísa attempts to survive her new master’s cruel ordeals, a greater threat looms just out of sight. A haunted and deranged zealot fresh from the sack of Constantinople plots a new personal Crusade, one to exterminate the heathen Raven-Geats and unite the Scandinavian peninsula under the White Christ.

Twilight of the Gods is a book drenched in both grim Norse fatalism and blood & thunder heroics. The novels in the Grimnir Saga depict a North where the Old Gods are in decline. Grimnir is the last of his kind, and other once respected and feared supernatural creatures have likewise become relegated to the margins of the world or gone extinct entirely. The influence of Odin and the old pantheon wanes, displaced by the encroaching Christian faith. For Grimnir and many of the other characters in this book, there’s a pervading feeling that the war has already been lost, yet for various reasons they still gear up to fight one last glorious battle. And readers familiar with Oden’s other work, from the previous Grimnir novel to historical adventures like Men of Bronze and The Lion of Cairo , know that Oden can deliver that final battle with gusto. Simultaneously rousing and horrifying, the combats in this novel blend cinematic action with gory, gritty, down-in-the-mud struggle.

As with A Gathering of Ravens , appealing characters are another strong point in Twilight of the Gods . Oden treads a delicate line with his hero Grimnir; he must appear monstrous enough to feel like an “authentic” orc and not just a brutish costumed human, but not so repellent that the reader finds themselves unable to relate to the character or enjoy his exploits. Grimnir is bellicose, capricious, spiteful, and arrogant. He’s casually brutal and an unrepentant murderer. But he’s also an orc of his word, and never fails to repay a debt. In his dealings with humans, who Grimnir views as little more than animals, Oden also imbues him with a mischievous, amused paternalism. Grimnir may not have a heart of gold, but he’s not an outright villain, either. To preserve Grimnir’s mystique, Oden wisely provides primary viewpoint character Dísa as a counterbalance and foil. Imperfect and impetuous, and sharing more than a little of Grimnir’s arrogance, Dísa is an entertaining heroine to follow. Her undying determination is admirable, and it’s interesting to watch her learn when to push back against Grimnir and when to (grudgingly) accept his brusque guidance.

Despite the exceptional quality of the book, Twilight of the Gods had the misfortune of launching in February 2020, roughly simultaneously with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With all the societal upheaval, store closures, cancelled events, and supply chain issues that followed, I suspect unlucky timing and curtailed promotions prevented this volume from attracting the audience it deserved. Now is an ideal time to read Twilight of the Gods , however. Its conclusion will leave readers wanting more, just as more is about to arrive: The Doom of Odin , book 3 in THE GRIMNIR SAGA, is scheduled to be released on December 19, 2023.

Wholeheartedly recommended for fans of Vikings, orcs, Viking orcs, tough heroines, Scandinavian metal, and doomed battles against incredible odds.

Read Twilight of the Gods by Scott Oden

Born in Spain and raised in the United States, Robin Marx has lived in Japan for more than two decades. He works in the video game industry, handling localization and international licensing. In addition to over a dozen video games, his writing has appeared in a number of role-playing game supplements. He lives with his wife and their two daughters. You can link up with Robin over at: https://mastodon.social/@RobinMarx

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Book and Film Globe

Books, Film, TV, Culture.

‘Twilight of the Gods’

The magisterial final volume of Ian W. Toll’s Pacific War trilogy

September 2nd marks the 75 th anniversary of the day the Japanese officially surrendered on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, ending World War II. Just over the railings, much of Tokyo was burned to the ground, as were many Japanese cities, the nation starving and completely beaten.

I first became fascinated by the war between the United States and Japan in the 1970s, when its history felt current: many veterans were still alive, and people were still fishing out the last stubborn Japanese soldiers from the Philippine jungles. I was 13 and the fierce battles between planes and ships on a vast blue ocean were thrilling to imagine. My great uncle died when he stepped on a Japanese landmine on Leyte Island. My step-father fought in five campaigns in the Pacific, manning twin 50-cal. machine guns to protect airfields. Even then, 35 years later, he preferred cloudy afternoons, because the Japanese “won’t strafe us today.”

At the time, with much information newly unclassified, histories of the conflict tended to recount which ships had been where, which planes had scored hits on their opponents, and which battles had decided the outcome. As the decades wore on, and my interest ebbed and flowed, I occasionally read the latest new history. The focus shifted: writers added novelistic details, rich visual descriptions, internal thoughts and motivations for admirals and sailors, and all manner of obscure diary entries and hitherto unexplored official histories. Battles and incidents that had once merited a line now got the full-book treatment.

Then, nearly 10 years ago, the author and historian Ian W. Toll published the first of what would seem to be–what surely must be–the definitive, three-volume history of the brutal four-year battle with Japan. I gobbled them up. How did Toll manage to distinguish himself from all those works that had come before? By collecting an astounding volume of information and elegantly putting it on the page; by wonderfully writing those battles that previous historians had thoroughly examined; and by going deeply into episodes that had received scant attention before. In the first volume, “Pacific Crucible,” for example, Toll gives an early U.S. raid on the Marshall Islands pulse-pounding narrative drive, while previous authors had rushed through it to get to big battles like Coral Sea and Midway.

The result is a remarkable body of work that allows one to viscerally experience how the war in the Pacific was not one war, but really three wars. It began as a three-dimensional, 360-degree naval and air chess game between professional navies, morphed into a titanic war of attrition, and ended as a an utterly unbalanced contest between the largest, most sophisticated war-making force the world had ever known and a desperate, starving, beaten nation, its own civilians caught miserably between their relentless enemy and their own delusional, selfish leaders.

Today, Norton publishes the final volume, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945. In the closing pages of the second book, “The Conquering Tide,” Toll foreshadowed the Gotterdammerung that Japan would face in the war’s closing year. In Twilight of the Gods he delivers it with stunning, exhausting, horrifying force.

From Kamikaze to Napalm

Twilight of the Gods–at 792 pages of text, the biggest of the trilogy–begins with a look at the role of press relations during the war and the delicate art of releasing bad news to the public, a theme that continues as a subplot. Both sides fight a public-relations battle, with characters like Gen. Douglas MacArthur playing directly to the media, while others shun the spotlight. Again and again, in both the United States and Japan, we see the answer is clear: it’s always best to put the truth out there for your people to see and hear. This focus on the partisan use of “facts” is indeed germane to our political discourse today.

We’re soon back in action at Peleliu and then the sprawling Battle of Leyte Gulf, the final true sea fight of World War II. Toll switches nicely from the 30,000-foot strategic view to the telling, in-close detail, like how sailors transferred their injured shipmates off the burning carrier Princeton by timing their tosses to the up-down ocean swells. The battles wrecks the Japanese. It essentially finishes their navy as a fighting force; from there it only gets worse for them.

The United States carrier force–alternately the Fifth Fleet or the Third Fleet, depending on who is in charge, Adm. Raymond A. Spruance or Adm. Bill “Bull” Halsey–has become an unstoppable Death Star, ranging around the Pacific with impudence. In “Pacific Crucible,” Toll had described balanced battles between forces with two or three aircraft carriers each; now the U.S. fleet has dozens, with the best planes and the best-trained flyers by far.

Japan, meanwhile, rushed young men aloft as quickly as possible, in planes that were fast becoming obsolete, to be shot down en masse . Yet the leaders wouldn’t give up, even as a nascent peace movement took hold within the government. The generals and admirals knew they were beaten but were ready to sacrifice as many of their sailors, soldiers and pilots–and eventually civilians–as necessary to convince the Americans that this fight was going to be too costly, and they should just negotiate a peace and go home.

These competing factors reach a fevered pitch with the advent of the Kamikaze, in which barely trained Japanese pilots – many of them college students – flew their planes into American ships, or died trying. The Kamikaze scored many successes, sinking or severely damaging dozens of vessels, including several big and valuable aircraft carriers, but they were nonetheless unable to hinder the U.S. fleet’s movement. A furious typhoon, which Toll harrowingly describes; you almost get seasick–causes almost as much of a setback for the fleet as the most frenzied Kamikaze attack.

Toll makes a strong case that, in the beginning of the Kamikaze program, the flyers, both new and veteran, were eager to volunteer. But as the war drags on, and the Allies get closer to the homeland, they begin to resist, or to at least question the strategy. More and more pilots turn back with mysterious engine malfunctions. One pilot does so nine times, and is executed. He was a graduate of the elite Wasada University. What a terrible waste: he was exactly the kind of person Japan would need to rebuild in the months ahead.

The true Gotterdammerung of this historical Gotterdammerung is the strategic bombing campaign against Japan. First we see the troubled development of the massive, four-engine B-29 bomber and its initial failures. Japanese civilians, it’s almost painful to read, initially “regarded the B-29s with curiosity, fascination and even admiration.”

But when Gen. Curtis LeMay determines that the plane’s most effective use would be flying low and dropping napalm-lined incendiary bombs on Tokyo, the interest turns to horror. That night is told in unflinching and ghastly detail: the streamer-tailing explosives floating to the ground and popping, the fires everywhere, the desperate sprints of terrified families seeking refuge when there was none. Fathers lose their children in the whirlwind; mothers and babies burst into flames. Michiko Okubo, 12, grabs the hand of a four-year-old girl and says, “Let’s get away from here together.” But flames quickly separate them. She recalls: “I have never been able to forget the feeling of her soft, little hand, like a maple leaf, in mine.”

It is hard to say who’s crueler: the American planners who knew what incendiaries would do to a city of wood and paper, and seemed to almost relish it, or the Japanese leaders, who implored their citizens to keep fighting when they couldn’t protect them. By the time the bomb falls on Hiroshima 146 pages later–again told in unflinching detail–Twilight of the Gods has more or less inured us to human suffering. But then again, at the time, much of humanity was equally inured.

Never Again

Reading about the Pacific War as a 54-year-old is quite a different experience from that of a 13-year-old boy. As the father of a 20-year-old college student son, I find tales of young pilots being shot down in flames not at all thrilling–in fact, they are deeply upsetting. As a writer and journalist with 30 years experience, I can all the more admire and appreciate Toll’s incredible breadth of reporting, his canny insights, and his smart way with words. Twilight of the Gods is not as taut as the first two books. A section on the home front didn’t seem to advance the scholarship and he probably could have cut it. And there’s a little sloppiness: a misnamed ship here, an awkwardly repeated phrase there. But, all in all, it’s an incredible work, an all-encompassing journey back to a war whose scale and ferocity is hard to imagine today.

My youthful fascination with the Pacific War led to a lifelong interest in Japan and its history and culture. I’ve managed to go three times, and I’ve made some strong friendships there. In October, 2015, I went to write a travel story for The New York Times and, on my last day, made a mad dash from Kyoto to Tokyo to Narita Airport and home. In Tokyo I met a friend, Sakura, at Tokyo Station. We had coffee and cherry pie at a place called Bubby’s.

Her grandfather had driven a truck in the Japanese Army during the war. Perhaps he was on the same island where my step-father shot at Japanese planes on sunny days. But now here we were, in the Tokyo outpost of a downtown Manhattan restaurant, eating a quintessential American dessert, so very close to where Curtis LeMay’s streamer-tailing bombs had set their fires. It seemed impossible to imagine that our nations, and our relatives, had once been at each other’s throats.

With his magisterial work Toll reminds us in extraordinary detail that they were, and in so doing makes the best possible case for making sure it never happens again.

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Wendell Jamieson

Wendell Jamieson, a former Metro editor of The New York Times, is an author and political consultant working in New York City. He is currently writing a book for Hachette Books with Joshua Miele, a scientist, accessibility advocate and Macarthur winner who was blinded in an acid attack as a child.

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