the year in books [XXV]

I rounded out the year reading a flurry of nonfiction histories of the Pacific Theater of World War Two. Voices of the Pacific is a series of memoirs from Marines and their experiences throughout the war. The Battle of Wake Island was an excellent treatment of one of the earliest defeats of the war after Pearl Harbor. Coral Sea 1942 retells the epic drama of how the United States finally got the edge over the Japanese in the Coral Sea (hence the subtitle: Turning the Tide). Incredible Victory: The Battle of Midway was written by Walter Lord, whose book on the R.M.S. Titanic I read earlier this year; as always, he gives a fantastic retelling of the event. Torpedo 8 is the story of a squadron of U.S. torpedo planes, and The Battle of Iwo Jima covers one of the last great battles of the Pacific Theater.