2006 Reading List - The End of the Beginning
Book Eighty-five
The End of the Beginning by Harry Turtledove
One of the most powerful questions available to any writer is "What if?" What if there were a monster living under a small New England town? What if you could time travel back to the Middle Ages? What if you could build a new universe in the lab? Most of the time, these "What if" questions become fantasy or science fiction, but in the hands of someone like Harry Turtledove, they become history. In this case, the question was, "What if the Japanese had occupied Hawaii after attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941?"
As I discovered when I turned the last page of the book, this is actually a sequel to the book Days of Infamy, which describes the actual attack and occupation. Knowing this helped explain a few things that bugged me about this book, namely the over-rapid shift from character to character. We whip from pilot-in-training Joe Crosetti to Japanese Lieutenant Saburo Shindo to American POW Jim Peterson with lightning speed, sketchy backgrounds and an assumption that you already know who they are. Which, if you had read the preceding book (which I will, if I can find it), you would have.
The first half of the book is kind of jumpy and tough to follow, mainly because I was coming into the story halfway. But the second half, when the Americans come to retake the island, was brilliant. Turtledove has spend most of his career writing about war and combat and can make what could be a chaotic mess of airplane dueling and ship combat into an exciting page-turner. Even better, he knows his history cold, and is able to extrapolate from what really happened into what might have happened.
Well worth the read.
The End of the Beginning by Harry Turtledove
One of the most powerful questions available to any writer is "What if?" What if there were a monster living under a small New England town? What if you could time travel back to the Middle Ages? What if you could build a new universe in the lab? Most of the time, these "What if" questions become fantasy or science fiction, but in the hands of someone like Harry Turtledove, they become history. In this case, the question was, "What if the Japanese had occupied Hawaii after attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941?"
As I discovered when I turned the last page of the book, this is actually a sequel to the book Days of Infamy, which describes the actual attack and occupation. Knowing this helped explain a few things that bugged me about this book, namely the over-rapid shift from character to character. We whip from pilot-in-training Joe Crosetti to Japanese Lieutenant Saburo Shindo to American POW Jim Peterson with lightning speed, sketchy backgrounds and an assumption that you already know who they are. Which, if you had read the preceding book (which I will, if I can find it), you would have.
The first half of the book is kind of jumpy and tough to follow, mainly because I was coming into the story halfway. But the second half, when the Americans come to retake the island, was brilliant. Turtledove has spend most of his career writing about war and combat and can make what could be a chaotic mess of airplane dueling and ship combat into an exciting page-turner. Even better, he knows his history cold, and is able to extrapolate from what really happened into what might have happened.
Well worth the read.