Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942
Description
In 1937, the swath of the globe east from India to the Pacific Ocean enclosed half the world's population, all save a fraction enduring under some form of colonialism. Japan's onslaught into China that year unleashed a tidal wave of events that fundamentally transformed this region and killed about twenty-five million people. From just two nation states with real sovereignty, Thailand and Japan, and two with compromised sovereignty, China and Mongolia, the region today encompasses at least nineteen major sovereign nations. This extraordinary World War II narrative vividly describes in exquisite detail the battles across this entire region and links those struggles on many levels with their profound twenty-first-century legacies.
Beginning with China's long-neglected years of heroic, costly resistance, Tower of Skulls explodes outward to campaigns including Singapore, the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies, India, and Burma, as well as across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor. These pages cast penetrating light on how struggles in Europe and Asia merged into a tightly entwined global war. They feature not just battles, but also the sweeping political, economic, and social effects of the war, and are graced with a rich tapestry of individual characters from top-tier political and military figures down to ordinary servicemen, as well as the accounts of civilians of all races and ages.
In this first volume of a trilogy, award-winning historian Richard B. Frank draws on rich archival research and recently discovered documentary evidence to tell an epic story that gave birth to the world we live in now.
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Reviews
Monumentally researched....A painful yet riveting history, especially valuable for historians and military buffs.--Kirkus (starred review)
The definitive account of the first phase of WWII in the Pacific....This epic yet accessible account sets a new gold standard for histories of the conflict.--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Absolutely outstanding....brisk and compelling....a real game changer for the historiography of the Pacific Theater in World War II.--Jerry D. Lenaburg
Frank offers readers a wealth of material that provides a more nuanced perspective of the events that preceded our entry into the war....There will be two more volumes to come in this set, and I cannot wait to read them.--Vick Mickunas
Frank succeeds in his goal to alter our view of World War II as a mostly European clash in this informative book meant for all serious world history readers, even those who presume to know all there is to know about World War II.--Library Journal (starred review)
Tower of Skulls is the opening volume of what promises to be the definitive history of the Asia-Pacific War, a gripping account of two wars--one on the Asian mainland, the other in the islands of the Pacific--that conjoined and became a history-changing struggle without mercy or precedent. The scope is epic and the story has the pulling power of fiction. It is that rare thing: a work of staggering scholarship bound to appeal to a wide reading audience.--Donald L. Miller, author of Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign that Broke the Confederacy
