The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back

Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

Susan Southard · 402 pages

This book is a powerful and unflinching account of the enduring impact of nuclear war, told through the stories of those who survived. On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan's southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were

Japan at War: An Oral History

Haruko Taya Cook, Theodore F. Cook · 479 pages

This pathbreaking work of oral history captures for the first time ever - in either Japanese or English - the remarkable story of ordinary Japanese people during World War II. In a sweeping panorama, Haruko Taya and Theodore Cook take us from the Japanese attacks on China in the 1930s to the Japanese homefront during the inhuman raids on Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, offering the first glimpses

Hiroshima Nagasaki

Paul Ham · 640 pages

In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War.

Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45

Max Hastings · 656 pages

By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan's defeat was inevitable, but how the drive to victory would be achieved remained unclear. The ensuing drama--that ended in Japan's utter devastation--was acted out across the vast theater of Asia in massive clashes between army, air, and naval forces.In recounting these extraordinary events, Max Hastings draws incisive portraits of MacArthur, Mao, Roos

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand · 514 pages

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Se

Hiroshima

John Hersey · 118 pages

Describes the effect of the bombing of Hiroshima on six survivors of the atomic blast.

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Herbert P. Bix · 800 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeIn this groundbreaking biography of the Japanese emperor Hirohito, Herbert P. Bix offers the first complete, unvarnished look at the enigmatic leader whose sixty-three-year reign ushered Japan into the modern world. Never before has the full life of this controversial figure been revealed with such clarity and vividness. Bix shows what it was like to be trained from bir

Showa, 1939-1944: A History of Japan

Shigeru Mizuki · 548 pages

Continues Mizuki's autobiographical and historical account of Showa-era Japan. This volume covers the final moments of the lead-up to World War II and the first few years of the Pacific War, and is a chilling reminder of the harshness of life in Japan during this highly militarized epoch.

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath

Michael Norman, Elizabeth M. Norman · 463 pages

Following the U.S. surrender to the Japanese on the peninsula of Bataan in 1942, 76,000 American and Filipino POWs began the infamous Death March. This gripping narrative, told in unsparing but sympathetic detail, focuses intermittently on American POW Ben Steele, whose sketches adorn the book, and the hell of Japanese prison and labor camps that introduced these captives to the starvation, dehydr

The Rising Sun: The Decline & Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45

John Willard Toland · 954 pages

Comprehensive account of the military and political events that led to Pearl Harbor, the war in the Pacific, and Japan's defeat; based on interviews with participants, and told from a Japanese point of view.

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

John W. Dower · 680 pages

John Dower, distinguished historian of modern Japan, casts his eye on the immediate aftermath of World War II. Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources, this new study illuminates how shattering defeat followed by over six years of American military occupation affected every level of Japanese society in ways that neither the victor nor the vanquished could anticipate. The great achievement of

Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy

Eri Hotta · 344 pages

Examines the attack on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective.

Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto · 444 pages

"'Meticulously researched and beautifully written, the true story of a Japanese American family that found itself on opposite sides during World War II--an epic tale of family, separation, divided loyalties, love, reconciliation, loss, and redemption this is a riveting chronicle of U.S.-Japan relations and the Japanese experience in America. After their father's death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fuk

Killing the Rising Sun: How America Vanquished World War II Japan

Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard · 384 pages

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. This book takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, w

The Twilight Warriors: The Deadliest Naval Battle of World War II and the Men Who Fought It

Robert Gandt · 385 pages

Band of Brothers at sea and in the skies, 340 miles off the coast of Japan. The Twilight Warriors is the engrossing, page-turning saga of a tightly knit band of naval aviators who are thrust into the final -- and most brutal -- battle of the Pacific war: Okinawa. April 1945. The end of World War II finally appears to be nearing. The Third Reich is collapsing in Europe, and the Americans are overpo

Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944

Anna Reid · 512 pages

A gripping, authoritative narrative history of the siege of Leningrad from 1941-1944, interwoven with indelible personal accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists and memoirists on both sides.

Inventing Japan: 1853-1964

Ian Buruma · 192 pages

LA Times Book Award winner and expert on the past and present Japan, Ian Buruma examines the transformation of a country. Following Japan's history from its opening to the West in 1853 to its hosting of the 1964 Olympics, Buruma focuses on how figures such as Commodore Matthew Perry, Douglas MacArthur, and Emperor Mitsushito helped shape this complex country.

The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank

Willy Lindwer · 204 pages

The "unwritten" final chapter of "Anne Frank: Diary Of A Young Girl" tells the story of the time between Anne Frank's arrest and her death through the testimony of six Jewish women who survived the hell from which Anne Frank never returned.

Treblinka

Jean-Francois Steiner · 415 pages

"Nearly a million Jews were consumed by the ovens of Treblinka before August 2, 1943. On that day 600 prisoners armed with stolen guns and grenades attacked the Nazi guards, burned the camp, and fled into the nearby Polish forests. Of these, forty survived to bear witness to man's courage in the face of the greatest evil human history has produced."

Isaac's Army: A Story of Courage and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland

Matthew Brzezinski · 472 pages

Describes the formation of one of the most daring underground movements of World War II under the leadership of twenty-four-year-old Isaac Zuckerman, and the group's collective efforts to gather information, build an arms cache, participate in uprisings, and organize escape systems.

Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz

Yehuda Koren, Eilat Negev · 283 pages

In this remarkable, never-before-told account of the Ovitz family, seven of whose ten members were dwarves, readers bear witness to the terrible irony of the Ovitz's fate: being burdened with dwarfism helped them to endure the Holocaust.

On the Natural History of Destruction

W.G. Sebald · 202 pages

This book is acclaimed German novelist Sebald's investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. He examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void is in part a repression of things--such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of t

Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February, 1945

Frederick Taylor · 552 pages

After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

Giles MacDonogh · 637 pages

Throughout time it has been the victor who has written history, but here historian MacDonogh (The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II, 2001, etc.) examines the darker side of the Allied occupation of defeated Germany. The subtitle is probably the publisher’s, since MacDonogh advises at the outset, “I make no excuses for the crimes the Nazis committed, nor do I doubt for one moment the terrible