Lots of historical detail included in each hour leading up to and after the attack on Pear Harbor although, there are many run-on sentences, which tended to make the storyline hard to follow at times.

takes me back to the year my parents' married and my dad joined the Navy

Pleased with book.

This book is far too long. Made up of hundreds of unrelated stories, many of them only a paragraph long, this book reads like a post-modernist novel and took me ten years to read (I read a couple of hundred pages and tucked it away for a decade until I could muster the fortitude to finish it).

Also, the author has strong emotions and does not hesitate to color his narrative to suit his prejudices. For instance, he paints the America Firsters as a sinister group of anti-semitic, Hitler lovers. No doubt there were a few mixed in there, but most of them were sincere if misguided people who were afraid that if we got involved in World War II, we would become an imperial power with an enormous military industrial complex. They may have been wrong, but most of them were not Nazis. I am very much against the protestors of the war in Iraq, but I recognize that only a small minority of them are in favor of genocide and the restoration of a Saddam-like strongman. The America Firsters deserve more sympathy than the current raft of protestors since we are currently in a war and the protestors want us to lose, rather than keep us out as the AFers did. Also, we were not aware of the Nazi genocide until 1942, whereas we have found the bodies in Iraq to prove that Saddam has been a practitioner of genocide for many years.

Or MacArthur, another bete noire of Mr. Weintraub, who gets a lot of blame for losing his planes on the ground, even as the author shows how much it was the fault of Gen. Brereton, the Air Force Chief in the Philippines. Since Brereton went through the war going from blunder to blunder (while always procuring for himself the fanciest HQ, liquors and women) - he presided over the one of the costliest and least effective bombing raids of the war, the most disastrous friendly fire incident in history and the only Allied airborne assault failure in the war - you would think that some of the snide remarks that Mr. Weintraub has for Gen. MacArthur could have been spread to the real culprit.

Occasionally, the author's hatreds catch him telling tall ones. Chiang Kai-Shek was receiving aid from the Soviets (which was one of the causes for the postwar Sino-Soviet rift), so Chiang's Nazi sympathies must have been muted if they existed at all.

OK, so the book is too long and somewhat untrustworthy. Why four stars? Because the author attempts something rarely seen, which is valuable in its own right. A reader of a book like this would be foolish to actually think he's learning about the events. The narrative is too choppy for that. The value here is in reminding us that history ISN'T a smooth narrative, that events are happening around the world, some of them relevant, some of them not, two steps forward and one step back. The author made a great and largely successful attempt to find events happening simultaneuously around the globe, all on a single day. Breaking 12/7/41 into the 47 hours of the sun's movement around the globe (from midnight 12/7 on the western side of the International Date Line to midnight 12/8 on the eastern side) and moving from Orson Welles in a train heading to Chicago to General Rommel in a conference with an Italian general in the Egyptian desert to Cordell Hull in DC waiting for Japanese diplomats to the withdrawal of a Spanish division in Russia to a football game in Manhattan to the aircraft carriers steaming toward Pearl Harbor, the story is compelling.

John Ellis wrote a book about a day in October, 1944 and there is an excellent book about a day in the middle of the American Civil War, but those books focused on their respective wars and told their stories on a theater by theater basis. You had a feeling that you were the President being given an intelligence report the first thing in the morning. They were exciting books because of that, but they had a different purpose than Mr. Weintraub's book, which is, ultimately, an impressive acheivement.

In LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO WAR author Stanley Weintraub dissects December 7, 1941 hour by hour as it occurred around the globe. Relative to one's geographic location on the planet, December 7th occupied parts of three days, December 6, 7, and 8 (Hence the "long day" of the title). But December 7, 1941 was also a "long day" in the sense that it was a watershed of history. A vast chasm separated the world of the day before and the world of the day after, and that chasm had it's fault line at Pearl Harbor.

Weintraub uses both historical documentation and personal reminiscences to describe the occurrences of December 7th, and does so in a creatively novelistic manner that holds the reader's unflagging interest. Pearl Harbor Day is thus described from the standpoint of military men, diplomats, and the ordinary people who found themselves caught up in the extraordinary events recounted here.

Weintraub uses a bank of clocks at the head of each chapter to illustrate the relative time in, let's say, Tokyo, Manila, Washington D.C., and Stalingrad. Part of his thesis is that December 7, 1941 was the high-water mark of the Axis Powers. Although the Axis-dominated portion of the globe did geographically expand after this date, the edifice had begun to crack. Weintraub makes a convincing argument that this day in December was the Beginning of The End for Japan, Germany, Italy and their smaller satellites, as in retrospect it seems to have been.

Filled with accurate historical data and interesting personal stories, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO WAR is a fascinating presentation of a day which deserves the unique treatment this book provides.

Stanley Weintraub has written a fascinating book about the beginning of World War II in the Pacific. The story begins on "the day before" (December 6, 1941), then turns to an hour-by-hour narrative that covers the thoughts and actions of leaders and ordinary people in Tokyo, Washington, London, North Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore, Pearl Habor, Manila, the Russian Front and other places. The action builds towards Japan's attacks on British and American positions in the Pacific, giving some sense of the brilliance of Japan's military planning, the racism and unpreparedness of both America and Britain, and the foolhardiness of taking on a country as powerful as the United States.
Equally interesting is Weintraub's treatment of the hours that followed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many of us remember where we were when JFK was shot, or when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, or when the Challenger exploded. For the generation that preceded us, the world was divided into "before Pearl Harbor" and "after Pearl Harbor." Weintraub describes the reactions of many when they first heard the news.
He also discusses at length the inexplicable failure of MacArthur and the American leadership in the Philippines to understand that the war had really begun. Not that the inexcusable loss of American aircraft at Clark Field seems to have affected MacArthur's career--as Weintraub puts it, "few generals have profited so spectacularly from their own failures."
This book brought me as close as any of us Baby Boomers are likely to come to understanding what people around the world were thinking just before and just after America entered World War II. It is really enjoyable, and I couldn't put it down. If you can find a copy (easier said than done), buy it and read it.