Blog 2

When I took ENG 102 with Ms Laura Bandy, I read the book Day of Infamy written by Walter Lord. Walter Lord was an American author, who born was born in Baltimore, Maryland on October 8, 1917 to Henrietta Hoffman and John Walterhouse who died when Walter was three years old. After high school at Gilman School, he studied history at Princeton University where he graduated in 1939. He continued his education at Yale Law School but it was interrupted because of the attack on Pearl Harbor he joined the Army. When the war ended he returned to school and received a degree in law. Lord wrote twelve bestselling books on such subjects as Pearl Harbor(Day of Infamy,1957), the Battle of Midway (Incredible Victory,1967), the Battle of the Alamo (A Time to Stand,1961), Arctic exploration (Peary to the Pole, 1963), pre-World War I( Good Years: From 1900 to the first World War, 1962), Coastwatchers (Lonely Virgil, 1977), Civil rights struggle (the Past that would not Die, 1965), and his best-selling 1955 book A Night to Remember about the sinking of the ship Titanic.

            Lord’s Day of Infamy is about the December 7, 1941 tragedy of Pearl Harbor when the Japanese brutally attacked the U.S. naval fleet and the island of Oahu. This book is unique because it tells the story from plenty of perspectives from at least 577 people such as sailors and ordinary civilians. An example was a quote from Chief Albert Molter saying “Uniforms meant nothing,” meaning rank was forgotten on that day, people only wanted to pitch in together. There are even some Japanese participants in the book, but were later killed in the war except fifteen were located and contributed their stories to the book. Lord has used a lot of written material as sources especially from the War Records Depository of the University of Hawaii and the damage report from the Honolulu Board of Water Supply. Books and Honolulu papers were keys to the coverage of the book. Some books with valuable information on the attack like Battle Report: Pearl Harbor to Coral Sea by Walter Kraig and Welbroune Kelley, and Remember Pearl Harbor by Blake Clarke . Books of the Japanese side were covered in I Attacked Pearl Harbor by Kazuo Sakamaki and Sunk by Mochitsura Hashimoto. The contribution to this book is so great that the book contains a well-sized list of the people who lend a hand.      

            Lord’s Day of Infamy is a very distinguished book due to its very detailed descriptions and even illustrations. The book does not have good presentation of characters because Lord only describes them in a sentence or two. Lord did a great job with the sequence of events during that time period. Each chapter has a time period and explains what events happened in sequence. Due to the facts gathered, Lord made the book very accurate on what happened during the attack. Overall, this book is an excellent book to read for anyone who does not know what happened on Sunday December 7, 1941.