Well, I need to either begin or end the review with these words, so let’s get it out of the way right off the top: The Pacific just isn’t as good as Band of Brothers. It is an easy but inevitable comparison. As The Pacific finds its way to television screens in the form of a ten-part mini-series, it also makes its way to store shelves (and to the list of bestsellers) as a book. Written by Hugh Ambrose, son of Stephen Ambrose (who wrote Band of Brothers), it landed on the list just days before the airing of the first episode.

Now, I know that it may be unfair to immediately draw comparisons between the two but really it is inevitable. The publisher knew this, putting the words Band of Brothers right on the cover of The Pacific. If they can sell it to us on that basis, I think we are free to evaluate on that same basis.

Band of Brothers rose or fell on the strength of its characters and the growing (and declining) relationships between them. It was tightly focused on one small group of soldiers–E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne. It followed these men from boot camp all the way to the end of the Second World War. In men like Major Dick Winters it had heroes and in men like Captain Herbert Sobel it had villains. It was a fascinating story that was well-told and easily adapted into a fantastic mini-series. The Pacific, on the other hand, began as the mini-series rather than the book. Based on two famous Second World War memoirs–With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge and Helmet for a Pillow by Robert Leckie–the mini-series is a product of the same team that brought us Band of Brothers. Through one episode it shows great promise.

The book is a companion or an add-on to the series. It ranges much farther than Band of Brothers ever did, focusing on soldiers from different branches of the military–Army, Navy and Marines. It focuses on men who never encountered one another during the war. Therefore, it does not have the interplay and fraternity between the characters that helped make Band of Brothers what it was. Instead of the relationship between characters, we find tension between telling the story of the war and telling the story of individual soldiers and airmen within that war.

So, for example, Ambrose is constantly switching between what people actually did and saw and what they might have done and might have seen. In one sentence he’ll say, “He dove into the trench, cutting his foot on a jagged piece of shrapnel” and then follow it by saying, “He might have noticed the smoke from the explosion.” Ambrose continually switches back and forth between what the soldier actually saw, as recorded in his memoirs, and what he might have seen based on the historical record. Though it may seem like a small thing, I found it quite maddening as it showed to me that The Pacific doesn’t know what it wants to be–history or biography. In the end it becomes a bit of both but does neither with the excellent of Band of Brothers.

Is The Pacific a bad book? No, not at all. There is a lot to gain from it both in terms of history and in terms of learning about individual soldiers. At the same time, I just can’t help but feel that it’s not all it could be; that it was a rush job and one that lacks precision and focus. I wanted more of the men and less of the facts. I wanted to feel about the men in this book like I felt about Winters and Sobel and Guarnere and like I’m sure I’ll feel about the men in The Pacific mini-series. After all, the series has already shown that it will be more about the soldiers and less about the big picture of the war.

So here is my advice. If you have not read With the Old Breed, read that first. You owe it to yourself. It is one of the best books you’ll read on the Second World War. Then, if your appetite for reading about the war and about the Pacific campaign still remains, go ahead and read The Pacific. You will encounter Sledge again, but you will also encounter another set of characters that are worth meeting.

Verdict: Read it if you’re a World War II enthusiast and if you’ve already read With the Old Breed.

In 1905 President Teddy Roosevelt sent a delegation to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China and Korea. Alice Roosevelt, the President’s daughter and the Paris Hilton of her age, served as mistress of the cruise while Secretary of War William Howard Taft acted in his capacity as a diplomat. In each of these nations he conducted meetings in Roosevelt’s name with many of the meetings kept strictly secret. Now, a century later, James Bradley seeks to discover what those meetings were all about and how they have impacted history. He records his findings in The Imperial Cruise.

Bradley is best-known for authoring Flags of Our Fathers, a book that spent almost a year on the list of bestsellers and that was subsequently made into a film directed by Clint Eastwood. Flags of Our Fathers told the story of the six iconic figures who raised the American flag during the battle of Iwo Jima. One of these men was John Bradley, the author’s father. He followed that book with Flyboys, which told the story of an air raid during that same battle. And now Bradley’s third book turns to the background of the War in the Pacific, attempting to understand why those battles were necessary in the first place, why so many young American men lost their lives thousands of miles from home.

Where Bradley’s first two books were well-received and really quite good, The Imperial Cruise is, frankly, just awful. This is a book that has become a bestseller only on the basis of Bradley’s prior success. There is no other logical explanation. The Imperial Cruise is a sanctimonious, unsubstantiated, anti-American screed. Much is said, little is proven, credibility is almost entirely lacking. Bradley falls into the well-worn trap of reading current standards, current social mores into the past. But even worse, he creates one-dimensional caricatures of many of the characters in the story, defining them only by their worst trait. This is history at its worst.

By way of example, Bradley defines Teddy Roosevelt almost entirely as a hopeless, arrogant, paternalistic racist, as if that is all he ever was. He continually describes Americans as American Aryans, a pejorative that paints all Caucasian Americans in a negative light, drawing the inevitable comparison to Hitler’s Nazi’s. He describes the actions of American soldiers only in terms of atrocities, making it seem that those who committed atrocities were the norm rather than the exception. He paints all of America, and her foreign policy in particular, in only the worst terms and then assigns to her the blame for every Pacific conflict of the twentieth century. Read Bradley and you would assume that Japan would never have considered invading China were it not for America’s suggestions and demands.

Ironically, as Bradley goes on and on he begins to sound like he is the one who is racist. Reading this book one would think that the history of the Pacific nations was all sweet and peaceful until the evil Aryan Americans showed up and began to teach the “Pacific Negroes” how to make war. One would assume that no Japanese leader was clever enough to be deceptive until the Americans taught Western-style deceit.

Bradley’s anger, his snideness, show themselves from cover-to-cover. His mocking tone, his inability to be at all objective, taint this book, leaving it far less than credible history. It’s just a mess and one not worth bothering with.

Verdict: Buy it if you want to learn how not to do history.

Just two weeks after The National Parks hit the bestseller list, here comes The Big Burn, a book that contains a lot of overlap in both setting and characters. Where The National Parks provided a history of “America’s best idea,” The Big Burn tells the story of the greatest fire in American history–a fire that devastated some of those national forests that were the subject of the other book. Authored by Timothy Egan (whose last effort The Worst Hard Time received a National Book Award), the book is the kind of fast-paced, popular-level history that sells so well today.

In August of 1910, a massive windstorm moved through the national forests of Washington, Idaho and Montana. Small blazes that had been sparked by lightning or by passing trains were soon whipped into raging infernos. Near the end of a long and dry summer, the forests were primed for a fire. Within days, thousands and then hundreds of thousands of acres of prime forest were consumed. In the path of the fire lay towns, mountain outposts that had been carved out of the rough wilderness. In the path of the fire were only the smallest number of forest rangers, men who were tasked with fighting fires and protecting the people from them. These men assembled a ragtag army of men and boys to battle the blaze but no one had ever seen a fire quite like this one. No fire in memory had moved so quickly and with such powerful force, outpacing even the fastest runner and raining hot coals miles ahead of the flame. The fire was completely out of control and all that was left was for the men to protect their own lives and those of the settlers in the area.

Egan tells the story of this blaze, centering the story around Teddy Roosevelt, the man responsible for the growing emphasis on conservation, and around Roosevelt’s good friend and chief forester Gifford Pinchot. These men provide the political and ideological backdrop for the heroes of the story–those who raced into the wilderness to try to save both the forest and human lives. It is a fascinating little slice of history, a bit of mostly-forgotten Americana. Egan, with his talent as a writer and his dedication as a researcher, is the perfect historian to tell the story. He does so very well, focusing as much on interesting characters as on the historical events. This is history brought to life.

I know this is a study about culture and worldview, but I can’t think of anything profound to say about either one of those topics. This is good history, but not a whole lot more than that, I think. Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with that.

Verdict: Buy it

Ken Burns is easily the cream of the crop when it comes to documentary film making (take that, Michael Moore!). The Civil War, The War, Baseball…his credentials go on and on. Each of his documentaries has been amazing in its own way. His latest film is called The National Parks and like its predecessors, it is accompanied by a coffee table book. I was rather surprised to see that book, with its $50 price tag, spring onto the list of bestsellers and remain there for a couple of weeks.

Coming in at over 400 pages and weighing about as much as a small car, The National Parks is chock full of both text and pictures. The book follows the same format as the film, offering six chapters that cover roughly the same material. Chapters average fifty or sixty pages and they are split roughly evenly between text and photographs. The text is interesting enough, describing the genesis of “America’s best idea.” The photographs are often stunning, showing some of the most amazing scenery America has to offer. My only complaint, if we can label it that, is that the paper used in the book could use a bit more gloss in order to really make those pictures pop. Nevertheless, even as they are, they provide amazing evidence of the beauty to be found in America’s parks.

What gripped me as I read the book was the beautiful simplicity of the idea behind the National Parks. In days past and in other nations, the richest people, the most powerful people, had been able to have their nature preserves, their areas of unbroken and pure land. They had been able to set aside these little bits of paradise for themselves and had been able to enforce privacy, ensuring that the commoners were kept far away. In America, though–the land of free–vast areas of land were set aside specifically for the common man. The National Parks were to be held in trust by the nation for the benefit of all Americans in all of time. The parks were an investment in the future. One needs only look to Niagara Falls to see what happens when such stunning scenery goes unprotected. There is hardly a square inch of the Falls that is not in some way defiled, in some way exploited. It is due to the efforts of those who fought for the National Parks that Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Badlands and all these other areas remain largely undefiled. America’s best idea is really in some ways her simplest. Many generations have benefited from it already and many more will continue to do so. America would not be what she is without her National Parks.

Verdict: Buy it