Danger’s Hour
My friend Max, a Cape Cod man currently living in Los Angeles,* has produced a towering work of history. I’m just finishing it now. Danger’s Hour: The Story of the USS Bunker Hill and the Kamikaze Pilot Who Crippled Her has a couple of problems, technically and thematically, one of which I mentioned earlier. You know, the al-Qaeda, kamikaze, Horatio at the Bridge cultural relativity thing.
Forget all that. Move on. The research Max did into the kamikaze attack on the USS Bunker Hill on May 11, 1945, to include an intimate and detailed history of the kamikaze pilot who carried out that attack, the entire kamikaze program, the life of an Essex class carrier, and the carriers’ role in the strategy that took down the Japanese imperial forces, deserves a special place in the lexicon of war history. I’ve been reading it, several pages each night before I drop off, sometimes skipping back a couple. I can’t wait to get back to it. Max’s recounting of the real experiences of kamikaze and carrier pilots, and his incredibly detailed depiction of aftermath of the kamikaze attack on the USS Bunker Hill will stay with me for a long time.
* I owe Max half an apology. I promised him more. It’s too late to push a newspaper review for a book that came out in mid-November, and I’m sorry. But Max, if your publicist had got it to me earlier than mid-December, and if the holiday season didn’t happen to fall at that time, as it generally does, and if I actually had time to read in my life, which I don’t, I might have finished it in time to do that, but I didn’t, and for that I’m sorry.
Too bad, because I missed an opportunity to rack up an IOU from a Kennedy, which is theoretically valuable and not that easy to accomplish, especially when you are a rightwing loudmouth working at the local conservative tabloid. The fact is, doing favors for Kennedys generally won’t get you much, because generally, they expect it.
But all of that is irrelevant. I praise Max Kennedy here because his book is the most useful, insightful, praiseworthy thing any Kennedy has given America in decades. Anyway, Max already owes me for giving him something no other Kennedy ever got. In an article maybe 10 years ago, I refered to him as “a Cape Cod man,” without any genealogy. I’m proud to call him a friend … even if we are only work-related acquaintances, and it’s a tossup who is compromised more by any suggestion of a ramped-up association … and quite apart from that, to recommend his book without reservation.
** My criticism of his AQ angle and rhapsodic excesses in the introduction that resulted from close contact with kamikaze history and survivors stand. The historical work that makes up the body of the book is straightforward, deeply insightful and transcends that. By the way, to any wags who want to make jokes about Kennedys not writing their own books, this one is unquestionably in Max’s own hand.
Topics: history, literary, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:10 am Comments (0) on Sunday, March 1, 2009
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