Rain of Ruin from Richard Overy
Tokyo, Hiroshima and the Surrender of Japan

Category: Bücher
Pages / Format: 224 S
Edit year: 2025
Publishing House: Penguin Books UKAllen Lane
Language: Englisch
ISBN: 9780241700693

A short but quietly devastating book, in which Overy adds new perspectives to a subject that has often been approached from a narrowly American angle... Overy's book is a sombre reminder that the border between civilisation and savagery is wafer-thin. Philip Snow Literary Review

'A short but quietly devastating book, in which Overy adds new perspectives to a subject that has often been approached from a narrowly American angle... Overy's book is a sombre reminder that the border between civilisation and savagery is wafer-thin.'- Philip Snow,Literary Review<br><br>A remarkable account of the terrible climax of the Second World War in Asia, published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.<br><br>In the closing months of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of Japanese, mostly civilians, died in a final outburst of violence from the air. American planes were beginning to run low on plausible targets when it was decided to use two atomic weapons in a final, terrible flourish to try to end the war.<br><br>Richard Overy's remarkable new book rethinks how we should regard this last stage of the war and the role of the bombing. This book explores the way in which the willingness to kill civilians and destroy cities became normalized in the course of a horrific war as moral concerns were blunted and scientists, airmen, and politicians followed a strategy of mass destruction they would never have endorsed before the war began. But it also engages with the new scholarship that shows how complex the effort to end the war was in Japan, where'surrender'was entirely foreign to Japanese culture.

3GBRichard Overyis Honorary Research Professor of History at the University of Exeter and one of Britain's most distinguished historians. His major works includeThe Dictators,winner of the 2005 Wolfson Prize,The Morbid AgeandThe Bombing War,which won a Cundill Award for Historical Excellence in 2014. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

0 Shares Tweet0 Pins