Books, Arts & Manners: The Still Rising Sun

Long Day’s Journey into War: December 7, 1941, by Stanley Weintraub (Dutton, 706 pp., $26.95)

STANLEY Weintraub does not brood, in this compelling account of December 7, 1941, about Japanese refusal to accept the guilt for the sins committed in the Second World War—or, for that matter, Japanese self-exculpation. And this is just as well: as it is, the book is a remarkable feat of detailed, minute-by-minute narrative. I suspect Mr. Weintraub agrees with the quote he cites from a high-school textbook: “War makes people cruel. So we cannot say that one nation is more cruel than another.”

Long Day’s Journey into War: December 7, 1941, by Stanley Weintraub (Dutton, 706 pp., $26.95)

STANLEY Weintraub does not brood, in this compelling account of December 7, 1941, about Japanese refusal to accept the guilt for the sins committed in the Second World War—or, for that matter, Japanese self-exculpation. And this is just as well: as it is, the book is a remarkable feat of detailed, minute-by-minute narrative. I suspect Mr. Weintraub agrees with the quote he cites from a high-school textbook: “War makes people cruel. So we cannot say that one nation is more cruel than another.”