More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ian W. Toll
Read between
October 8 - December 5, 2023
badinage
Interesting word
excrescence
Good word
The press, he said, was a profit-seeking enterprise that found sensationalism and gossip more lucrative than sober, accurate reporting, and was polluting the nation’s civil discourse.
Looking back from the present, when his legacy has been engraved in marble, it is difficult to sense how polarizing and controversial a figure FDR was in his own time.
The different standards of accountability imposed in Hawaii and the Philippines have bothered historians ever since. The latter events were never formally investigated, and MacArthur never answered for errors and derelictions that seemed at least as blameworthy and certainly more avoidable than those in Hawaii.
abstemious
Good word
indolence
Good word
This axiom generally held true throughout the Pacific War—that each time American commanders considered and debated the option to bypass an island, and finally decided to go ahead and take it, their decision would seem tragically mistaken in hindsight. But they were naturally loath to admit error, either to historians or to themselves, because the blood spilled in those sands could never be unspilled, and no one wanted to hear that young men had died for a mistake.
complaisant
Good word
boondock.
Good word
massifs
Good word
karst.
Good word
vitiate
Good word
mordant,
Good word
the 72,000-ton colossus was listing heavily to port, her towering superstructure smashed and blackened by bomb damage, a column of black smoke unspooling thousands of feet into the air. Her long sleek bow was swamped, her weather deck awash to her forward main turret, and the sea was lapping up against her gold chrysanthemum bow crest. The sun was nearly down, so the pitiful spectacle was suffused in low-angle light that cast long shadows across a violet sea.
Good writing
This mass-junking of perfectly serviceable warplanes occurred at the height of the war, when the Japanese were falling well short of aircraft production targets and struggling to keep their assembly lines in operation at all.
iniquitous
Good word
90 It seems likely that the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, at least initially, than the atomic bombings of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. If the highest death toll estimates are accurate, the Tokyo raid may have killed more people (initially) than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It was the most devastating air raid of the war, in either Europe or the Pacific. It left more dead than any other single military action in history.
extirpated.
Good word
contretemps
Good word
ordeal,
Good word
