Day of Infamy
Pearl Harbor reconstructed hour by hour through the eyes of hundreds of people who were there.
The Verdict
Walter Lord more or less invented the modern you-are-there battle book here, and Pearl Harbor was the perfect proving ground. Working from interviews with hundreds of survivors barely fifteen years after the attack, he cuts among cooks, admirals, pilots, and civilians to rebuild the morning of 7 December 1941 minute by minute, on both sides of it. There is little analysis and no thesis — just the controlled chaos of a catastrophe as the people inside it lived it. The template for a hundred narratives that followed.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want
- Pearl Harbor hour by hour, from those who were there
- Immediacy over interpretation
- A short, propulsive entry to the attack
- The origin of the you-are-there genre
Look elsewhere if you want
- The strategic post-mortem (At Dawn We Slept does that)
- An analysis of the intelligence failure
- The wider Pacific war
Why We Rated It 4.4
Historical Context
Day of Infamy (1957) reconstructs the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor through the recollections of hundreds of witnesses. It set the pattern for Lord's later books and for popular narrative history generally; for the planning and post-mortem, Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept is the companion.
Events Covered
Editions & Reading Notes
Read It Alongside
Where to Buy
ISBN: 978-0805068030
Other Books About the Same Events
Frequently Asked Questions
- What kind of book is Day of Infamy?
- A minute-by-minute narrative reconstruction of the Pearl Harbor attack built from survivor interviews, light on analysis and heavy on immediacy.
- What should I read for the causes of Pearl Harbor?
- Gordon Prange's At Dawn We Slept covers the planning, the intelligence failure, and why the US was surprised.