Bantam
Flags of Our Fathers
Key Metrics
- James Bradley
- Bantam
- Paperback
- 9780553384154
- 9.07 X 6.06 X 0.77 inches
- 1.15 pounds
- History > Military - World War II
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima--and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island's highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag.
Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever.
To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island--an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo--three were killed during the battle--were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley's father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn't come back.
Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.
Author Bio
James Bradley is a New York Times number one best-selling author of four books on Pacific history. Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood made the movie of his first book, Flags of Our Fathers. James has been traveling in and learning about Asia since 1974, when he attended Sophia University in Tokyo.
America’s best-selling Pacific historian, James’ first book, Flags of Our Fathers, chronicled the lives of the boys who raised the flag on Iwo Jima; his second, Flyboys, detailed the air war in the Pacific and the dramatic story of George Herbert Walker Bush’s close escape from capture and death; his third, The Imperial Cruise, tells the story of how President Theodore Roosevelt promoted the Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia; and his fourth, The China Mirage, tells of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attitudes towards China in the lead-up to World War II in the Pacific.
Source: JamesBradley.com
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