This book does a great job of providing the history and pre-1941 history of Wake Island. Focusing on the previous decade as well as the Navy and Marine Corp build-up in 1940-1941. Good insight into the Military politics involved in the Pacific during this time. Balanced view from the Japanese perspective with first hand accounts used were appropriate.

The actual battle sometimes becomes mired in use of real names (lists of involved personnel), and is sometimes hard to follow in a geographic sense. However, if you are familiar with, or have access to detailed maps of Wake during the invasion, this book walks you through almost every step.

Overall a good documentation of this little piece of the Pacific.

On the opening day of the Pacific War, Wake was bombed and strafed by island-based planes of the Japanese navy. When the raiders left, seven Grumman F4F Wildcats were wrecked on the ground.

With five remaining fighters, U.S. Marine Corps pilots defended the atoll for two desperate weeks. They shot down two Mitsubishi G3M land-based bombers, two Nakajima B5N carrier bombers, and a Kawanishi flying boat--and sank a destroyer with a device intended for water-filled practice bombs. They cannibalized wrecked Wildcats and refilled oxygen bottles from tanks belonging to the welders who had been building the island defenses. And when their last Wildcat was shot down, they took up rifles and fought as infantrymen.

The defense of Wake is an old story, but Cressman uses Japanese accounts to freshen and inform the telling. He can get carried away with nomenclature--writing "a shotai of three kansen" when "a flight of three Zeros" would be easier and no less accurate--but in battle after battle he identifies the pilots in opposing aircraft, and confirms or denies 54-year-old victory claims. He makes good use of Japanese photos, too, including the B5N that darkens the sky on the dust jacket.

A relief force was dispatched from Hawaii, built around the carrier Saratoga with two fighter squadrons, including 14 Brewster F2A Buffaloes that were to land on Wake and replace the lost Wildcats. Their ETA was Christmas Eve. The Japanese got there first, and the Americans turned away without launching a plane or firing a shot. As so often in that winter of 1941-42, the United States was a day late and a carrier short.

From the point of view of a small time history buff, This book was hard for me to put down. It gives a play by play of the battle and events surounding it from both sides. I was able to picture the scenes and events that took place. The photographs scattered throughout the book lets one put a face to a name, or see what buildings and equipment looked like. I plan on reading other books from this author.

The quality of memory is brilliantly conveyed in this novel: the details, the dreaminess, the layers of knowing - knowing what you knew as a child and what you learned later and what happened after that. The book is a quantity of detail that never becomes claustrophobic. In the opening pages, we have a minute description of the mother, her three children, and their bus ride from Long Island to the city to visit relatives. Without boring the reader, McDermott renders exquisitely how excrutiatingly boring such visits can be for children, who don't understand exactly what's going on among the adults but understand perfectly the tension. Out of this wealth of detail emerges the story of a family, and though thoroughly Irish and Catholic, these are characters recognizable in any family - the beautiful, disappointed one, the one determined to be happy, the adored alcoholic, the smart, embittered one. We see the way family stories take on a life of their own and family problems are more like the air one breathes than explicitly defined events and situations that can be rationally addressed. "Aren't you glad that you only have to see your relatives at weddings and wakes?" says a teenager to her younger cousins. They all agree, but the reader knows the truth - each one of them is a unique product of their common family, as is each one of us.

Alice McDermott is obviously not for everyone. Her language is dense, at times difficult, but it's also hauntingly beautiful. Her writing in AW&W is just a pitch-perfect rendering of a child's memory of the complex life of an extended family. For some of us, the revelations in this novel resonate strongly with our own lives and experience: growing up Catholic in post-war America in a suburban family with urban roots. Ev en those lacking these personal connections might come to appreciate McDermott's artistry. (Just so you'll know where I'm coming from: this book, Possession by A.S. Byatt, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov are my favorite fiction of those I've read in the last year or so.)

In "At Weddings and Wakes," Alice McDermott brilliantly brings to life a tragically flawed Irish Catholic family from Brooklyn. Told through the eyes of the three children, each character in this deeply moving piece resonants with their own indivduality. By jumping between different time periods, McDermott entices the reader to follow without ever giving up the suspense. I could not put this book down. But as much as I wanted to see what happened, I didn't want it to end. Alice McDermott is, quite simply, a master storyteller.