I just finished reading Dead Reckoning by Dick Lehr earlier today. Had I read this book before I read Operation Vengeance by Dan Hampton I would have been fairly disappointed with it. Four chapters in I was seriously considering just shelving it and looking for another book on the subject but I decided to tough it out and finish reading it. I am actually glad I did take the time to finish it. I am also glad that I read the books in the order that I read them. At this point I would consider them complimentary in that Operation Vengeance was geared more towards the operational aspect of the mission whereas this book Dead Reckoning was geared more towards the two men, Mitchell and Yamamoto, and their lives leading up to their eventual meeting over the island of Bougainville.
There are some glaring errors such as classifying the Battleship Arizona as a destroyer but imo this did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. This is definitely not the be all, know all, end all book on the subject but it definitely covered a lot of ground I had not taken the time to look up in the past. I found the more I read about the events of their lives and how they finally intersected the more interesting the book became to me.
Dead Reckoning
by Dick Lehr (2020)
https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Reckoning-Mitchell-Fighter-Yamamoto/dp/006244851X
About the Author
Dick Lehr is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of six previous works of nonfiction and a novel for young adults. Lehr coauthored the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award Winning Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI and a Devil’s Deal, which became the basis of a Warner Bros. film of the same name. His most recent nonfiction book, The Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited The Battle for Civil Rights, became the basis for a PBS/Independent Lens documentary. Two other books were Edgar Award finalists: The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston’s Racial Divide, and Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind The Dartmouth Murders. Lehr previously wrote for the Boston Globe, where he was a member of the Spotlight Team, a special projects reporter and a magazine writer. While at the Globe he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in investigative reporting and won numerous national and local journalism awards. Lehr lives near Boston.
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