Max Hastings

Max Hastings has had an illustrious career as a journalist and author, encompassing foreign correspondent for the BBC, editor of the Daily Telegraph and writing best selling, highly acclaimed military histories including Bomber Command, Armageddon and the recent Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45. ... (more)His memoir Did You Really Shoot the Television? reports news from the front-line of his tumultuous family. Son of broadcaster and adventurer Macdonald Hastings and journalist and gardening writer Anne Scott-James (and step-son of the colourful Osbert Lancaster) it is no wonder that the genes of swash-buckling man-of-action and popular journalist course through his veins.

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Presentation and live webcast: 6:00 pm CDST
No Charge but reservations are suggested. 312-587-0234

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome military historian and former foreign correspondent MAX HASTINGS to discuss the final year—and world-changing events—of the Pacific war against Japan.

By the summer of 1944 it was clear that Japan’s defeat was inevitable, but how the drive to victory ... (more)would be achieved remained to be seen. The ensuing drama—that ended in Japan’s utter devastation—was acted out across the vast stage of Asia, with massive clashes of naval and air forces, fighting through jungles, and barbarities by an apparently incomprehensible foe. In recounting the saga of this time and place, Max Hastings gives us incisive portraits of the theater’s key figures—MacArthur, Nimitz, Mountbatten, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. But he is equally adept in his portrayals of the ordinary soldiers and sailors—American, British, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese—caught in some of the war’s bloodiest campaigns.

Hastings discusses Japan’s war against China, now all but forgotten in the West, MacArthur’s follies in the Philippines, the Marines at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Soviet blitzkrieg in Manchuria. He analyzes the decision-making process that led to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which, he argues, ultimately saved lives. Finally, he delves into the Japanese wartime mind-set, which caused an otherwise civilized society to carry out atrocities that haunt the nation to this day.