Rest in Peace: John Toland 1912-2004

[Wanker]

To my favorite history author who died a couple of days ago. He was the author who started my burning passion for non-fiction military history. When I was 10 years old, I read my first Toland book, the 1000+ page, Pulitzer Prize winning "The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-45"

If you happen to run into these books in the library, bookstore, or eBay, I urge you all to read them:

Battle:Story of the Bulge
But Not in Shame
The Last 100 Days
The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-45
Adolf Hitler
No Man's Land: 1918, the Last Year of the Great War
Infamy: Pearl Harbor and its Aftermath
In Mortal Combat

John Toland was a success, IMO, because he never forgot to tell about the human side of war, the experiences of those who were there.

NY Times Obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/07/arts/YTOLA.html

John Toland, 91, Author of Best-Selling History Books, Dies
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

Published: January 7, 2004


ohn Toland, a best-selling historian whose book "The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945" won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, died on Sunday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. He was 91 and lived in Danbury.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Tamiko Toland.
 
 
Reviewing "The Rising Sun" (Random House) for The New York Times, Walter Clemons called it a "big, absorbing and finally very moving history of the Pacific war, told primarily from the Japanese viewpoint."

In research for his books, Mr. Toland typically sought to do as many interviews as possible, sometimes hundreds. For "Rising Sun" his subjects ranged from Japanese generals and admirals to housewives who had survived the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. This technique served him well in perhaps the most popular of his histories, "Adolf Hitler" (Doubleday, 1976), an anecdotal portrait that several reviewers called the most comprehensive biography of Hitler up until that time.

He entered a long-running historical debate about the Roosevelt administration's culpability at the start of the Pacific war with " "Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath" (Doubleday, 1982). In a shift from his conclusions in "The Rising Sun, " Mr. Toland said he had turned up evidence to conclude that Roosevelt had known in advance of Japan's impending attack but failed to inform the naval command in the Pacific in the hope of rousing America from its isolationism. This view put him at odds with a series of official federal investigations and historians who said Roosevelt may have made errors in judgment but neither knew about nor encouraged the attack.

John Willard Toland was born June 29, 1912, in La Crosse, Wis. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Williams College, getting his B.A. in 1936, and set out to become a playwright, attending the Yale University School of Drama in 1936-37. From 1942 to 1949, he served as a captain in Special Services in the Army Air Force, stationed in the United States. During the war, he married Dorothy Peaslack, a dancer. They had two children, Diana Netzer, of Basalt, Colo., and Marcia Toland, who lives in Oman. The marriage ended in divorce.

In 1960, while doing research in Japan, he married Toshiko Matsumura. She and their daughter, Tamiko, of Ithaca, N.Y., also survive him, as do three grandchildren.

By the mid-1950's, he had written many plays, novels and short stories, but remained unpublished. Encouraged by a friend, he turned to nonfiction and began to sell articles to magazines. His agent got him a contract to write a book on dirigibles, "Ships in the Sky" (1957), and he followed with a dozen books for adults and young people, specializing in World War II. A memoir, "Captured by History," was published in 1997.

[Ripsnort]

Are you trying to beat my title as Copy and Paste king?
http://agw.warbirdsiii.com/bbs/showthread.php?threadid=28872

[mudder]

I think my late father had a signed copy of "Infamy". They were at Williams together. Hmmm, wonder where that book went?

[Halo]

Yep, Toland was great, especially Rising Sun and Hitler.

[Otto]

Well, I didn't read all of them, but most.  He was a great writer that gave me hours of enjoyment.   Salute!