Rating: 
Summary: A blend of personal memoir and history
Review: Manchester's "Goodbye Darkness" is a combination of personal memoir and history. It gives a very fascinating insights on the Pacific theater during World War II. A lot of books tend to focus on the European theater but as Manchester shown, it was just as important. It's very important to bear in mind (as the author said at the end of the book) that the book is not in a chronological order. I think for those who wants to learn about each Marines battle, either in Tarawa, Guadalcanal or Okinawa, this is a good book to read as it Manchester gives background information on the battles or the war itself. I especially like the part where he explained in details how an amphibious assault works. In addition to all the historical information that were provided, Manchester succesfully personalize the book by giving his readers insights into life at boot camps, and later at Quantico for Officer Candidate School, etc. He managed to show that the "human" side of Marines as opposed to mere numbers and how they fought for each other, not the country, not the ideology.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding book, well suited for 16-24 year old men
Review: This book chronicles the personal experiences of William Manchester, one of the best authors of histories and biographies of the last twenty years. Manchester describes his experiences as a young adult fighting with the U.S. Marines in the Pacific theater of World War II. I believe that this book is particularly valuable for young men in a society that is ambivalent about its armed forces. Manchester's chronicle follows him from the excitement and unbrideld patriotism of the early war years through the progressively deeper understanding he gains of himself as the war drags on and the battles become ever more fierce. By the end of the book Manchester is in a battle to survive and is, in fact, nearly killed in one of the war's final battlefields on the road to Japan. I received this book fifteen years ago as a high school graduation gift. I found it a very moving story and it had a profound impact on me. This many years later I never miss an opportunity to recommend this author, and especially this book. You will be well served to give this book as a gift to any young man facing the challenges of growing up in a society that needs its soldiers but doesn't really know how it feels about their craft. Enjoy. Ted Wham
May 17, 1996
Rating:
Summary: Required Reading
Review: This memoir grabbed me by the stacking swivel harder than any other book I have ever read with the possible exception of Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front". But this is not fiction. This book deals with the aftermath of the author's two months of combat on Okinawa. Memories of that combat are safely walled up for some thirty years. Then the wall begins to crumble exposing the darkness at his core and the "Sergeant" and the "Old Man" begin to visit in the night. Confronting the darkness and nighttime visitors requires an odyssey to the Pacific battlefields. This is the story of that odyssey, what he finds there (in the mid 1970's), and the memories they release. There are really three stories intertwined in the narrative: a travelogue of his visits to the various invasion sites, the Okinawan memories resurrected by those visits, and the light shed by those memories which illuminates the darkness and provides the "Old Man" with an answer to the "Sergeant's" question. If you are looking for page after page of fire and maneuver or blood and gore you may want to look elsewhere. But, if, every now and then, you can still smell battle's stench, hear the bullet's crack, or feel incoming's utter helplessness, there's Guts'n'Glory aplenty. I don't know what it is about "thirty years". That's about what it took for the cracks to show up in my wall. Read this book. The man has been there. He knows whereof he speaks.
Rating: 
Summary: Great travelogue of the Pacific, pretty good memoir.
Review: A wonderful and well-deserved tribute to those who gave the last full measure during the Pacific War. Certainly does not sugar-coat the realities and horrors of combat. Reads well--incredible imagery as only Manchester could write it. However, Manchester the biographer and Manchester the autobiographer are two different authors, meaning that this book is not nearly as objective as his other works. He spends no small amount of time pontificating about the moral and social decay of America's younger generation, as he basically "vents" thirty years' worth of frustration and emotion. Provides an outstanding broad overview of the entire Pacific War, not just Okinawa. Once again, he uses incredible imagery to paint vibrant word pictures of all the places he visits or re-visits, including Guadalcanal, Tarawa, New Guinea, Leyte, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, etc. He also introduces the reader to the local inhabitants of some of these places. You read this book in full color.
Rating:
Summary: Poetic and Haunting
Review: If one could read two accounts of the Pacific War written from the perspective of Americans this book and Sledges "With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa" would be the best that one can get. There are a lot of very good narrative history books on all aspects of the Pacific War, but the poet-gone-to-war genre is something that really the British usually do much better than the Americans. That is why when I stumbled upon Manchester's memoirs I was immediately sucked into the guts of wartime experience. Manchester writes with passion borne from desperation and experience of long times in the firing line. He waxes from the lyrical experiences of a fireside chat on the battle-line with a student of philosophy (himself?) regalling the troops with an exposition on the nature of time. One is left with the images of hard worn veterans from small American towns, experiencing the wonder of ideas for the first time on the eve of battle. Their far off, empty stares as the philosopher marine finishes his exposition in sheer silence is something that one can almost feel. That very same night they cut up a large Banzai charge on Guam --- one can cut the atmosphere of the book with a knife. Manchester can then go on an describe his visceral uncomfortable feelings of being close to the Japanese today. Their inability to admit to former attrocities is something that Manchester admits, planted the seed of dislike deeply inside him. Try as he might he cannot shake it and we are at least amazed with his honesty. This contrasts with the cerebral, fair-minded Manchester we all know from his biographies. I have read more than 200 narrative histories and memoirs of the Pacific War, British, American, Japanese, Indian and Chinese, Australian, Canadian ... and this is one of the best. Like all good books, it stays with you for a long time....
Rating:
Summary: Goodby Darkness
Review: I believe this book to be a classic, and it is definitely a personal favorite. Manchester wrote that he joined the United States Marine Corps during World War 2 after the fall of Corregidor Island. I must point out he then inadvertently reinforces a mistaken belief that the survivors from Corregidor endured the Bataan Death March. That infamous event was over weeks before Corregidor surrendered. But, in my opinion, Manchester's actual vist to the Pacific Island battlegrounds of his youth is a must read.
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Summary: Read This Book
Review: Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester is a personal story of the Pacific War and its effect on an individual marine. Manchester, who is a superlative historical author, intersperses his war experiences from Guadalcanal to Okinawa with his more recent visits to the islands. The book is not a history of the Pacific War, although there is a lot of history in the book, but a very personal story that is played out with the War as a driving force. Manchester does a remarkable job letting the reader feel what it was like to be a Marine on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and many other battles. His best writing is saved for Okinawa. It is on this island where Manchester was severely wounded. Manchester describes the heroism of the American Marines fighting for inches at the costs of thousands of lives. What is compelling about the book is that Manchester puts the reader in the battle, feeling the feelings of the soldiers. For those that are interested in the Pacific War, or just want to read a personal account of the a soldier in battle, this book is a must.
Rating:
Summary: The warp and woof of war
Review: Not only is William Manchester a first rate writer, but he was there. The title of this book depicts his nightmares as a repository left over from his experiences in the infantry in the South Pacific in WWII. His attempts to dispel them are worked out through visiting each island the marines fought on in the pacific theatre. His marine outfit was made up of Ivy leaguers like himself and the book is a distillation of his exploits. He takes the reader through the island fighting on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, New Guinea, the Philipines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The scenes in which he describes the fighting are absolutely gripping, This is easily as good as any war novel I've ever read if only for the descriptions of the combat. His description of the apparition in the foxhole with him in the Philipines is some of the best writing I've ever read. True, I'm not a literature buff, but this man can really write. It's too bad that more people aren't aware of it today.
Rating:
Summary: Superb Writing about War
Review: About one fourth of this book is dull biography, one-fourth is a mundane travelogue of World War II sites in the Pacific, and one fourth is an interesting history of the Pacific War. The remaining one-fourth consists of some of the best war writing I have ever read and thus "Goodbye Darkness" gets my highest ratings. Manchester has the skill and the insight to express events and emotions far beyond that of the ordinary soldier describing his experiences. Manchester was a Marine Corps Sergeant in an unorthodox front-line Intelligence unit during WW II. His baptism of fire was Okinawa where he was wounded twice -- once seriously -- during two months of combat. Most of the men in his squad were killed. Manchester strengthens my view that the U.S. Marines in World War II were among the finest combat soldiers that ever existed. But this is not a gung-ho book of combat tales of heroism and sacrifice. Manchester is equivocal about his service with the Marines and in the war. Writing the book was apparently a catharsis for him as he pours out feelings unexpressed for many years. In the final pages of the book, Manchester gives his insight about the reasons the Marines were capable of taking casualties in excess of 50 percent without ever giving up. First, they had been tempered by the hardships of the depression; secondly, in WW II the whole generation was in the war together -- most of the Marines in his squad were Ivy Leaguers, FDR's sons were in uniform, and the sons of important politicians were being killed alongside the sons of sharecroppers --; and third, nationalism, "the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous...." Contrast those examples of why the U.S. won WW II with the situation today in Iraq. A reader can skip much of this book without loss, but Manchester's accounts of his own experiences in battle are exceptional and should go included among the classics of war literature.
Rating:
Summary: deeply ironic memoir of WWII in the Pacific
Review: At first, I wasn't quite sure what to make of the style--part memoir, part history, part travelogue--but after a few pages into it, I was hooked. Some thirty-five years after the end of the war, Manchester embarked on a journey to re-trace the Pacific War and, in a sense, find something he lost there as a Marine who witnessed some of the war's fiercest fighting and shed the darkness that has remained after all those years. He hits all the islands, from New Guinea and Guadalcanal, north to Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, onto Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In the process, he not only describes his travels but also chronicles his own wartime experiences and gives a bit of the history of the theater (with generous attention given to MacArthur); Manchester's range is as intriguing as it is impressive: strategy, tactics, philosophy, history, and literature pepper the narrative. If there's one word to describe the book, it's "ironic." From his early, thwarted, incomplete sexual encounters (readers beware: these scenes, while brief, are definitely NC-17), to his leaving a hospital to rejoin his unit during Okinawa almost certainly to become a casualty (and indeed, he will be wounded badly enough to be sent home), to how the islands have changed or have not, irony pours from virtually every page. Aside from some vague and indecipherable allusions and a penchant for using the Gethsemane comparison (sometimes confusingly), this ranks among the very best war memoirs I've read. It's of a very different sort than E. B. Sledge's excellent and straightforward With the Old Breed, but it's no less insightful, no less interesting, no less gripping. I highly recommend it.
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