Rating: 
Summary: Good (detailed) history of the Pacific war
Review: John Costello did a fine job of detailing the Pacific war from start to finish. At 800 pages this is not a quick read but all the major battles and actions are covered in detail. I found his writing style a bit more dry than John Toland but still eminently readable and engaging. My choice for a good trio of books on the conflict would be John Toland's 'The Rising Sun', Dan Van der Vat's 'The Pacific Campaign' and John Costello's 'The Pacific War'. These three belong on the bookshelf of anyone with a more than passing interest in that era and any one alone would be more than adequate for the amateur historian. Costello's book included a section at the end on Pearl Harbor that hints at more sinister behind-the-scenes actions. While I'm not a conspiracy buff, that section was intriguing and unique to the Costello book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good but annoying goofs
Review: This book advertises itself as a comprehensive history of the causes and conduct of the war. It accomlishes this goal very well.Bright spots in the book where is compares favorably to other one-volume histories are the causes of the war going back to the opening of Japan, the Burma/India theater, the strategic wrangling between the Allies, and the wonderful maps. Someone looking for blow-by-blow accounts of the battles will be disappointed, as Costello's refreshing perspective is to look primarily at the strategic implications of the battles. This is thoroughly appropriate for a one-volume history. Costello successfully resists the temptation to delve into exciting, but page-consuming, battle narrative. His intent seems rather to give you a framework with which you can fit together your other Pacific War books that have narrower settings. Lastly, the photo pages in this book are the best I have ever seen. The selection of photographs, very few of which are trite, together with the masterful captions are in themselves a thumbnail of the plot of the book, not just eye candy or filler. Especially effective is how a inset of an important participant often appears in a photo of an event. Extremely impressive!
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