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Into the Valley: Marines at Guadalcanal
by: John Hersey

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5426
EAN: 9780803273283
ISBN: 0803273282
Label: Bison Books
Manufacturer: Bison Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 164
Publication Date: May 01, 2002
Publisher: Bison Books
Sales Rank: 577482
Studio: Bison Books

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:

John Hersey (1914–93) was a correspondent for Time and Life magazines when in 1942 he was sent to cover Guadalcanal, the largest of the Solomon Islands in the Western Pacific. While there, Hersey observed a small battle upon which Into the Valley is based. While the battle itself was not of great significance, Hersey gives insightful details concerning the jungle environment, recounts conversations among the men before, during, and after battle, and describes how the wounded were evacuated as well as other works of daily heroism.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A classic!
I loved this book because, along with Guadalcanal Diary, it is one of the only contemporaneous narratives of life on Guadalcanal. I only wish it were 1000 pages. Most war memoirs are seemingly written 30 years on whereas this book has a great sense of immediacy...read it if you love WW2!

Rating:

- Not a good read unless you are an antiwar liberal
This book will disappoint any who are not antiwar liberals. I didn't think this type was around in WW2, but Hersey was. He says he updated it; maybe that was to give it more of that slant.
What you are going to get with this very brief (80 pages!) account is a failure by a Marine company to capture a valley, with emphasis on the wounded and disappointed sied of the conflict, and agnosticism on the moral right of either side. It reads like the liberal press of the Vietnam era or during the present Iraq conflict.
I don't think an author has to sell America the greatest and certainly not the glory of war, but to not recognize the scrifice and the sense of what we were fighting for I think is pretty lousy. Hersey seems to suggest a sense of defending the country at one point ("they fought for home") but then passes over that to say "they were mostly there to avoid the draft" - huh?
For a sharp ... Read More

Rating:

- War is Hell
That's the bottom-line message of this short, artfully written book by a distinguished writer who served as a war correspondent in the Pacific early in his career.
America had no choice but to fight World War II, and the Marines profiled in this book had to be where they were. But Hersey shows you the war from close up, not from the lofty vantage point of the generals, with their maps, strategic theories and neatly prepared statistical tables.
These are real people being blown to bits. Human lives and humanity itself are expendable in the quest for a few yards of territory.
You will come away from this book hating war, however necessary it may be under certain circumstances.
The same author capped off his message some years later with his classic account of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath. If you haven't read that one, your education isn't complete.

Rating:

- Great for what it is
I was pretty surprised by how short this book was -- not counting illustrations, there are maybe 45-50 pages of content here. That said, it gives a really good perspective on being in battle and how the every-day must have been. It feels a little "cleaned up" and therefore slightly propagandistic (e.g., no one swears, no one is lazy, everyone is helpful to the writer, etc.), but for me at least, that's also helpful in understanding the time and place. The other issue is that you never for a moment forget that this is being written by a journalist (and not by an infantryman) -- the book never pretends to be anything else, though, and the reporter's POV is still useful and in some ways perhaps better for its "objective" third-partyness.

All-in-all, worthwhile for anyone interested in the subject matter.

bkd

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