This book is very different in that the entire attack is viewed through the individual actions on hundreds of people, US sailors, marines, soldiers and civilians as well as Japanese sailors. There is no overall high level view of what happened, or a moment by moment description of the events, but rather the story is the sum of all of the individual accounts.
Thus we understand the attacks on the US battleships by hearing what sailors and marines on the ships did, what they could not do, what they saw and how they reacted. Sometimes this narration tells much that an overall account could not, as with the description of how one mess stewart, with no training, took control of one of the machine guns firing at the attacking Japanese planes, how one sailor stayed at his machine gun while the fires raged around him and how sailors trapped below decks waited for either rescue from their sunk ships, or suffocation as the air ran out. Often the narrations, although compelling, fail to tell us how the events hung together and what the views of the commanders were, so the book ends up being a mixed bag. This book is quite old, having been written in 1957, so it lacks information that has been gleaned in the intervening years through research, but it is still a worthwhile look at the event that started World War II for the US.
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