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 5:30 pm Registration | 6:00 pm Program with Wine Reception
Marines' Memorial Association,
609 Sutter Street, San Francisco
BOOKS FOR SALE will be available at the event.
This special event is co-sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Northern California
and Books, Inc.
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James Bradley is the author of the NYT bestsellers Flyboys and Flags of Our Fathers and the son of one of the men who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima. He lives in New York.
SYNOPSIS:
From the New York Times #1 bestselling author of FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS and FLYBOYS, a startling look at the events that set the stage for World War II, the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the Korean War.
In 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft on the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in history to Hawaii, Japan, the Philippines, China, and Korea. Roosevelt's glamorous twenty-one year old daughter, Alice, served as mistress of the cruise, which included senators and congressmen. On this trip, Taft concluded secret agreements in Roosevelt's name.
In 2005, a century later, James Bradley traveled in the wake of Roosevelt's mission and discovered what had transpired in Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila, Beijing and Seoul.
In 1905, Roosevelt was bully-confident and made secret agreements that he thought would secure America's westward push into the Pacific. Instead, he lit the long fuse on the Asian firecrackers that would singe America's hands for a century.
EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Theodore Roosevelt steers America onto the shoals of imperialism in this stridently disapproving study of early 20th-century U.S. policy in Asia. Bestselling author of Flags of Our Fathers, Bradley traces a 1905 voyage to Asia by Roosevelt’s emissary William Howard Taft, who negotiated a secret agreement in which America and Japan recognized each other’s conquests of the Philippines and Korea. (Roosevelt’s flamboyant, pistol-packing daughter Alice went along to generate publicity, and Bradley highlights her antics.) Each port of call prompts a case study of American misdeeds: the brutal counterinsurgency in the Philippines; the takeover of Hawaii by American sugar barons; Roosevelt’s betrayal of promises to protect Korea, which “greenlighted” Japanese expansionism and thus makes him responsible for Pearl Harbor. Bradley explores the racist underpinnings of Roosevelt’s policies and paradoxical embrace of the Japanese as “Honorary Aryans.” Bradley’s critique of Rooseveltian imperialism is compelling but unbalanced. He doesn’t explain how Roosevelt could have evicted the Japanese from Korea, and insinuates that the Japanese imperial project was the brainstorm of American advisers. Ironically, his view of Asian history, like Roosevelt’s, denies agency to the Asians themselves. Photos, maps. One-day laydown.(Nov. 24)
- Publishers Weekly
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