Captured by History: One Man's Vision of Our Tormented Century

When Toland was 42, in 1954, none of his plays or novels had yet been published. Then a former air force buddy prodded him into nonfiction. After a series of books mostly on war and a bestselling biography of Hitler, Toland returned to fiction writing in 1981, with only lukewarm success. This often slipshod memoir from his middle 80s details how he worked, often with the assistance of his second wife, Toshiko, whom he met while researching in Japan. Although he insists that he has written ""nonideological history,"" Japan emerges as something of an exception. His Rising Sun, on the war in the Pacific, emphasizes Japan as heroic victim of the imperialistic West, its own brutal colonialism notwithstanding. Some statements are wrong, even when he is allegedly quoting from principals, among them that Pearl Harbor was attacked on a single flight and that a second (rather than a third) flight was aborted. Later the author attempts to defend his revisionist claims in Infamy that Roosevelt and his Washington command knew that carriers were approaching Hawaii. Toland's revelations from interviews in Japan and Germany with major participants offer colorful sidelights and occasionally the inference that helpful ex-enemies, however much blood on their hands, were often nice guys. Nevertheless, encountering so many makers of, and witnesses to, history is in dramatic contrast to Toland's sentimentalized memories, also related here, of riding the rails in Depression days. (July)