Book Review: Ghosts of Honolulu

Mark Harmon’s Ghosts of Honolulu takes readers on a journey to discover the origins of the NIS and later NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service). From the outset, Harmon’s prose is engaging enough, pulling readers into the setting of Honolulu. The author paints a pretty vivid picture of the islands and Pearl Harbor pre- and post-attack.

Coming into this book I expected to find a popular history about Pearl Harbor and the birth of the NIS with engaging storytelling and vivid prose. Overall, it was underwhelming. The prose was dry and when the authors tried to interweave interviews and their own dramatized conversations of real events it fell flat. While reading I struggled to determine which people I should pay attention to and which would seldom be mentioned again.

There were some bright spots, however. The attack on Pearl Harbor itself only took one chapter but it was one of the better chapters. Likewise, some of the Douglas Wada interview sections were interesting and more engaging than the rest. However, the authors cite the same couple of interviews, leading me to question why I wasn’t just reading the other book or watching the interview.

The latter third of the book dealt mostly with Douglas Wada’s involvement in the trials which occurred in Japan after the war. I think the only person less interested in reading about this than me was Douglas Wada himself, who made it known he had no interest in taking part but felt he didn’t have much choice.

In short, this book added nothing new to canon and, without Mark Harmon’s name on the front, would likely never have made it to press.

For a popular history book which deals with some of the same topics in a much more engaging manner, I’d go with Killing The Rising Sun by Bill O’Reilly.

Rating: 3.25 / 5 (Too boring for a popular history, too thinly sourced and populated for an academic history)

Find Ghosts of Honolulu on Amazon.