RaveWall Street JournalThis is an elegantly written work, a meditation on conflict and courage that verges on poetry ... The trouble with this slender volume is that too often the meditations seem like a stretch ... At times Ms. Morris is better at the history than the reverie ... 'If there is much misery to Yamato’s story, there is beauty too,' Ms. Morris writes, but the beauty is hard to divine here, expect perhaps in one of the book’s final images, an underwater view of the warship at its resting place. You can make out the chrysanthemum crest of imperial Japan, still visible in a photograph made seven decades after the sinking. Terrible beauty, indeed.
