Eve of a Hundred Midnights

May 15, 2016

Journalist Lascher was inspired by a chance encounter with his grandmother to recount the life of his cousin Melville Jacoby (1917-42), a photographer and writer for Time and Life magazines during World War II. The result is this engaging debut. While Jacoby was lesser known than Ernie Pyle or Ernest Hemingway, he was nevertheless an instrumental, well-respected presence during the late 1930s and early 1940s. After graduating from Stanford University, Jacoby began a journalism career in 1936 that led him from the manufacturing hub of Chungking, China to the Philippine island of Corregidor in 1942 and ultimately to Brisbane, Australia. Jacoby's quest for truth brought him in contact with luminaries such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of the Republic of China, and U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The title is a bit of misdirection; only the last third of the book details the exciting escape from the Philippine province of Bataan that Jacoby and his wife, screenwriter and foreign correspondent Annalee Whitmore, undertook on a blockade runner. However, Lascher succeeds in highlighting Jacoby's brief yet important life using never before published letters and interviews. VERDICT This work will find itself at home among other World War II biographies and memoirs such as Elizabeth M. Norton's We Band of Angels. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/16.]--Maria Bagshaw, Elgin Community Coll. Lib., IL

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016

When the Japanese started bombing Manila on New Year's Eve in 1941, newly married journalists Mel and Annalee Jacoby barely escaped, then spent the rest of the war just one island ahead of the ever-invading Japanese troops as they continued their reporting. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2016
Two journalists caught in war and love.In 1936, when Stanford undergraduate Melville Jacoby first visited China on a student exchange program, he immediately felt drawn to the region and to travel. "The itch is perpetual," he confessed. Jacoby returned to Stanford to focus his studies on Asian affairs and journalism, and by 1939, he had gathered enough writing assignments for a return to Asia. Briefly back in the United States, he met and fell in love with Annalee Whitmore, a writer who shared his fascination with the Far East. In 1941, she followed him there, and the two married. When journalist Lascher discovered that Mel Jacoby was his cousin, he was inspired to find out as much as he could about the man political journalist Theodore White called "one of the greatest U.S. war correspondents." The result is a gripping, impressively researched debut, both a biography of Jacoby and a history of Asia in the throes of war. Mel and Annalee soon settled in Manila, where Mel became Time magazine's Far East bureau chief; his reporting gave America its only "window onto the buildup for war in the Pacific." Lascher ably conveys the frustration of Army officers with the "Europe First" strategy, which left them without necessary supplies and soldiers. He chronicles Japan's increasing belligerence, the Nanking massacre, unceasing bombing, and internment of reporters. Fearing for their lives, Mel and Annalee left Manila, burning piles of notes before they fled to Corregidor. From there, they closely followed the war, including the "subdivision of hell" on the Bataan Peninsula. Soon, though, they needed to escape once more, this time making a slow, dangerous journey to Australia, traveling by boat only at night. From Melbourne, they learned of the Bataan Death March, which killed between 7,000 and 10,000 Americans and Filipinos. From interviews and archival documents, Lascher creates a seamless narrative of daring and dedication.

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Starred review from June 1, 2016
This propulsive narrative will remind readers of Christopher J. Koch's 1979 novel The Year of Living Dangerously (and the film based on it). Journalists trapped in a foreign country at the brink of collapse form the central tension in both stories, but Koch was writing fiction, while Lascher's account is true, based on his own reporting. It starts with Lascher's grandmother showing him a beat-up leather case containing an elegant manual Corona typewriter, the one that a cousin unknown to Lascher, Melville Jacoby, used to type reports from China as a foreign correspondent for Time and Life during WWII. Lascher moves to the photo albums and boxes of letters, cables, and film canisters in his grandmother's attic, all primary materials that resulted in his continuing investigation and this remarkable book, which is part history, part a celebration of war correspondence, but, mostly, a love story. Jacoby and his wife, Annalee, moved to China one month after their marriage and were working as journalists during the Japanese bombing of Manila in 1941. They had worked to gain acceptance by the Chinese but were certain to be executed if Japan took over, necessitating a quick departure from China and an island-hopping escape from the Pacific with the Japanese advancing behind them. Lascher (and, through Lascher, Jacoby) conveys the privation, danger, and romance of this time in an utterly detailed and beguiling way. With Jacoby's own photographs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)