So I’m reviewing a collection of Pacific War oral histories titled, weirdly enough, The Pacific War Remembered. It’s a reissue of a book first published during the mid-1980s. It consists of compact testimonials from American protagonists in the greatest of all sea wars. And a sprightly read it is. The book is enlightening in several respects. First, let’s wax philosophical. Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson maintained that “there is properly no history; only biography.” In other words, history is the sum of the biographies of all the individuals, living or dead, who make up humanity. If Emerson has it right, the more individual stories come to light, the richer and more textured our understanding of the past.