Austin Hoyt

In just 60 years Chicago grew from a remote, swampy frontier town into one of the most explosively alive cities in the world. Captains of industry built empires through innovation, ingenuity, determination, and sheer ruthlessness, while the labor of millions of working men and women -- most of them immigrants from Ireland and Northern Europe -- helped reinvent the way America did business.

The last year or so of the war in the Pacific during WWII. It picks up at the point where the inevitability of an American victory seems certain--it's only a matter of time. It then discusses the ferocity of the Japanese defense, the American bombing campaign, the kamikaze, the Emperor and his resistance to surrender and the American feelings towards a negotiated peace.