Historian Gordon Prange spent more than 35 years studying the attack on Pearl Harbor but died before publishing the results. Two coauthors finished the work and At Dawn We Slept (by Gordon Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine Dillon, Easton Press, 1981) is still the best account of how the war started. The book analyzes the attack in detail and answers a question that has long puzzled historians: How could the US have been caught so unprepared? Readers may not agree with the conclusion – that US commanders on the scene were inattentive – but the depth of the research makes a compelling case.
