"In Flags of Our Fathers [Bradley] wrote about how his father helped plant the American flag on the island of Iwo Jima during World War II. In The Imperial Cruise he asks why American servicemen like his father had to be fighting in the Pacific at all."
"Bradley's thesis in The Imperial Cruise is startling enough to reshape conventional wisdom about Roosevelt's presidency."
"'Here was the match that lit the fuse, and yet for decades we paid attention only to the dynamite,' Mr. Bradley writes. The flame to which he refers is Roosevelt's secret diplomacy with Japan and his encouragement of Japanese imperialism."
"Mr. Bradley builds The Imperial Cruise around the public relations event that its title describes: a 1905 voyage of the liner Manchuria during which the first daughter, Alice Roosevelt, and the future President William Howard Taft, then Roosevelt's secretary of war, docked in the countries that this book describes."
"Mr. Bradley... produces graphic, shocking evidence of the attitudes that his book describes... The toughest parts of this book re-reveal things we should already know... The Imperial Cruise is all too persuasive in its visions of history repeating itself."
"Roosevelt's 'inability to recognize third-world nationalism' is cited again and again, not simply as a prejudice but as an obstacle to effective policy."
"This book argues that Roosevelt's designation of the Japanese as born leaders and veritable Americans, worthy of imposing their own Monroe Doctrine on weaker nations like Korea, was a cataclysmic mistake."
Bradley "brings a reckless passion to The Imperial Cruise."
