As a political tool, Pearl Harbour remains a bedrock of contemporary US foreign policy. Recall the war games performed by the US Navy's Pacific fleet in July this year as an example. When the USS Bonhomme Richard left Pearl Harbour there was a collective salute of the USS Arizona, sunk on 7 December 1941, the “day of infamy.” These maneuvers, counterbalancing China, were anticipatory in nature.

Rosenberg's work answers our need to position such happenings within the chronology of Pearl Harbour's deployment as a cultural icon. As such, it joins studies of national memory such as Roger Dingman's Ghost of War (1997) that concern themselves with how military incidents are contested in time and space, and across racial boundaries. There is no comparative investigation of Japanese remembrance, and nor does Rosenberg break any new ground in purely theoretical terms. The book is rather intended as a case study of national memory's ideological reproduction, and imparts a clear sense of Pearl Harbour's unique “living” significance within America's cultural landscape. This is facilitated by an exposé of Pearl Harbour's iconic evolution across the media, from televised documentaries to “big-screen” cinematic film and from war memorials to Internet websites. Rosenberg's style does not concede anything to this breadth in material. Neither overburdened nor spare, her work strikes the right tenor given this subject's appeal beyond academic circles. Indeed, one almost suspects that she has taken advantage of her likely extra-scholarly readership to “set the record straight” with them in matters of historical credibility (155–58). In this way she capitalizes on Pearl Harbour's tendency, as a subject, to attract an audience even as she seeks to describe the same.

Structurally, A Date Which Will Live is divided between the five decades immediately after the event, followed by a second section addressing more recent concerns falling between 1991 and 11 September 2001. Issues familiar to historians of the period, such as the backdoor controversy and the culpability (or lack thereof) of US military personnel, are given their just treatement. Rosenberg has also devoted considerable attention to the debates surrounding commemoration ceremonies and memorial construction, such elements standing forth as particularly apposite examples of Pearl Harbour's cultural capital. Occasionally the context of her work, as in the investigation into issues specific to Japanese Americans in chapter 8, somewhat overwhelms its subject and leads to a feeling of imbalance. That aside, the fullness of this study is quite apparent.