feats, engineering marvels, political plots and business chicanery, racial clashes and brutal wars. It is a chronicle complete with little-known facts and turning points, but always focused on the remarkable people at the center of events, among them the America-loving Japanese ambassador to Washington on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Russian builder of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and a Hawaiian queen during the first period of Western competition for the islands. Let the Sea Make a Noise . . . is a gripping account of the rise and fall of the empires in the last, vast, unexplored corner of the habitable earth -- an area occupying one-sixth of the globe. There is no other book that covers these same subjects in this wealth of detail and with such chronological scope.

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