“What the Japanese left behind in 1943 is worthy of exploration, not just to catch echoes of history before they fade, but to grasp the new strategic relevance of this area. Coyle’s Kiska helps us understand what this most remote spot in North America has to offer.”
— Mead Treadwell, lieutenant governor of Alaska
"Brendan Coyle weaves prose and images beautifully to evoke Kiska, a place seemingly forgotten over time, as a living landscape, a museum, and a onetime battlefield returning to nature."
— James P. Delgado, maritime archaeologist, historian, and author
“Brendan Coyle has done a magnificent job of documenting and putting into context the World War II remnants of one of the few unspoiled battlegrounds remaining on the North American continent. Kiska, a valor in the Pacific Monument site, is a virtual outdoor museum; a place to visit if we are to fully understand the largely forgotten Aleutian Campaign in a remote part of the world.”
— John Haile Cloe, retired military historian and author
“A remarkable new book. . . . Boots, ceramics, guns, cannons, carts and trucks remain where the Japanese left them. American airplanes shot down during bombing runs rest where they crashed. Telephone poles from abandoned communications links teeter sideways, awaiting their inevitable fall. Sluices disrupt streams where water was drawn for the occupying forces. Trenches, dugouts, bunkers and barracks are slowly being reclaimed by the soil. Old roadbeds cut across the landscape. Ships list and rust just offshore. It’s a world of ghosts, bearing witness to all-but-forgotten events that both parties to the conflict—long since reconciled and now close friends—have fortunately put behind them.”
— Alaska Dispatch
In Kiska: The Japanese Occupation of an Alaska Island, maritime historian Brendan Coyle recounts his 51-day stay on the island in which he documented the remaining ghosts of this far-flung battlefield—from pairs of shoes strewn among wildflowers to rusting submarines. The only thing the book is really missing is any trace of a living human being."
— The Japan Times
“Few adventurers get to the western Aleutian Islands, but Coyle takes us there so we vicariously see the war carnage, derelict aircraft, mini-submarines, and abandoned ships and feel the temperatures and humidity as our cold, wet feet maneuver around mounds of ammunition encroached by sedges and bright yellow globe flowers, all diminishing evidence of the war.”
— Alaska History
“A visual tour-de-force.”
— Polar Times