In this author talk, executive editor Marc LiVecche speaks with award-winning military historian Richard Frank about Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War, published earlier this year. The first of a planned trilogy, Tower of Skulls offers Frank's grim reappraisal of the Second World War's Pacific Theater. Topics include the ghastly nature of Imperial Japan's war making, the story of wartime China and the crucial and under-acknowledge role China played in helping defeat the Japanese, the impact the deeply flawed General Joseph Stilwell had on both China's ability to effectively prosecute the war as well as on China's future, the heroism of British General Marshall Slim, and the obscene death toll of civilians under Japanese occupation throughout the Pacific. In Frank's ambition to count "all the dead" and to insist on their shared humanity, a context is formed in which to weigh the heavy decisions on how to end the costliest war in human history as quickly as possible.