The book lacks a coherent theme, but the biographies are a cut above popular middlebrow history.
Intelligent but abridged lives of six accomplished military leaders.
Despite the subtitle, prolific historian McLynn (Richard and John: Kings at War, 2007, etc.) does not get inside the minds of his subjects—Spartacus, Attila the Hun, Richard the Lionheart, Cortés, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and Napoleon—but his meticulous, opinionated writing will satisfy readers who take their history seriously. Napoleon and Spartacus were the only brilliant tacticians. Attila, Richard and Ieyasu were pugnacious national leaders, and Cortés was a brutally ambitious adventurer. McLynn delivers cradle-to-grave biographies but deals mostly with their campaigns, which vividly illustrate Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics carried out by other means. In the absence of politics, war is futile—Rome refused to negotiate with Spartacus, so his victories gained nothing. Attila, Richard and Cortés foolishly believed that fighting was an end in itself, so they fell victim to more sophisticated rivals. Ieyasu, a mediocre general, employed guile and compromise to solidify his victories and then to maintain his power. He was the sole warrior to die peacefully in bed, and his Tokugawa shogunate ruled a stable Japan for 250 years. The most intellectual of the six, Napoleon was also the only leader never threatened by internal rivalries, but his naïve political dealings with Britain and Russia led to catastrophe. McLynn strains mightily to find a common thread, finally admitting that it doesn’t exist. Great conquerors turn out to be a mixed bunch with wildly disparate motives, personalities and levels of intelligence. All became historical superstars by crushing opponents on the battlefield, but this turned out to be the easy part—a lesson we are still learning.
The book lacks a coherent theme, but the biographies are a cut above popular middlebrow history.Pub Date: May 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-029-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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