A solid, engaging life.
A welcome new biography of the ruthless Red Army general who defeated the Nazis and then spent decades alternately disgraced and rehabilitated in Soviet Russia.
Roberts (History/University College Cork; Stalin’s Wars, 2007, etc.) relies less on his subject’s self-glorifying memoirs and more on newly available archival material in Russia. Zhukov’s relationship with Stalin emerges as a key, fascinating aspect to the story, as Zhukov, a rising cavalry commander in the rapidly modernizing Red Army, managed to escape being a victim of the army purges of 1937-38 and was then appointed on his first important mission for Stalin: to “conduct a purge” of the Japanese from the Mongolian-Manchurian border in 1939. The victory at Khalkhin-Gol was the Red Army’s first real triumph, deflecting the Japanese from Russia and establishing Zhukov as a brilliant offensive field commander who kept his cool under fire and was not averse to administering draconian discipline to his own men. Stalin had neglected defensive preparation of the Motherland in favor of the counterattack, and he summoned Zhukov after the disastrous response to Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. From victory at Yel’nya to saving Leningrad and Moscow (“no surrender and no retreat; counterattack wherever and whenever possible”) to Operation Bagration in Belorussia, Zhukov spared no number of Russia soldiers in his path to victory. Roberts spends a good deal of space on Zhukov’s mysterious postwar dismissal to the provinces, due no doubt to his overweening confidence and “Bonapartist” self-aggrandizement, which grated on Stalin. He resurfaced supremely under Khrushchev and died a fitting hero in 1974.
A solid, engaging life.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6692-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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