Soon to be bedside reading for West Point cadets and budding generals. We’ll hope that Eisenhower follows with an account of...
An excellent appreciation of Dwight Eisenhower’s skills as a military commander, though by a biased observer—the general’s son, himself a distinguished officer and historian.
Now in his ninth decade, John Eisenhower (Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott, 1997, etc.) had thus far not written at length about his father. Students of military history will be glad that he did, however, for here he offers observations that other, more remote biographers have not ventured or elaborated—in particular, on the matter of Ike’s influences as a junior officer. Perhaps surprisingly, given the subsequent movie treatment, one of the strongest of those influences was George S. Patton, who, with Eisenhower, courted official disgrace after WWI by arguing for the supremacy of tank warfare in ground combat. They were right, of course, as WWII bore out; of that future war, Patton effusively predicted, “Ike would be the Robert E. Lee and Patton would be Ike’s Stonewall Jackson.” That prediction was less accurate, as readers will discover. Elsewhere, Eisenhower considers the curious role that Douglas MacArthur had on Ike’s career, then goes on to study closely Ike’s record as theater commander for the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944. That close account turns up some criticisms, along with a few surprises, almost all of them having to do with the political aspect of balancing the egos and ambitions of the likes of Bernard Montgomery, Charles de Gaulle, and Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Patton and MacArthur. Eisenhower, for example, remarks that the Battle of the Bulge might have had a more satisfactory resolution had Ike ordered General Omar Bradley “to remove his tactical headquarters from Luxembourg to Namur, where he could control the main battle to blunt the German spearheads.” Such comments will be more meaningful to knowledgeable students of WWII tactics than to general readers, but in the main, Eisenhower’s account is nontechnical and free of jargon—and carries you along from start to finish.
Soon to be bedside reading for West Point cadets and budding generals. We’ll hope that Eisenhower follows with an account of his father’s presidential years.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4474-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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