An engaging history, guided by an elegant, witty sense of characterization.
Distinguished man of letters and former Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief Korda (Journey to Revolution, 2006, etc.) stylishly and sympathetically restores Dwight D. Eisenhower to an eminent place in the military and political pantheon.
The author begins in 1942, when Ike gained instant fame as supreme commander of the European theater of operations and began the dogged strategic planning that would defeat Nazi Germany. The long-postponed Allied invasion of France finally took place on June 6, 1944, and it showcased Ike’s skillful ability to manage staggering logistics and bring together the kind of manpower that the effort demanded. His sincerity, grasp of detail and lack of ceremony made it impossible for even the British and French not to like the unassuming, hardworking general. Korda too is evidently enchanted by the decency of his subject, for whom “duty would always come first.” Unscholarly and outdoorsy in Mennonite Kansas, Ike escaped small-town Abilene by attending West Point. Second Lieutenant Eisenhower married Denver debutante Mamie Doud in 1916, and they began a trying, peripatetic Army life that required long absences on Ike’s part and enormous amounts of suffering and forgiveness on Mamie’s. After tours of duty in Panama and France, in 1932 Eisenhower found his first mentor in General Douglas MacArthur, under whom he worked for six years at the War Department and then in the Philippines, building up America’s “arsenal of democracy.” With the outbreak of World War II, Ike was summoned to London to make order out of chaos, squired around by glamorous volunteer driver Kay Summersby, who may or may not have been his lover. (The author demurely chooses not to judge.) Korda’s command of military history is impressive in the wartime chapters. He treats Eisenhower’s two-term presidency more summarily, but hails Ike’s little-regarded devotion to keeping America out of war and the groundwork laid for the Civil Rights movement.
An engaging history, guided by an elegant, witty sense of characterization.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-075665-9
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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