by Nigel Hamilton ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016
The book is strongly pro-Roosevelt, but Hamilton gives a solid inside view of the strategic thinking that went into the...
A detailed look at Franklin Roosevelt’s role in the Allied strategy midway through World War II, with an emphasis on his relations with Winston Churchill.
Hamilton (The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942, 2015, etc.) shows Roosevelt’s clear vision of how to win the war and how to create a postwar society that would prevent such wars from recurring. Defeating and disarming Germany and Japan was just the first step; creating an international structure to prevent them from rearming was the only way to ensure a peaceful future. To achieve this, Roosevelt had to convince his own allies—even his own generals—that his approach would achieve the desired outcome. Stalin understandably wanted a second front to force Hitler to commit troops elsewhere. Churchill thought the way to attack Germany was through Italy or the Balkans, the “soft underbelly.” The U.S. Chiefs of Staff wanted to launch an invasion through France before their troops were battle-hardened or to put America’s main effort into defeating Japan. Hamilton is particularly hard (perhaps too hard) on Churchill, who had the advantage of writing a postwar history that justified his actions. Except for the U.S. interception of Japanese Adm. Yamamoto’s plane, there is almost nothing on the action in the Pacific theater. But Hamilton nicely documents his account with contemporary sources ranging from Roosevelt’s cousin (and confidante) Daisy Suckley and Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King to Joseph Goebbels, as well as official documents from the major players. The author offers plenty of colorful period detail, including the kinds of cocktails Roosevelt served Churchill and his family and the furnishings of the lavish private home Roosevelt occupied in Casablanca while attending the Allied summit during the North African campaign. As a result, the book presents a convincing portrait of its main subject, strengthening readers’ confidence in the author’s conclusions.
The book is strongly pro-Roosevelt, but Hamilton gives a solid inside view of the strategic thinking that went into the campaign against Hitler as America laid the groundwork for the D-Day invasion the following year.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-27911-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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