A 120-page monograph cannot replace a complete biography, the best being Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace...
When he left office in 1961, historians considered Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) a second-rate president. His reputation’s steady rise is not interrupted by this admiring, opinionated account by veteran British journalist and historian Johnson (Mozart, 2013, etc.).
Although he remained in the United States during World War II and spent two decades in the shrunken peacetime Army, Eisenhower’s talents were well-known. Gen. Douglas MacArthur kept him as an aide for nine years, and George Marshall summoned him to Washington a week after Pearl Harbor. Commanding the largest military force in history (20 times the size of MacArthur’s), Eisenhower kept Allied generals focused on the effort against the Nazis, even when they were often fighting among themselves. Victory made him a national hero, and he easily won the 1952 election over Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. During the 1950s, the prospect of World War III seemed imminent. Several joint chiefs wanted to get on with it, but Eisenhower kept the military firmly under his thumb. He receives credit for ending the Korean War but little for refusing to strike back at China’s threats to Formosa; his military advisers were raring to go. Despite national panic that followed the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Eisenhower quashed efforts to launch crash military programs. John F. Kennedy, a far more aggressive Cold Warrior, spent the 1960 campaign denouncing Eisenhower for underestimating the communist threat. Johnson astutely points out that Eisenhower enjoyed being president since, unlike generals Washington, Jackson and Grant, his best qualities were not those of a warrior but a staff officer: efficiency, administration, economy and flexibility.
A 120-page monograph cannot replace a complete biography, the best being Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace (2012). Though Johnson’s well-known right-wing views deliver an occasional jolt, this book remains a thoroughly entertaining introduction.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01682-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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