While the sections about Frederick’s childhood and reign are well-written and informative, it is the war coverage that will...
Prussia owes its reputation as the personification of militarism to Frederick the Great (1712-1786), who, though mocked by his own father as a weakling, foreshadowed Napoleon’s military genius.
British Academy fellow Blanning (The Romantic Revolution: A History, 2012, etc.) divides his biography into childhood, the Seven Years’ War period, and Frederick’s domestic efforts and policies. Throughout, the author explores and questions his subject’s sexuality. Frederick’s court was homosocial, even homoerotic, and lacked women. There are plenty of hints in his writings, and in those about him, but never a definitive statement. Blanning leaves it to readers to decide. Frederick despised Christianity and the Catholic Church. His music, his flute, and his art collection were his escapes from enforced religion. He corresponded with Voltaire for more than 40 years and accepted counsel only from him. Upon acceding to the throne, Frederick first dismissed his wife and then set out to surpass in war and conquest the father who abused him physically and psychologically. He invaded Silesia, the first of three Silesian wars; the third was better known as the Seven Years’ War. In the middle section, Blanning concentrates on that war, demonstrating his abilities as a military historian. Frederick built a top-notch military machine, and his highly trained, devoted soldiers were well-provisioned; they not only followed him, they often saved him from his own errors. The author shows Frederick as inexperienced, inept, and overconfident. During the war, his reconnaissance was faulty, and the intelligence he received was inadequate. Facing numerically superior enemies, this absolute commander succeeded as they failed to coordinate attacks, their councils debated actions, and parliaments refused funding. His decisions to attack were quick and often wrong. As Blanning notes, “when madness succeeds, it has to be renamed audacity.” Frederick made many mistakes, but his will and determination ensured success.
While the sections about Frederick’s childhood and reign are well-written and informative, it is the war coverage that will win over readers looking for a different view of the Seven Years’ War.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6812-8
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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