A no-holds-barred portrait of a controversial figure and a feast for World War II aficionados.
An examination of the reputation of Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), at one point the most admired of all the generals on the Allied side of World War II.
Borneman (American Spring: Lexington, Concord, and the Road to Revolution, 2014, etc.) draws on a wealth of sources to give a clear, full-length portrait of MacArthur, who carefully massaged his image with frequent press releases. In the early chapters, the author recapitulates MacArthur’s career before 1941 when, as commander in the Philippines, he was caught unprepared when the Japanese attacked the day after Pearl Harbor. A desperate defense on the Bataan peninsula failed to hold the Japanese. After direct orders from the president, MacArthur evacuated to Australia to organize Allied efforts to stem the tide. Despite his loss of the Philippines, he was widely seen as a hero, something Americans desperately needed in the dark days of 1942. Borneman chronicles the buildup of American forces and the step-by-step progress of the general’s return to the Philippines and the ultimate defeat of Japan. Stories of his infighting with other U.S. commanders make up much of the narrative. The author portrays MacArthur as a prima donna who regularly inflated his own exploits and bad-mouthed anyone who got between him and his perceived destiny. But Franklin Roosevelt and Gen. George Marshall recognized MacArthur’s value both as a general and as a symbol, and they tried to keep him happy, as Borneman amply shows with quotes from memos and messages. The author shows a grudging respect for his subject despite an understandable impatience with some of his less admirable qualities. These included declaring battles won when there was still serious resistance—which he left to subordinates to clean up while he moved on in an aura of victory. On the other hand, he showed real personal courage, frequently touring beachheads only hours after troops had landed. The book concludes with him presiding over the Japanese surrender in the fall of 1945, one of his finest moments.
A no-holds-barred portrait of a controversial figure and a feast for World War II aficionados.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-40532-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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