Like Patton at his best: polished, precise and persuasive.
George Patton revolutionizes warfare while struggling with his inner demons during times of peace.
Axelrod (Patton on Leadership, 2001, etc.) kicks off editor General Wesley Clark’s “Great Generals Series” with a compact but insightful volume on one of the most controversial military leaders in American history, a man who, in his own mind, was born and bred to be a warrior. Descended from a long line of military men on his father’s side, Patton decided at a young age to make war his business. Accolades and controversy followed him in equal measure from the moment he arrived at West Point in 1904. For every brilliant tactical maneuver he conceived and executed, he managed to alienate those around him, whether by cheating on his wife, offending his fellow officers or being too hard on his men. It was Patton’s shocking abuse of a shell-shocked private—and proclivity for putting his foot in his mouth—that sidelined him for nearly a year during World War II, a period of time during which Patton’s lightning strikes might have inflicted heavy damage and, perhaps, shortened the war. Patton was a walking contradiction: a pious man who cursed like a sailor, a man who knew peace through war and warred with himself in times of peace and a man who projected confidence while enduring excruciating bouts of self-doubt. For the most part, Axelrod holds nothing back in painting the portrait of a man who was something of anathema to a democratic society leery of having a large standing army: a professional warrior whose sole goal in life was to be in the thick of battle and emerge covered in glory. At times, Axelrod stretches in trying to justify some of Patton’s more glaring faults, but this can perhaps be attributed to the nature of the series. Still, this is a concise yet in-depth look at a fascinating man whose myth, in many ways, outshines the facts.
Like Patton at his best: polished, precise and persuasive.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-4039-7139-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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