A diverting view of some Americans' roles in this century-old conflict. For a more fine-grained focus on the ordinary man,...
World War I as seen through the private writings of American participants.
Using Gen. John Pershing (1860-1948), the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, as a centerpiece, Legacy Project founder and bestselling author Carroll (Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History, 2013, etc.) sets the ambitious task of telling "the story of the American experience in World War I…primarily through the letters, journals and other personal writings that Pershing and his countrymen wrote throughout the conflict." The narrative features an eclectic cast of characters. Some were leaders famous at the time—e.g., President Woodrow Wilson and Gen. Leonard Wood—while others became famous later, including George Patton, George Marshall, and Harry Truman. Most were humble individuals caught up in the war: ambulance drivers, fledgling aviators, an Army nurse, and soldiers in all-black regiments who found themselves used as stevedores or seconded to the French army once they were "over there." The personal anecdotes are engaging and well-told; the selected written materials, particularly the ones from the ordinary people, ring with a down-home authenticity and an earnest moral naiveté impossible to imagine in 21st-century youth. However, even as Carroll limits his attention to writers directly connected to the war, his attempt to present the viewpoints of everyone from president to private, while putting it all in the context of the flow of events, necessarily restricts readers’ contact with most individuals to little more than a superficial introduction. Nor are the source materials always particularly helpful. While Pershing's tender letters to his young son and to female companions (his wife had died in a fire) help to humanize a man who cultivated a stony public image, they do not illuminate his conduct of the war or his professional relations with others; rather, they seem to stand to one side as unexpected curiosities.
A diverting view of some Americans' roles in this century-old conflict. For a more fine-grained focus on the ordinary man, see Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow (2012).Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-648-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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