Brief, painless biographies and reasonable, if traditional, appraisals of the qualities required to make war.
Evaluations of the performances of nine leaders, from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher, who commanded their nations’ military forces.
Veteran historian Roberts (Churchill: Walking With Destiny, 2018, etc.) is no stranger to many of his subjects—he’s written multiple books about both Napoleon and Churchill—and holds strong opinions on all, although there are few surprises. All nine of the leaders he examines were blessed with supreme confidence and “an absolute faith in their tribes being superior to their antagonists….They believed in what is now called national exceptionalism, as tribal leaders throughout history have.” Napoleon, Churchill, Hitler, de Gaulle, and Thatcher took for granted that they were destined for great things. Three career military officers—Horatio Nelson, George Marshall, and Eisenhower—never gave the impression that personal ambition, in itself entirely acceptable, trumped an obsession with smiting the enemy. All of the author’s subjects were ruthless; Hitler and Stalin may stand out, but Roberts delivers unnerving examples from others, Churchill in particular. All were compulsive workaholics except Hitler, who was oddly lazy and the least intelligent. Since war, as Carl von Clausewitz put it, is the continuation of politics by other means, it’s essential to possess a sixth sense for politics, which turns out to require the same talent for timing, observation, and ability to predict an opponent’s behavior as a battlefield commander. However, many successful military leaders who flopped on politics (Pompey, Erich Ludendorff, Philippe Pétain, Douglas MacArthur) don’t make Roberts’ list—or anyone else’s. Many evaluations once universally accepted are now controversial. Thus, Roberts writes that Marshall’s chilly reserve won Franklin Roosevelt’s deepest respect, but other historians point out that Roosevelt did business with a breezy informality and preferred the advice of men he could schmooze with.
Brief, painless biographies and reasonable, if traditional, appraisals of the qualities required to make war.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-52238-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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