A fresh, readable look at events and players that, though well-known to history, deserve to be studied for some time to come.
On the forging of the wartime Winston Churchill, a figure iconic to this day, in the crucible of events that took place in the spring of 1940.
That Churchill was a gifted writer and speechmaker is well-known; that he drank alcohol by the bucket is not news, either. In this work of popular history, a tie-in to a forthcoming film, screenwriter and novelist McCarten (Death of a Superhero, 2007, etc.) does venture a novel thesis along the way: that in May 1940, Churchill was prepared to strike a peace deal with Hitler, “as utterly repugnant as that idea might now seem.” Admitting that the thesis is both conjectural and unpopular, the author buttresses it with an argument that seems reasonable, if one that academic historians would likely refute. In the end, of course, Churchill chose instead to stand and fight. McCarten does good service by showing how Churchill used his pen to advance Britain’s cause; the author engages in a highly useful sort of rhetorical analysis that examines Churchill’s use of repeated words, phrases, and motifs and his subtle reference to other classic addresses and essays: “In stark contrast to Hitler’s egomaniacal speeches—which emphasized the word ‘I’—Churchill…knew the power of ‘We’ when exhorting the British public to take up such a fearful struggle.” McCarten sometimes seems to go a bridge too far, as with an invented dialogue between Churchill and Lord Halifax, but his reasoning is generally sound. His study is also timely given not just his own film, but also the recent release of Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk, recounting a key event that led to Churchill’s famous “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets” speech, by which he aimed “to give voice to the people of Britain.” Churchill succeeded admirably, and so, in the main, does McCarten.
A fresh, readable look at events and players that, though well-known to history, deserve to be studied for some time to come.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-274952-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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