An attentive consideration of the deep affection between a military legend and his son, of particular interest to those...
With the assistance of former Elle and Vogue contributor Scruby, the grandson of George S. Patton Jr. chronicles the relationship between his father and grandfather in this mélange of memoir, correspondence and biography.
The book opens with the fascinating correspondence exchanged between Gen. Patton and his son, George Patton IV, then a new cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point. The selected letters highlight the close relationship between father and son. Straight from the battlefront, Patton’s letters are solicitous and enthusiastic about the daily concerns of a cadet, while his son’s letters express encouragement for his father’s battle campaign and an eagerness to begin his own military career. Documentary filmmaker Benjamin Patton continues with a series of character studies of a wide array of people who figured prominently in his father’s life, including his wife, his developmentally disabled son (the author’s brother), a commanding officer and a nun. One such significant figure is Manfred Rommel, son of Patton Jr.’s chief military rival during World War II, Erwin Rommel, who was executed by Hitler for alleged disloyalty. These two sons of military legends began a friendship later in life when George Patton IV was stationed in Germany, and their mutual admiration for their fathers served to cement their unlikely friendship.
An attentive consideration of the deep affection between a military legend and his son, of particular interest to those already enthralled by Patton’s larger-than-life shadow.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-425-24351-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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