An informative biography aviation enthusiasts and military-history buffs will find most appealing.
Overshadowed by figures like Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Army Air Corps commander Henry Harold “Hap” Arnold deserves just as much credit for the Allied victory in World War II, this new biography argues.
Commissioned a lieutenant in the infantry upon graduating from West Point, Arnold’s interest in aviation began in 1909 when he saw his first airplane in flight. Taught to fly by the Wright Brothers, Arnold transferred to the aeronautical division of the Army Signal Corps and began his distinguished career as a military aviation pioneer. A protégé of the controversial visionary general Billy Mitchell, Arnold rose to command the Army Air Corps immediately prior to the U.S. entry into World War II and directed its expansion into the largest and most powerful airborne military force in the world. An advocate of technological research and development, he oversaw the development of the intercontinental bomber, the jet fighter, the extensive use of radar, global airlift and atomic warfare as mainstays of modern air power. In this admiring, detailed biography, Yenne chronicles Arnold’s many accomplishments, explaining how the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan Arnold conceived contributed to their defeat. Curiously lacking is any discussion of the highly controversial decision of the Allies to shift from strategic to area bombings of Germany and Japan after their defeat was inevitable.
An informative biography aviation enthusiasts and military-history buffs will find most appealing. (photos, appendices, bibliography, index) (Biography. 13 & up)Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62157-081-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Regnery History
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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