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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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