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 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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