An absorbing portrait of the growth of Eisenhower the man and a fine analysis of the accomplishments of Eisenhower the...
Exhaustive, highly readable study of Ike the soldier, from his modest Kansas origins through V-E Day.
Descended from a long line of religious pacifists, Dwight D. Eisenhower was to end his political career by decrying the “military-industrial complex.” Yet, retired US Army officer and military historian D'Este (Patton: A Genius for War, 1993) points out, although he was president of the US, Eisenhower “would have been elated merely to be remembered as a soldier.” Thus, D'Este limits his treatment to Ike's military accomplishments. The first was graduating in the class of 1915 at West Point, where his indifference to discipline won him many demerits. After WWI, which he sat out as a trainer of the infant Tank Corps, Eisenhower distinguished himself in staff assignments, through associations with key officers who aided his climb up the Army ladder. D'Este portrays his subject as a complex personality, beneath whose sunny smile and easygoing manner lay ruthless ambition and a first-rate intelligence. After an important stint in 1925 at the Staff School in Fort Leavenworth, Eisenhower commenced a career as a high-level staff officer, mostly engaged in turbulent service stateside and in the Philippines to the imperious, histrionic Douglas MacArthur. After WWII began, Eisenhower's mastery of the problems of industrial mobilization endeared him to George Marshall and won him assignments as strategic planner for the Mediterranean campaigns. The bulk of D'Este's account is devoted to Ike's masterful command of the Allied effort in Europe, which entailed brilliant diplomacy as much as military acumen. The biographer not only conveys the strategic problems Eisenhower faced, but shows how the general’s personal qualities—his unpretentiousness, single-minded dedication to the task, and sensitivity to the difficulty of forging unity between two proud allies who were often mistrustful of each other—ultimately drove the Allied war machine to victory.
An absorbing portrait of the growth of Eisenhower the man and a fine analysis of the accomplishments of Eisenhower the general.Pub Date: June 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-5686-6
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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