Accomplished and comprehensive but overly long. John Keegan covered most of the bases in his 200-page Winston Churchill...
A sprawling study of the lord of Overlord—and Gallipoli and many other imperial campaigns.
“War, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would play at,” wrote Winston Churchill after the Battle of Omdurman, when British forces defeated an Islamist army still revered by the militant faithful. It was an ugly battle, but it would not be the ugliest Churchill witnessed. Military historian and former officer D’Este (Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life, 2002, etc.) finds in the half-American British leader a profound attachment to all things martial—as a child, he writes, Churchill had a vast collection of toy soldiers and a keen sense of how to deploy them—but also a wariness of those who reveled too greatly in martial glories. As a young man, having “stumbled into adulthood from a stormy and rebellious childhood,” Churchill felt he was an avatar of an ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, born for war and equipped to understand its every aspect as both scholar and practitioner. He fought on horseback in the Sudan, Egypt, India and South Africa before ascending, perhaps improbably, to the Admiralty. There he committed well-known tactical errors in planning the campaign at Gallipoli, and effectively punished himself by resigning to serve as an officer on the Western Front. In the years after World War I he emerged as a skillful military thinker determined not to repeat the largely political errors he had made, even though, during that time, he slashed the army budget, “unusual behavior indeed for a man who had played such an important role in the defense of Britain.” Churchill did, however, advocate rearmament just in time for Hitler’s rise and skillfully managed his share in the alliance that defeated him, even if voters sick of war turned him out of office as prime minister as soon as the conflict ended.
Accomplished and comprehensive but overly long. John Keegan covered most of the bases in his 200-page Winston Churchill (2002), which nonspecialist readers will prefer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-057573-1
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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