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
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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