A worthy contribution to the Civil War literature.
A well-crafted study of “two failed men with great potential” without whom the Civil War might have ended differently.
Flood (Hitler, 1989) opens with a dispiriting account of Ulysses S. Grant, the Mexican War hero and former Army captain who, in 1860 at the age of 38, found himself a clerk in a leather-goods store in northwestern Illinois; it would take a cataclysmic war for him to have a chance to redeem himself. As for Sherman, the beginning of the conflict found him heading a military school in Louisiana; after fighting at Bull Run, he was assigned to head a force on the Kentucky-Tennessee frontier, where he seems to have struggled with a few personal demons that for a time debilitated him. Sherman was relieved of command, the local papers reporting that he was insane; later, thanks to the efforts of Gen. Henry Halleck, Sherman was rehabilitated and eventually allowed to raise a division of his own. Assigned to the western campaign under Grant, Sherman got his first taste of his commander’s ways at Shiloh, where Sherman was prepared to counsel retreat but held himself from doing so when Grant replied to his remark, “We’ve had the devil’s own day of it, haven’t we,” with, “Yes. . . . Lick ’em tomorrow, though.” What was to have been Beauregard’s victory turned out to be a great Southern defeat, and the beginning of the end for the South. Flood’s overarching theme of Grant and Sherman’s friendship, born in fire, is sometimes swept under by a surfeit of Big Picture historical detail, but in those instances, the book becomes a careful survey of the Civil War in the West. Of interest to students of early modern warfare, in particular, is Flood’s account of how Sherman, always in close contact with Grant, conducted his scorched-earth campaigns in Georgia and South Carolina—and how both generals detested the press, a theme that resounds in our own time.
A worthy contribution to the Civil War literature.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-16600-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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