Students of strategy and tactics, as well as of the Civil War, will find this a useful look at a storied partnership.
A study of the working relationship between Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, masters of strategy.
“His equal can never be found for fighting; for planning, Genl Lee stands unsurpassed; for both, I place Genl Jackson at the head of any list.” So noted a Virginia cavalryman in his diary after Jackson died as a result of wounds suffered under “friendly fire.” The Army of Northern Virginia consistently fought against the odds, almost always outnumbered and outgunned by Union forces. Even so, thanks to strategic innovation and a certain derring-do—to say nothing of a willingness to expend lives for their cause—that force’s chief generals managed to outfight their opponents. Jackson and Lee, writes Keller (History/United States Army War Coll.; Chancellorsville and the Germans, 2010, etc.), were friends who relied on each other for advice and leadership, Jackson taking the role of the chief strategic adviser who executed Lee’s orders even when he disagreed with them. (In this respect, Jackson was much different from James Longstreet, who, Keller notes, always believed that his own strategic ideas were best and sulked when Lee overrode them.) Jackson had no shortage of ideas and plans, even venturing policy suggestions that led to such things as the “first national draft in American history.” Together, Lee and Jackson developed early plans that would take the war north to such battlefields as Gettysburg, a battle that might have turned out much differently had Jackson not died in 1863. With Jackson’s death, a partnership of near equals ended, and Lee reorganized his army while facing what Keller considers a thorny dilemma: “how to ‘build’ another Jackson-type subordinate in [Richard] Ewell and [A.P.] Hill within an extremely time-constrained and pressure-filled environment.” He could not, and even though the Army of Northern Virginia managed to fight on until 1865, Jackson’s loss was a critical turning point.
Students of strategy and tactics, as well as of the Civil War, will find this a useful look at a storied partnership.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-134-4
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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