Not great literature by any means, but likely to interest students of aerial warfare and WWII history.
A memoir of high-altitude warfare by a well-known figure in WWII history.
The Memphis Belle was one of the new generation of long-range bombers developed by Boeing Aircraft at the start of WWII, a plane that first-time author Morgan and collaborator Powers (Flags of Our Fathers, not reviewed) lovingly describe as “silver and elegant and indomitable-looking on the tarmac, bristling with armature, that massive reassuring tailfin crowning its splendid architecture.” Powers piloted it and a crew straight out of a Hollywood movie (Clark Gable, in fact, came along for a ride while he was making training films for the Air Corps) for an impressive total of 25 bombing runs over Nazi-occupied Europe—impressive because the odds were very much against any plane’s surviving for so long (as Morgan notes, 82 percent of his original bomber group had been blown out of the sky within the first two years of the war). When the Memphis Belle completed its 25th mission on May 17, 1943, plane and crew were sent on a barnstorming tour of America to promote the war effort and sell government bonds. Not content to remain behind the lines, Morgan pressed to be reassigned to the Pacific: “I had some payback I needed to deliver to the Japanese for what they did to us at Pearl Harbor,” he explains. Payback he got. Under General Curtis LeMay, he planned and executed the hellish 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, using a napalm bomb “of fiendish effectiveness” that killed or badly wounded more than 120,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians in the space of an hour. Morgan narrates these results with an unsettling satisfaction and no apparent remorse—a tone that will trouble some readers but may satisfy others.
Not great literature by any means, but likely to interest students of aerial warfare and WWII history.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94610-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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