A compelling and convincing history lesson.
A strong argument that “if any one human being is responsible for winning World War II, it is FDR.”
Most scholars agree that industry was the deciding factor in the war, but Nelson, bestselling author of Pearl Harbor and Rocket Men, gives it his full and expert attention. He points out that one American Revolution established the country in 1776, but another began in 1933 Franklin Roosevelt. His administration created an explosive expansion of industry, managerial expertise, national infrastructure, and government-business cooperation that literally drowned the enemies in weapons. Nelson reminds readers that FDR took office in a nation awash in unemployment, poverty, and starvation. Unsure how to act, he listened to his advisers and launched many expensive programs. The ramped-up war effort helped alleviate unemployment, and the government relief allowed the unemployed to put food on the table and persuaded them that they had a leader who cared about them. Aware that Americans overwhelmingly opposed rearmament, he began on the sly. Beginning in 1938, he told military chiefs that he wanted a 10,000-plane Air Force and then siphoned money from social programs to pay for them. By 1940, the U.S. was producing more planes than Germany, and the Public Works Administration was integral to the financing of the aircraft carriers that helped win the war in the Pacific. While most historians emphasize military icons (Marshall, Eisenhower, Nimitz) Nelson concentrates on relatively obscure civilian figures such as Donald Nelson, Bill Knudsen, and Edward Stettinius Jr., “dollar-a-year patriots who relinquished the comparatively mild civil-service salary that would normally be their due.” The industrial miracle they oversaw was far more complex than anyone had predicted, so politicians, generals, and the media at the time have looked down on them, but Nelson doesn’t. This hyperproduction continued after the war was over, when the U.S. helped rebuild the world and gave birth to one of the first affluent, consumer societies in which, for a generation, the middle-class made up the majority.
A compelling and convincing history lesson.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781982122911
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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