A fascinating look at World War II as reflected in the career of an important yet largely forgotten Allied general.
The story of Gen. Maurice Rose (1899-1945), whose division fought its way from Normandy to the German heartland during World War II.
Rose, who served as an infantry officer during World War I, had distinguished himself in the North African and Italian campaigns. “He led troops under fire, created battle plans, supervised the staff, ran the division command post, and even found time to negotiate a major German component’s surrender,” writes Bolger, who served in the Army for 35 years and earned five Bronze Stars. In August 1944, Rose was appointed to command of the 3rd Armored Division, with the Allied offensive stalled in the Normandy hedgerows. Rose, like Patton—who recommended him for command—believed in seeing what was going on with his own eyes. In Normandy, he immediately moved the division’s headquarters forward to be nearer the action; unlike the majority of generals even then, Rose routinely took his vehicle within range of enemy fire. The author follows his career from his assumption of command in Normandy through most of the major battles on the Western Front, where his division was routinely in the middle of the action. A highly private man who did not discuss personal matters even with his officers—and did not survive to write his postwar memoirs—Rose remains something of a mystery even at the end of the book. Bolger, who has himself commanded an armored division, gives a solid military insider’s view of how armor, infantry, artillery, and air support cooperate on the battlefield, with interesting details on the tactics and strategy of the battles on the Western Front. He also offers pointed observations about Rose’s relations with the major figures of the Allied war effort, including Montgomery, Patton, Eisenhower, Bradley, and other less-familiar figures.
A fascinating look at World War II as reflected in the career of an important yet largely forgotten Allied general.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18371-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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