Despite not straying far from the almost universal veneration, this is a definitive, nuanced portrait.
An overdue, authoritative biography of one of America’s greatest soldier-statesmen.
Roll (The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler, 2013, etc.) emphasizes that George Marshall (1880-1959), a brilliant staff officer, always impressed his superiors. A favorite of Cmdr. John Pershing, he became aide-de-camp when the general served as Army Chief of Staff from 1921 to 1924, and few were surprised when Marshall attained that office in 1939. The author excels in describing the period from Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland until Pearl Harbor, when Marshall urged rearmament and Franklin Roosevelt, aware that most voters opposed it, proceeded too cautiously for his taste. Opposition vanished after Pearl Harbor, to be replaced by questions of strategy, and here, Marshall’s record is spotty. He advised defeating Germany before taking the offensive against Japan and invading France in 1942 or 1943 instead of expending resources on the periphery: North Africa and Italy. Always congenial, Roosevelt agreed and then, after listening to public opinion, Churchill, and other advisers, changed his mind. After the war, President Harry Truman sent Marshall to China to end its civil war in what everyone agrees was an impossible assignment. Appointed secretary of state in 1947, he vigorously supported the European Recovery Program, which became known as the Marshall Plan. He resigned in 1949 but returned as secretary of defense in 1950 during the nadir of the Korean War, when he helped restore confidence in the armed forces. He resigned permanently in 1951 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, the only serving military officer to do so. Roll admits that America would have won World War II even with a less competent chief of staff, and many of his decisions remain controversial, but he was a thoroughly admirable, surprisingly quirk-free figure who, even during his life, seemed larger-than-life.
Despite not straying far from the almost universal veneration, this is a definitive, nuanced portrait.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-99097-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Graceful and deeply felt.
A collection of personal pieces, combined into an affecting memoir by longtime New Yorker editor Angell.
The author, a noted baseball writer (A Pitcher’s Story, 2001, etc.), has many intimate connections to the magazine Gardner Botsford once dubbed “The Comic Weekly,” in which most of these reminiscences originally appeared. His mother, Katherine, was the New Yorker’s fiction editor; years later, Angell held her former job—and occupied her office. His stepfather, E.B. White, was the magazine’s most important contributor during its most influential years. The memoir mostly concerns New Yorker colleagues and other remarkable people who have been a part of the author’s life. His father, lawyer Ernest Angell, lost Katherine to the younger White but over the years became a figure of immense importance to Roger. Angell loved his mother, loved White, loved his first wife (not much here about the cause of their 1960s divorce), loved his coworkers, loved his job. His portraits are really tributes, whether of the well-known William Maxwell, V.S. Pritchett, Harold Ross or William Shawn, or the lesser-known Botsford and Emily Hahn. Angell offers some New Yorker–insider tidbits (Ian Frazier mimicked Shawn’s voice so well that he could fool colleagues over the phone) and a bit more than you want to know about some of his aunts, one of whom wrote a book about Willa Cather. A dazzling story-within-a-story describes a 1940 round of golf with a mysterious woman who lost a valuable ring. The author seems uncertain how an iPod works but reveals an expertise with machine guns. His fickle memory frustrates and bemuses him. Sometimes he can recall only sensory images; sometimes the story unreeling in his mind skips, stops, fades, dissolves into something else. In several of his most appealing passages, he writes about the fictions that memory fashions.
Graceful and deeply felt.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101350-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
IN THE NEWS
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