A yeoman’s effort in service of an admirable subject in need of more good studies about him.
A biography of George Marshall (1880-1959) focusing on the general’s overall decency rather than his strategic brilliance.
Having inherited this project after the death of historian Hirshson, the Ungers (The Guggenheims, 2005, etc.) make a valiant attempt to cover Marshall’s accomplished military career and his years as President Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff and President Harry Truman’s secretary of state. A graduate of Virginia Military Institute and a protégé of Gen. John Pershing, with early postings in the Philippines and China, Marshall, laconic and humorless, could never garner the kind of position as commander of troops that would have ensured a glorious career. He was most effective at training officers in the late 1920s, organizing Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corp in preparation for his move to Washington to take up a position with the War Plans Division and eventually become chief of staff. This indeed is what the authors believe he should best be remembered for: “creating the American World War II army virtually out of nothing.” As Roosevelt’s wartime right arm, Marshall pushed for the “Europe First” agenda and was deemed too valuable at home to spare as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, yet Marshall’s “complacency” about Japan’s threats on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack lent his right-wing critics fodder for the rest of his life. The Ungers find him naïve in dealing with the Chinese when sent to negotiate a truce between the Nationalists and the Communists in late 1945; they do not credit him with coming up with the so-called Marshall Plan to help Europe get back on its feet, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. However, Marshall always remained a devoted and dutiful officer.
A yeoman’s effort in service of an admirable subject in need of more good studies about him.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0060577193
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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