A competent overview, but readers in search of a rich character study or thoughtful analysis of military leadership should...
Part of the Great General series, this biography of George Armstrong Custer (1839–1876) provides about as much information as the average reader needs to know about the flamboyant general.
For centuries before tanks drove horses from the battlefield, cavalry leaders were often viewed as brave but stupid, and histories have long portrayed Custer, who led his 220-man troupe to annihilation at Little Big Horn, as a prime example. Military historian Schulz (Crossing the Rapido: A Tragedy of World War II, 2010, etc.) disagrees modestly in this slim volume, which summarizes Custer’s short, eventful life as well as the controversy that followed his death. He graduated from West Point in 1861 last in his class, first in demerits and probably the leader in charm because he quickly inveigled a cavalry command and impressed superiors during the rout after Bull Run. Charismatic, extremely aggressive in battle but also popular with reporters who followed the Army, he ended the war as the Union’s youngest general. Glory was in short supply after the war when Custer participated in several brutal Indian campaigns, but he remained a popular media icon. Consequently, news of Little Big Horn in 1876 produced a national horror similar to that after 9/11. During the inevitable postmortem analysis, survivors worked hard to avoid blame, so Custer, unable to defend himself, became the scapegoat. Modern scholars such as James Donovan and Nathaniel Philbrick suggest that he’s had a bad rap, and Schultz delivers a sympathetic account of the debate.
A competent overview, but readers in search of a rich character study or thoughtful analysis of military leadership should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61708-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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