The book lacks a coherent theme, but the biographies are a cut above popular middlebrow history.
Intelligent but abridged lives of six accomplished military leaders.
Despite the subtitle, prolific historian McLynn (Richard and John: Kings at War, 2007, etc.) does not get inside the minds of his subjects—Spartacus, Attila the Hun, Richard the Lionheart, Cortés, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and Napoleon—but his meticulous, opinionated writing will satisfy readers who take their history seriously. Napoleon and Spartacus were the only brilliant tacticians. Attila, Richard and Ieyasu were pugnacious national leaders, and Cortés was a brutally ambitious adventurer. McLynn delivers cradle-to-grave biographies but deals mostly with their campaigns, which vividly illustrate Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics carried out by other means. In the absence of politics, war is futile—Rome refused to negotiate with Spartacus, so his victories gained nothing. Attila, Richard and Cortés foolishly believed that fighting was an end in itself, so they fell victim to more sophisticated rivals. Ieyasu, a mediocre general, employed guile and compromise to solidify his victories and then to maintain his power. He was the sole warrior to die peacefully in bed, and his Tokugawa shogunate ruled a stable Japan for 250 years. The most intellectual of the six, Napoleon was also the only leader never threatened by internal rivalries, but his naïve political dealings with Britain and Russia led to catastrophe. McLynn strains mightily to find a common thread, finally admitting that it doesn’t exist. Great conquerors turn out to be a mixed bunch with wildly disparate motives, personalities and levels of intelligence. All became historical superstars by crushing opponents on the battlefield, but this turned out to be the easy part—a lesson we are still learning.
The book lacks a coherent theme, but the biographies are a cut above popular middlebrow history.Pub Date: May 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-029-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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