The subtitle notwithstanding, there’s hardly an untold story to be found here, but a worthy distillation all the same.
A military historian considers Lincoln as military leader—a far from nominal position.
A veteran of battle, Lincoln had disparaged James Polk’s touching off the Mexican War: “So far as Lincoln was concerned,” Perret (Jack: A Life Like No Other, 2001, etc.) writes, “Polk had gone to war with Mexico to revive the political fortunes of the Democratic Party, and not for any higher aim.” Similar charges would be leveled at Lincoln, with Republican Party founder William H. Seward urging him to “change the question before the Public from one of Slavery, or about Slavery to a question upon Union or Disunion.” But Lincoln took his abolitionist fight seriously—and, as many modern historians have observed, as the primary purpose for waging war on the South. Lincoln—who claimed that his greatest success in life was commanding a militia detachment in the Black Hawk War—was closely involved in the daily conduct of the war, Perret shows. Lincoln saw to it that generals were appointed by federal authority, not that of the states. He planned operations and logistics, and he wasn’t being hyperbolic when he famously remarked of a recalcitrant combat leader, “If General McClellan does not want to use the Army, I would like to borrow it.” He promoted leaders, and he broke them, as when he removed the military commander of occupied New Orleans for looting. He imposed strategy on his greatest commanders, including Ulysses S. Grant. And he even showed up for combat on a couple of occasions, though one Union officer sensibly warned him, “There is nothing in the Constitution authorizing the Commander in Chief to expose himself to the enemy’s fire where he can do no good!” Perret does an admirable job of weaving these episodes into a readable narrative.
The subtitle notwithstanding, there’s hardly an untold story to be found here, but a worthy distillation all the same.Pub Date: April 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50738-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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