In contrast to his last subject, the vainglorious Douglas MacArthur (Old Soldiers Never Die, 1996), military historian Perret profiles the Union commander as an unassuming strategist ahead of his time and as a president whose abysmal standing deserves re- evaluation. The facts of Grant's life, familiar enough to Civil War aficionados, are retold here, from his service in the Mexican War, to the ennui that temporarily ended his army career in 1854 and left him a clerk in his family's store in Galena, Ill., to his blissful four-decade marriage to wife Julia. What distinguishes this narrative are Perret's bristling style and his skillful blend of tactical analysis and conventional biography. Like his hero, Perret prefers to stay on the offensive, in this case against William McFeely's Pulitzer Prizewinning Grant (1981) for its allegations of the general's sporadic insubordination, drunkenness on several occasions, and perjured deposition on behalf of an aide during his presidency. On the contrary, Perret claims, as a person Grant displayed unimpeachable integrity, and as a general he exhibited a penetrating intelligence, a driving will, and an eerie calm at the center of war's storm. One wishes for a stronger admission of Grant's shortcomings (even the disastrous assault on Cold Harbor is blamed on General George Meade). But Perret outlines, in admirably clear prose, Grant's mastery of the ``wide envelopment'' movement, and his gamble in the Vicksburg campaign to cut loose from his supply line. He even makes a convincing case that, for all the scandals embroiling subordinates, Grant as president had successes (e.g., smashing the Ku Klux Klan). But most of all, Perret persuasively presents a man who endured and conquered all: binge drinking, rivals, false friends, and even the cancer that could not stop him from completing his memoirs (which, Perret notes, ``have the directness and limpidity of the purest English prose''). A shrewd, if insistent, brief for Grant as his era's most imaginative and resourceful master of war. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44766-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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