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
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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