by Giles Milton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2019
A worthy commemoration of a key historical moment, the 75th anniversary of which falls in 2019.
Anecdotal history of D-Day, when Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe.
As historian and journalist Milton’s (Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat, 2017, etc.) busy title suggests, the Normandy landings involved a vast machinery hinging on conditions of weather and tides and the hope that the German enemy would be surprised. In this skillfully woven narrative, the author depicts the complexity of Operation Overlord. In the predawn hours of D-Day, for instance, the operational planning officer had to secure signoffs from several senior commanders involved, which “was more time-consuming than he expected,” especially when the British air marshal began proofreading the orders, “sure that in detail lay victory.” The British meteorologists were cautious, the Americans perhaps too optimistic, but somehow the invasion was launched. Meanwhile, on the German side of the Channel, an observer predicted the landings nearly to the minute only to have his intelligence ignored. When news arrived of massive airborne landings behind the German lines, an argument broke out over whether “the paratroopers were merely liaison parties sent to help the French resistance.” For its part, the Resistance was present and active on the scene, while French civilians rendered aid as they were able—though in one memorable episode, a young French man had to turn over a badly wounded American paratrooper to the Germans in order to get him medical treatment. Milton’s narrative is episodic, much in the spirit of the book that looms over the literature of Overlord, Cornelius Ryan’s Longest Day (1959), populated by near-stock figures like a young American captain who “was a bulldozer of a man, with a thickset face and pronounced nose,” and a British “bruiser built of sinew and muscle” who single-handedly stormed a German bunker, earning a Victoria Cross for his troubles. World War II buffs will be pleased to see the tradition continue here.
A worthy commemoration of a key historical moment, the 75th anniversary of which falls in 2019.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-13492-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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