An enthusiastic, only mildly critical account of America's original elite fighting unit.
Special forces like the Green Berets and SEALs didn’t exist when the U.S. entered World War II. Admiring the spectacular hit-and-run tactics of British Commandos, American leaders decided to form a similar unit in 1942. Chosen as its leader was William Darby, an obscure but popular staff officer of the 34th Infantry, the first American division to arrive in the U.K. Within two weeks, Darby had assembled 600 volunteers and led the newly named 1st Ranger Battalion to a Commando camp in Scotland for a brutal summer of training. That autumn, the battalion stormed ashore in North Africa to knock out two batteries just before the main landing. After other successful raids during the North African campaign, the Rangers, now expanded to a regiment, preceded the invasion of Sicily and of the Italian mainland at Salerno to protect one flank of the landing. An avalanche of publicity fostered by Phil Stern, a famous photographer who attached himself to the unit, made Darby’s Rangers as familiar to Americans as Patton’s Third Army or Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Britain’s handful of Commando units remained reserved for special operations, but the Rangers kept growing, and commanders could not resist using them on the front lines, where they suffered far more casualties than in raids. In the bloody January 1944 Anzio campaign, a botched attack decimated the unit. Other Ranger units made history in Normandy and the Pacific, but the remnants of Darby’s group scattered and never again fought together.
The extremely prolific Jeffers (An Honest President, 2000, etc.) does much of his research in other popular histories. Military buffs who have read those same books might give this one a pass, but readers unfamiliar with the Rangers will enjoy this dramatic account of their adventures.Pub Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-451-22128-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NAL Caliber/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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