A powerful capsule history of World War II, chilling and reflective in one breath.
A visually engaging and highly atmospheric overview of World War II, including the runup and the fallout.
This is an impressively smart historical survey of World War II: condensed, but complex without being labyrinthine; smooth in its delivery without being trivial. It comfortably merges a political overview with snapshots and film of military action, gratifying both those who gain most from the written narrative and those who like a visual prod to the proceedings. The war is broken down into absorbable chunks, starting with World War I’s unfinished business, through the Japanese invasion of China—the story moves fluidly between the European and Pacific theaters—the blitzkrieg and the homefront. It covers the military campaigns from North Africa to Guadalcanal, Stalingrad to the Coral Sea. The user experience is easy and intuitive—well-organized, clean screens are active but not numbingly so, and there are toolbars for hopping about. Visual cues indicate when more material can be accessed by a swipe of the screen. There are plenty of brief film clips, chosen with finesse, and with their sepia tone or grainy, gray look, they send readers back 70 years in a flash. They wed the fleetness of a footnote to the most pungent visual imagery: One moment you are in the cockpit of a Stuka dive bomber, the next you are looking down at the dock of the Nuremberg trials. What gives the story so much texture, though, is the inclusion of less-notorious moments in the war, such as the Russian-Finnish conflict, helping to paint the big picture in all its swarming complexity.
A powerful capsule history of World War II, chilling and reflective in one breath.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Internet Design Zone
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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