Good reading for military buffs who enjoyed the authors’ previous book.
Six long accounts of wars in which great captains fought on either side.
Excepting the occasional masterpiece like John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, military buffs often look down their noses at the “great battles” genre. However, historians and professors Lacey (Marine Corps War College) and Murray (Naval War College) follow their previous book, Moment of Battle: The Twenty Clashes That Changed the World (2013), with another expert mixture of lively nuts-and-bolts descriptions of combat and opinions on why some legendary generals won their wars and others did not. Hannibal kept defeating Roman armies, but Romans never gave up; eventually, their best general, Scipio, defeated Hannibal. Caesar is better known, but Pompey, equally triumphant during his lifetime, chose the wrong allies when the two had a falling out. During the Crusades, Richard the Lionhearted won many victories, but Saladin possessed more resources and patience, so Richard’s goal, Jerusalem, remained out of reach. Napoleon’s early victories saved revolutionary France and then megalomania took over. Against stubborn enemies, megalomaniacal leaders, no matter how brilliant, sooner or later make stupid decisions, and Napoleon did not break the mold. Robert E. Lee knew how to win battles, but Ulysses S. Grant knew how to win the war. Erwin Rommel, Bernard Montgomery, and George Patton were successful despite vastly disparate personalities. “Entirely different cultures, both national and military, formed their approaches to leadership,” write the authors in the “Conclusion” section of that chapter. In this genre, it’s obligatory to tie matters together with an insightful historical analysis, and the authors do their best without breaking new ground. They emphasize that wars are won by generals with a strategic overview of what they must accomplish (Scipio, Saladin, Grant) and lost by those who concentrate on winning battles (Hannibal, Napoleon, Lee). While collections of descriptions of famous campaigns remain the lowest common denominator of military history, this is a solid addition to the genre.
Good reading for military buffs who enjoyed the authors’ previous book.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54755-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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