A densely researched, thorough history for students of Roosevelt and World War II.
A new history of the Franklin Roosevelt/World War II era and the many significant characters who inhabited it.
Beating Germany or Japan was not a given in the bitter early stretches of the war, and it could not have happened unless the United States effectively harnessed its resources quickly. Military historian Lacey (War, Policy, and Strategy/Marine Corps War Coll.; Great Strategic Rivalries: From the Classical World to the Cold War, 2016, etc.) shows how the U.S.—which, in 1940, had a military the size of Bulgaria’s—would, within 30 months, turn the tide to victory. Much of the success owes to the leadership and strategy of Roosevelt and Gen. George Marshall, yet the momentum toward victory was years in the making. Roosevelt played his advisers against each other—e.g., Henry Hopkins, secretary of commerce, and Harold Ickes, secretary of interior, who were both tasked with ending the Depression—and he often worked in secret, as when he jump-started the military procurement in 1938 before the public knew of his motivation to aid England. As the European conflict intensified, Roosevelt stood firmly by the people he trusted. Ever politically astute, he appointed two Republicans to key war-building positions just on the eve of his own dicey decision to run for a third term: Henry Stimson at the war department and Frank Knox to run the Navy. With the Cabinet stocked with men in a driving hurry, Roosevelt tapped the brilliant Ernest King as chief of naval operations. Lacey manages to gather together the many strands of this remarkable story of how the U.S. government harnessed the disparate talents of business leaders, congressmen, volatile generals, and prickly heads of state such as Churchill. As the author notes, these “titanic rows almost always led to better outcomes than would have prevailed had there been a single man or apparatus directing events.”
A densely researched, thorough history for students of Roosevelt and World War II.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-345-54758-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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