If these sensible lessons break no new ground, the biographies make good reading.
Principles of leadership drawn from the lives of 10 admirals from ancient Greece to the present.
Exploring self-improvement through the lives of great leaders has become a popular—and often eye-rolling—genre, but this earnest mixture of biography, memoir, and pop psychology makes no outlandish claims, and readers will absorb some significant naval history. Well-read but no scholar, Stavridis (Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World's Oceans, 2017), the former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and current chairman of the U.S. Naval Institute, has done his research in the works of popular historians. For the most part, the author has chosen his subjects well, and ambitious readers can follow up using his excellent bibliography, which includes works by such noted historians as Jan Morris, Walter Borneman, and James Hornfischer. Stavridis begins with history’s first great sea commander, Themistocles, who led the ancient Greeks to victory over the Persians at Salamis and then fell from favor, ending his life in exile. Stavridis concludes that Themistocles represents a case study in charisma, risk-taking, and overweening arrogance. Perhaps most obscure is 15th-century Chinese Adm. Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch who rose to the top of the imperial hierarchy and led a titanic fleet in several voyages across south Asia as far as Africa. Demonstrating grit and self-reliance, he was “carefully organized, calm of spirit, devoted to his prince, and willing to take risks.” More familiar figures march across the pages, including Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson, John Arbuthnot Fisher, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Chester Nimitz, Hyman Rickover, and Elmo Zumwalt. Stavridis ends with Grace Hopper, whose “vision of the distant future” guided a not-always-enthusiastic Navy into the computer age. In the final chapter, the author summarizes character traits that these impressive figures demonstrated, and few readers will deny that they include creativity, resilience, humility, empathy, decisiveness, and determination.
If these sensible lessons break no new ground, the biographies make good reading.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55993-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
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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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