A laudatory history of the Leathernecks, whose fortunes have taken them to every corner of the world.
Marines, as military historian Warren (Cold War, 1996, etc.) shows, don’t mind being known as men (and now women) who roam the planet breaking things and ending lives; it is dogma that there is “no better friend, no worse enemy” than a Marine. Or, as one of Warren’s interviewees remarks in a fine definition of esprit de corps, “If you kill Marines, one thing is for sure: there will be other Marines coming along soon, and they will keep coming until they find you.” After touring the ego-destroying machine that is basic training, Warren turns to the bloodiest moment in Corps history, the invasion of Iwo Jima, in which 25,000 were killed or wounded; it was this terrible fight, Warren suggests, that lent the Corps some of its self-image and certainly much of the public estimation that it has enjoyed since. The Korean War provided more opportunities to be bloodied and to bloody the enemy, a theme that would provide something of an official mantra in Vietnam the following decade; Warren quotes one Marine commander as saying, “We’ll just go on bleeding them until Hanoi wakes up to the fact that they have bled their country to the point of national disaster for generations.” It didn’t quite work out that way, as it may not be working out that way in Iraq, where Warren’s account ends. Along the way, from battle to battle, Warren considers changes in Corps doctrine and the evolution of strategy and tactics, all intended to reinforce Marine supremacy as a fighting force and its relative rarity as a service branch that has mastered the skills of every other branch to fight in just about any theater on the globe—and in no time flat.
Good reading for the Semper Fi crowd, though civilians will likely prefer Rinker Buck’s Shane Comes Home.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2005
ISBN: 0-684-87284-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | MILITARY | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
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
Did you like this book?
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
