With no pretensions to original scholarship, this is an enjoyable "retelling of an exciting story about a remarkable...
Malanowski (The Coup, 2007, etc.) revives the legend of an "immortal" Civil War hero, now nearly forgotten.
“Habits of study: irregular. General conduct: bad. Aptitude for Naval Service: not good. Not recommended for continuance at the Academy.” So wrote the superintendent of Annapolis about William Barker Cushing (1842-1874) upon expelling him from the academy a month before the outbreak of the Civil War. Eventually, Cushing talked his way back into the Navy with a rank of acting master's mate, and four years later, he was a 22-year-old lieutenant commander nationally famous for astonishing exploits in which he showed a fighting spirit, creativity and determination rare in any military service. The most noteworthy of these was taking on the massive Confederate ironclad Albemarle in an open-picket boat and sinking her by personally guiding a mine under her hull and detonating it while under constant small-arms fire, an achievement for which he was voted the Thanks of Congress. His daring leadership of amphibious commando raids has caused him to be viewed as a precursor to the Navy SEALs. The author recognizes, however, that Cushing's reckless impatience for bold action, often bordering on insubordination, made him both an outstanding warrior and a difficult officer to manage. Indeed, Malanowski engages in brief speculation that Cushing's heroism may have been genius but may also have been rooted in a personality disorder. This is popular history for general readers, served up in bite-sized chapters of just a few pages each. The author presents Cushing's life story in a casual style, enthusiastically describing his adventures unrestrained by a historian's professional reserve.
With no pretensions to original scholarship, this is an enjoyable "retelling of an exciting story about a remarkable individual whose name had begun to fade."Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-24089-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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