Meatier and more substantive than books like The 48 Laws of Power and a font of well-considered guidance.
The former secretary of defense delivers lessons for would-be leaders.
The title might describe the current White House, from which Mattis (co-editor: Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military, 2016) departed after disagreeing on one issue too many with the sitting president. However, it derives from an ironic Marine Corps acronym. Mattis spotted trouble from the start, noting that, after all, the separation of military from civilian leadership, by which officers were forbidden from serving in the office “within seven years of departing military service,” is there for a good reason—a reason disregarded by Trump and company. Still, Mattis, writing with Bing (One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War, 2014, etc.), has relatively little to say about his time in that orbit. Instead, he focuses on his military career, during which he rose through the ranks and replaced Gen. David Petraeus as head of the U.S. Central Command; and on the leadership lessons he learned in the field and on base. Considered an intellectual, he insists foremost on lifelong learning and constant reading: When he was called on to lead the 1st Marine Division in the Iraq War, for instance, he devoured books, from T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (“few Westerners in recent history had achieved his level of trust with Arabs on the battlefield”) to memoirs and studies of William Tecumseh Sherman, Gertrude Bell, and Alexander the Great. “I may not have come up with many new ideas,” writes Mattis, “but I’ve adopted or integrated a lot from others,” and he insisted that his officers and enlisted personnel read and study. Some lessons are obvious (don’t play favorites), some gung-ho (show an “obvious bias for action”), and most eminently useful for leaders in whatever sector (“You must decide, act, and move on"). One wishes for a little more dirt, but the author, a cool-headed diplomat, seems to be reserving that for magazine interviews, dishing it judiciously.
Meatier and more substantive than books like The 48 Laws of Power and a font of well-considered guidance.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9683-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 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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