A moderately revisionist, entirely engrossing WWII history.
An expert, opinionated World War II history with some unsettling conclusions.
McManus (U.S. Military History/Missouri Univ. of Science and Technology; Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945, 2015, etc.) points out that Marines received almost all the glory during the war, a fact still resented by the Army, which did “the vast majority of the planning, the supplying, the transporting, the engineering, the fighting, and the dying to win [the] war.” Unlike most histories that move quickly from Pearl Harbor to the gratifying mid-1942 victories in the Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal, half of this book covers the painful earlier months. Japan invaded the Philippines two weeks after Pearl Harbor. The commander in the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur, considered himself a warrior. Warriors attack, so he discarded the long-planned retreat to the Bataan peninsula and announced that he would defeat the Japanese at the beaches, an impossible task. By the time MacArthur, seeing his forces in full retreat, reinstated the Bataan plan, it was too late. The troops made it, but most supplies remained behind. Despite outnumbering the enemy, starvation, disease, and shortages doomed them. Evacuated to Australia, MacArthur directed the reconquest of New Guinea, where, despite a better outcome, troops suffered the same miseries as they had on Bataan. McManus moves on with gripping accounts of campaigns in China, Burma, the Solomons, and the Gilberts. Readers may learn more than they want to know about Japan’s vicious treatment of POWs and flinch at the author’s low opinion of Gen. MacArthur. Military historians rarely share the worshipful view of civilian colleagues, who give him a pass on the Philippine debacle, brush off the fact that his troops disliked him, and happily pronounce him a military genius with an inflated ego. McManus’ MacArthur comes off as an arrogant self-promoter with modest military skills and no rapport with fighting men, routinely sacrificing their lives (and the careers of subordinate commanders) to burnish his image.
A moderately revisionist, entirely engrossing WWII history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-47504-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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