Sturdy and illuminating: of interest to students of modern British history and the conduct of WWII.
A capable, brief study of Great Britain’s renowned wartime leader and the troubled course of his passionate—if hardly compassionate—conservatism.
Winston Churchill defined himself as both a military and literary man, and thus it makes perfect sense for the eminently literate military history Keegan (War and Our World, 2001, etc.) to add this volume to the rapidly growing Penguin Lives series. Keegan gives us a Churchill who, for most of his life, was essentially alone—“Churchill’s life,” the author remarks, “is remarkable for its paucity of friendships: few in youth, eventually none at all.” Friendless he may have been, but Churchill set out early on to accomplish great things as both an ardent student of the world (an indifferent scholar, he inhaled whole libraries of world literature and history) and a shaper of events. Often he succeeded, Keegan writes, but often he failed; he rose to eminence at the opening years of WWII after having been demoted and shuffled from one prewar government post to another, and his achievements leading the fight against Hitler took many of his contemporaries by surprise. Keegan gives us a Churchill who was at once aristocratic and populist, idealistic, and resolutely practical, strongly ideological yet capable of compromise (especially in the matter of accepting Stalin as a wartime ally, inasmuch as Churchill detested “Bolshevism” perhaps more than he ever did Nazism). Keegan faults much of Churchill’s wartime strategy, driven by his view that “the defeated peoples of Europe could be brought to wear down Germany’s control from within,” which Keegan rebuts with the observation that partisan resistance was largely ineffectual, and that somehow diversionary offensives on the flank of the enemy were preferable to full-on assault, such as that at Normandy. But Keegan also defends Churchill from the well-worn charge of alcoholism, and gives him in most other ways a respectful, if certainly not warm, treatment.
Sturdy and illuminating: of interest to students of modern British history and the conduct of WWII.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03079-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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