An engaging narrative that brings the colorful, late-Victorian military and political world vividly to life. (maps,...
A biography of the complicated soldier who transformed Great Britain’s military from a late-Victorian fighting club into a modern army.
Pollock (Gordon, not reviewed) begins by detailing Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s quick rise from military surveyor of Britain’s colonial holdings in the Middle East and the Mediterranean to his historic victories on the Nile River at Khartoum and Omdurman. These early successes made him a household name in England and prompted the government to appoint him as commander of forces in the increasingly nasty Boer War in South Africa. It was here that Kitchener’s keen diplomatic instincts first became apparent, and Pollock suggests that the carefully crafted peace accord (which reconstructed South Africa’s ruined infrastructure and offered the defeated Boers a large measure of independence) went a long way towards healing the rift between Britain and South Africa. The unique combination of military competence, diplomatic skill, and indefatigable energy led Kitchener into the politically charged position of Indian Army commander, where his controversial military reforms upended the colonial status quo. Later on, his efforts to raise a million-man volunteer army and gear British industry up for munitions production may well have saved the Allies from defeat at the hands of Germany during WWI. Had Kitchener survived that war, Pollock suggests that its peace might well have been modeled on his successful reconciliation with South Africa rather than the retributive Treaty of Versailles.
An engaging narrative that brings the colorful, late-Victorian military and political world vividly to life. (maps, illustrations, and photos)Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0829-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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