Soon to be bedside reading for West Point cadets and budding generals. We’ll hope that Eisenhower follows with an account of...
An excellent appreciation of Dwight Eisenhower’s skills as a military commander, though by a biased observer—the general’s son, himself a distinguished officer and historian.
Now in his ninth decade, John Eisenhower (Agent of Destiny: The Life and Times of General Winfield Scott, 1997, etc.) had thus far not written at length about his father. Students of military history will be glad that he did, however, for here he offers observations that other, more remote biographers have not ventured or elaborated—in particular, on the matter of Ike’s influences as a junior officer. Perhaps surprisingly, given the subsequent movie treatment, one of the strongest of those influences was George S. Patton, who, with Eisenhower, courted official disgrace after WWI by arguing for the supremacy of tank warfare in ground combat. They were right, of course, as WWII bore out; of that future war, Patton effusively predicted, “Ike would be the Robert E. Lee and Patton would be Ike’s Stonewall Jackson.” That prediction was less accurate, as readers will discover. Elsewhere, Eisenhower considers the curious role that Douglas MacArthur had on Ike’s career, then goes on to study closely Ike’s record as theater commander for the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944. That close account turns up some criticisms, along with a few surprises, almost all of them having to do with the political aspect of balancing the egos and ambitions of the likes of Bernard Montgomery, Charles de Gaulle, and Josef Stalin, to say nothing of Patton and MacArthur. Eisenhower, for example, remarks that the Battle of the Bulge might have had a more satisfactory resolution had Ike ordered General Omar Bradley “to remove his tactical headquarters from Luxembourg to Namur, where he could control the main battle to blunt the German spearheads.” Such comments will be more meaningful to knowledgeable students of WWII tactics than to general readers, but in the main, Eisenhower’s account is nontechnical and free of jargon—and carries you along from start to finish.
Soon to be bedside reading for West Point cadets and budding generals. We’ll hope that Eisenhower follows with an account of his father’s presidential years.Pub Date: June 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4474-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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