A workmanlike, solid biography of a significant American military leader.
An admiring reappraisal of the belligerent fleet commander who carried the day for the American Navy during World War II.
Descended from a line of peripatetic buccaneers and sea captains, William F. Halsey (1882–1959) proved an indifferent student at the Naval Academy, but was “full of life and ready for action.” His early career benefited from Theodore Roosevelt’s plans to expand the Navy, and Halsey learned important lessons as a commander of destroyers after World War I. However, his love of aviation prompted his move to the aircraft carrier. By the spring of 1940, well liked by his men, truculent and with the appearance of a bulldog, he was put in charge of all Pacific aircraft carriers and their air groups. To his consternation, but ultimate good luck, he was out on maneuvers near Wake Island on Dec. 7, 1941, when he was apprised of the attack on the rest of the fleet at Pearl Harbor. Witnessing that scene of devastation and humiliation fueled his anger and determination for the duration of the war, sometimes to cringingly incendiary language (“Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs!”) Halsey proved to be the answer to a swift, bold offensive, and with the elevation of Chester W. Nimitz as Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, Halsey was sent to protect the crucial Midway-Johnston Island-Hawaii triangle from Japanese attack. His series of raids played well on the home front, and the press dubbed him “Bull” and “Knock-’em Down Halsey.” Subsequent decisive victories at Midway, Coral Sea and Guadalcanal stopped the Japanese advance. Military historian Wukovits (American Commando: Evans Carlson, His WWII Marine Raiders, and America’s First Special Forces Mission, 2009, etc.) deals evenly with Halsey’s precipitous, potentially disastrous decisions in October 1944 at Leyte Gulf, and later recklessness during two typhoons. However, the author makes a good case that Halsey was the much-needed warrior for America’s darkest hour.
A workmanlike, solid biography of a significant American military leader.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-60284-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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