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
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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