For the general reader looking for a handy guide to Eisenhower’s long, important and event-filled life in the armed forces.
A condensed version of five-star General Dwight David Eisenhower’s military career.
Eisenhower was overshadowed as a general by contemporaries Patton and MacArthur, sandwiched as president between the important FDR/Truman and the charismatic Kennedy. But his virtues become more manifest as time passes. Ike may not have been either America’s greatest general or president, but he has emerged as our best combined such leader since Washington. Drawing heavily on previously published materials, Wukovits (One Square Mile of Hell, not reviewed) has efficiently distilled Eisenhower’s life as a soldier, following his career from the plains of Kansas to West Point, where he was an avid footballer and an indifferent student, to a series of Army posts in Texas, Maryland, Panama, Kansas, the Philippines and Washington D.C., where his uncommon organizational ability and talent for training men kept him, against his own wishes, off the battlefield. Instead, he developed an interest in and devotion to the military; acquired a thorough understanding of all branches and levels of the Army; and learned first-hand strategic and political lessons from the likes of Patton, MacArthur and, most importantly, Generals Fox Connor and George C. Marshall. He emerged during WWII as the indispensable Supreme Allied Commander, able, through consensus, to conceive grand strategy, to tame prima donna generals and to deal with Roosevelt and Churchill as an equal. After defeating the Nazis, he became Army chief of staff and later head of NATO before running successfully for president in 1952. Wukovits attributes Ike’s military ascent and success to his focus, his dedication to teamwork, his empathy for the common soldier, his media savvy and his absolute devotion to duty. The brief text contains sufficient evidence to support this analysis. Mercifully infrequent references to contemporary conflicts come off as ham-handed attempts to make Eisenhower relevant and detract from a biography otherwise so tightly focused.
For the general reader looking for a handy guide to Eisenhower’s long, important and event-filled life in the armed forces.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4039-7137-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
