In addition to World War II buffs, other readers will enjoy the intrigue, back-stabbing, action, and diplomacy in this...
Attorney Jordan (Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe, 2011, etc.) delivers another page-turning chronicle of World War II.
Small details and little-mentioned facts make this a highly informative look at four men in charge in Washington, D.C., during that time. Franklin Roosevelt never made it easy for his military men. He was secretive and nonchalant, and his answers to their questions were often glib and equivocal. He was also very much under the spell of Winston Churchill. Planning meetings often began with the British presenting their strategy and the Americans, with no clue from FDR, nodding their heads. Luckily, the American contingent included Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall; Secretary of War Henry Stimson; and Ernest J. King, leader of the Navy. Marshall had his hands full fighting the Allies as much as the enemy. In the Pacific, there were squabbles between Army and Navy, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur focused primarily on his promise to relieve the Philippines. The British harped on their needs to strike at Africa and the Balkans, while the American public and Joseph Stalin were demanding action against Hitler in France. American tanks, planes, and ships supplied all of these theaters during the war, but they could only produce so much. Furthermore, a second front was impossible until 1944. Throughout, the author provides astute and clever portrayals of the leaders, including Churchill’s pretense to his ancestor’s abilities, Stalin’s displays of compassion, and FDR’s meddling in naval projects. Jordan’s wonderful new insight into the leaders shows how lucky we were regarding Stimson’s prescient warnings about nuclear war, Marshall’s long-suffering, self-effacing loyalty, and King’s rough-and-ready fighting abilities.
In addition to World War II buffs, other readers will enjoy the intrigue, back-stabbing, action, and diplomacy in this well-written book.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-41457-1
Page Count: 624
Publisher: NAL Caliber/Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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