A fine appreciation of the military professional who arguably ranks among America's very best generals. Drawing on interviews with contemporaries and family members as well as on archival sources, Sorley (a USMA grad who served in Vietnam) offers an unsentimental portrait of a career officer who fought in three wars. A member of West Point's Class of `36, Abrams became an authentic hero leading a tank battalion in WW II's ETO. Winning promotion to brigadier general after a tour of duty in Korea, he handled a number of increasingly responsible assignments before being posted to Southeast Asia as General William Westmoreland's deputy and successor. As Sorley makes clear, Abrams probably would be better and more warmly remembered today had he been given a better war to fight. In any case, Abrams gave a brilliant account of himself despite restrictive rules of engagement and the fact that his civilian superiors had begun a phased reduction of US combat forces. Back in the States after a four-year absence, he was appointed chief of staff, a position that allowed him (before his untimely death at 59 in 1974) to initiate the reforms that eventually helped the US Army win in the Persian Gulf. While Sorley focuses on the talents that gained Abrams renown as a world-class strategist and tactician, he does not scant the qualities that also made him a soldier's soldier and a very human being. In addition to recounting the feats of arms that earned the colorful, cigar-chomping Abrams a legendary reputation among front- line troops and peers, the author provides affecting glimpses of his subject's personal and spiritual life. Though tough-minded and a stickler for integrity and honesty, Abrams (a late-in-life convert to Roman Catholicism) was evidently a devoted father of six, a loving husband, and a compassionate, if demanding, commander. A well-told tale of a paradigmatic warrior. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70115-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
