A candid assessment that strips away the colorful legends about “Chesty” Puller and replaces them with a more valuable...
A powerful and often controversial military biography of the US Marine Corps’ legendary Lieutenant General Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller.
Military historian (and Marine Corps Reserve lieutenant colonel) Hoffman (Once a Legend, not reviewed) unravels the complex personality of the officer held up by Marine Corps culture as the quintessence of aggressive combat leadership. The author traces Puller’s fighting instinct to a desire to live up to standards of military service that were rooted in his family’s Civil War heritage. This heritage, he argues, led Puller to enlist in the Marine Corps immediately after graduating from the Virginia Military Institute, in order to test his own courage and win glory on the WWI battlefields. Hoffman shows how, when WWI ended before he had completed his training, Puller doggedly pursuing his dream of becoming a Marine Corps officer by volunteering for service in Nicaragua, where he earned an early reputation as a tactically competent and ferocious fighter. He then follows Puller’s celebrated career into WWII and Korea, chronicling his personal bravery and inspiring leadership in the brutal Pacific fighting on Guadalcanal, Cape Glaster, and Peleliu, as well as his key role in making MacArthur’s audacious Inchon landing a success. Despite his successes, Puller has been accused by some of unimaginative tactics and reckless expenditures of young marines’ lives. Although Puller often fell short as a formal operational planner, Hoffman effectively argues that he compensated for this by always sharing the risks and conditions of combat with his enlisted men—and thus inspiring his marines to complete their missions no matter what the sacrifice.
A candid assessment that strips away the colorful legends about “Chesty” Puller and replaces them with a more valuable legacy—the importance of caring for military subordinates and leading from the front in the face of overwhelming odds. (16 pages b&w photos, maps)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44732-6
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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