A lead balloon of a book.
A ham-fisted account of the Battle of Britain.
A frequent collaborator with Bill O’Reilly in the gee-whiz school of history, Dugard does not confront a fact without spinning it into the moral equivalent of a tweet, as these two complete paragraphs suggest: “The British like Hitler. A lot.” One of the author’s glancing examples is that of the future King Edward VIII teaching his niece, the future Queen Elizabeth II, how to do the Nazi salute. Alas for Hitler, Winston Churchill wasn’t buying it. Churchill looms large over this narrative, though Dugard peppers the text with characters straight out of a 1960s epic film, including heroic soldiers and RAF pilots, sneering Nazis, children’s toys lying in ruined streets. For all the purple flourishes, the author takes care with the historical details. He extensively analyzes Britain’s reluctance to enter into armed conflict with Germany, as well as the Nazis’ going for broke on the air war in the summer of 1940, sending wave after wave of bombers until, finally, Britain’s war machine kicked into gear and “the workers, skilled and unskilled, men and women alike, stood to their lathes and manned the workshops under fire as if they were batteries in action.” Those words are Churchill’s, by far the better writer than Dugard, who favors chyronworthy telegraphic prose. Entire paragraphs again: “A single German U-boat could kill the highest levels of Anglo-American leadership with a single well-placed torpedo.” “The Germans are coming back.” “And yet five German bombs will make this morning quite unforgettable.” That the narrative is full of action is thanks to the facts of the matter, which don’t really need Dugard’s breathlessness. Readers with an interest in the early years of World War II would do better to read Churchill’s Their Finest Hour.
A lead balloon of a book.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780593473214
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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