Warriors are like the rest of us, Hastings observes—which makes the accomplishments of the great ones all the more unusual....
An old-fashioned book about battles past, before the technocrats came along to ruin the notion of courage under fire.
Indeed, writes British military journalist and historian Hastings, “this study will be of no interest to such modern warlords as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, because it addresses aspects of conflict they do not comprehend, creatures of flesh and blood rather than systems of steel and electronics.” What characterizes the flesh-and-blood creatures whom Hastings studies is a particular kind of gumption in the face of mortal danger. To some, such as the impossibly accomplished Napoleonic soldier Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot, courage seems second nature; he was apt to jump into freezing lakes to rescue wounded enemies, incur multiple wounds and save his beloved emperor, all in a day’s work. To others, initiative under fire was as much an intellectual, learned process as a reflexive, physical one; Hastings offers an affecting portrait of Joshua Chamberlain, the Maine rhetorician who became one of the Union’s most outstanding officers during the Civil War. To still others, courage was a nearly unwilling and certainly unexpected response; none of his fellow officers could have guessed that John Chard, the hero of Rorke’s Drift, would have organized so brilliant and successful a defense. And to still others, bravery in grave danger seems almost a path to escape from an unhappy life under ordinary circumstances; its revisionism will perhaps displease diehard fans, but Hastings’s portrait of the woeful Audie Murphy, “widely perceived as a soldier fighting a war of his own,” is sensitive and revealing, and it explains much about the ways in which heroes allow logic and instinct to be overridden by something much more elemental—and dangerous.
Warriors are like the rest of us, Hastings observes—which makes the accomplishments of the great ones all the more unusual. Of interest to students of tactics and military history—and perhaps of psychology as well.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4441-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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