Lee is a man for the ages, and Korda delivers the goods with this heart-wrenching story of the man and his state. Readers...
A masterful biography of the beloved Civil War general.
Former Simon & Schuster editor in chief and acclaimed biographer Korda (Hero: Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, 2010) is well-acquainted with heroes of the ages and has learned to present his subjects as true human beings with foibles, faults and failures. Robert E. Lee’s (1807-1870) days at West Point showed him to be a master engineer and master of maneuvers, talents borne out in the Mexican-American War and in the making of St. Louis as an important port on the Mississippi River. Those abilities came into play throughout the Civil War, as he built the defenses for Northern Virginia that protected it when all seemed lost. George Washington was Lee’s idol, and during his schooling, he discovered the writings of Napoleon, which he applied throughout his life—especially the use of speed, audacity and élan to defeat an army twice the size of his forces. Lee was a member of one of Virginia’s oldest families, and his devotion was to his state, family and country, in that order. He felt that secession was unmerited and that slavery should not be extended but be allowed to dwindle away. Korda’s clear descriptions of Lee’s battles illuminate his closest subordinates, especially Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, his curious methods of leading and his incredible patience. The author also points out that, as a gentleman, Lee would never raise his voice in anger, and he avoided confrontation and gave his orders as “if practicable”—unfortunately, that became a way out for those who disagreed with his strategies and “knew better.” It was Lee who kept the South going as his barefoot army starved and froze but followed him with unqualified devotion.
Lee is a man for the ages, and Korda delivers the goods with this heart-wrenching story of the man and his state. Readers with the stamina for long biographies should follow this book with S.G. Gwynne's biography of Stonewall Jackson, Rebel Yell, to publish in September.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-211629-1
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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