The victorious siege commander of Sevastopol garners a formal, meticulous new study.
Melvin, a British major general (Royal College of Defense Studies, London), emphasizes Erich von Manstein’s (1887–1973) operational skill as well as his problematic ethical decisions while commanding assaults on the Eastern Front during World War II. Born to an aristocratic East Prussian family with a strong military tradition, Manstein was schooled at the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps, trained as an officer in Berlin’s War Academy and wounded during World War I. He amply absorbed the “twin punch of defeat and deprivation” suffered by the Germans after the armistice, believing as many did that the Versailles Treaty was a “shameful Diktat.” Manstein became one of the rising stars in the quietly expanding Reichswehr between the wars, and was swept up into the general euphoria of Hitler’s rise to power, though he did reveal contradictory positions by composing a letter in 1934 protesting the ban on the employment of Jewish officers. A member of Hitler’s General Staff during the years of 1935–38, when Germany undertook breathtaking modernization and plans to build a “storm artillery,” Manstein was posted to command in Silesia, then enlisted in the invasion of Poland. He was key in forming the “triumphant invasion plan in the West,” though he claimed in his considerable late-life memoirs that he was not consulted in planning the ill-fated Operation Barbarossa. Nonetheless, he spearheaded the siege attacks on Sevastopol, Stalingrad and Kursk, to ferocious Russian resistance, and his mounting frustration with Hitler’s leadership prompted him to tender his resignation several times. The “scorched earth” policy he implemented upon retreat and other crimes committed by the Nazi leadership gained him conviction at trials in Nuremberg and later Hamburg; he served eight years but was largely rehabilitated by his memoirs and work in bolstering the Bundeswehr during the Cold War. Too thick for casual readers lacking a strong interest in European history, but Melvin provides a fair, thorough reappraisal that carefully considers Manstein’s military prowess while challenging his moral amnesia.
Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-56312-7
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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