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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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