A 120-page monograph cannot replace a complete biography, the best being Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace...
When he left office in 1961, historians considered Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) a second-rate president. His reputation’s steady rise is not interrupted by this admiring, opinionated account by veteran British journalist and historian Johnson (Mozart, 2013, etc.).
Although he remained in the United States during World War II and spent two decades in the shrunken peacetime Army, Eisenhower’s talents were well-known. Gen. Douglas MacArthur kept him as an aide for nine years, and George Marshall summoned him to Washington a week after Pearl Harbor. Commanding the largest military force in history (20 times the size of MacArthur’s), Eisenhower kept Allied generals focused on the effort against the Nazis, even when they were often fighting among themselves. Victory made him a national hero, and he easily won the 1952 election over Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. During the 1950s, the prospect of World War III seemed imminent. Several joint chiefs wanted to get on with it, but Eisenhower kept the military firmly under his thumb. He receives credit for ending the Korean War but little for refusing to strike back at China’s threats to Formosa; his military advisers were raring to go. Despite national panic that followed the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Eisenhower quashed efforts to launch crash military programs. John F. Kennedy, a far more aggressive Cold Warrior, spent the 1960 campaign denouncing Eisenhower for underestimating the communist threat. Johnson astutely points out that Eisenhower enjoyed being president since, unlike generals Washington, Jackson and Grant, his best qualities were not those of a warrior but a staff officer: efficiency, administration, economy and flexibility.
A 120-page monograph cannot replace a complete biography, the best being Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace (2012). Though Johnson’s well-known right-wing views deliver an occasional jolt, this book remains a thoroughly entertaining introduction.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01682-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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 engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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