A definitive but dull biography of the least known of Europe's 20th-century dictators. Preston (International History/London School of Economics) makes some significant changes in the generally received portrait of Franco that has come down to us. He portrays Franco as admired by his troops in Spanish Morocco, where he spent ten of his early military years, for his thoroughness and his insistence on always leading assaults personally. In the Spanish Civil War itself, however, he was prodigal with his soldiers' lives, as he deliberately waged a war of attrition designed to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible rather than to win quick victories. Preston believes that the ruthlessness and exemplary use of terror Franco learned in Africa dominated both his political and military conduct. His ferocity in getting rid of rivals was exceeded only by his executions of tens of thousands of Republican supporters during and after the war (he would sign sheaves of execution notices while in his car, without reading the details). Preston's most interesting new material derives from his analysis of Franco's relationship with Hitler and Mussolini. Admirers of Franco have seized on Churchill's praise of the Spaniard for not joining the Axis powers in 1940, despite the aid he had received from Germany and Italy during the Civil War. In truth, Preston shows, Franco was eager to get into the war, particularly when he thought that the Germans were winning, but only if he received economic aid. It was Hitler's reluctance or inability to pay Franco's price, rather than Franco's shrewdness, that scuttled negotiations. Although Preston omits some of the context in which Franco operated—notably the atrocities committed by the Republican forces opposing him—Franco emerges as an extraordinarily unlovable figure, cunning, with a hunger for adulation and an icy cruelty. Careful and thorough, if uninspired, and likely to remain the standard biography in English for some time to come.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-02515-3
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
