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
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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