A vivid but scattershot exploration of the pivotal role New York City played in mobilizing America’s World War II effort, both logistically and culturally.
If there’s one point that this series of vignettes drives home more than any other, it’s how dramatically the perception of, and support for, war has changed on the home front since the 1940s. New York Times writer Goldstein (Desperate Hours: The Epic Rescue of the Andrea Doria, 2001, etc.) weaves a patchwork quilt of communal camaraderie that demonstrates how the can-do spirit of metropolitan New York helped define the country’s attitude toward the war—a stark contrast to today’s fractured perspectives on conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The author’s many stories include: dockside workers’ Herculean attempts to ramp up ship-building capabilities in New York Harbor; the Mafia’s cooperation with law-enforcement officials to provide intelligence on German dispositions; Irving Berlin and a host of other Broadway performers banding together to entertain troops and a worried American public; and the combined efforts of pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Squibb and Merck to mass-produce the newly discovered “miracle” drug penicillin to aid soldiers’ recovery from battlefield infections. The author loosely organizes each series of anecdotes into themes including “The Harbor,” “The Uniforms” and “The Tensions,” but the material is as eclectic as the city itself. This is a beneficial attribute when the stories are lively—as in the case of a small plane crashing into the Empire State Building in the midst of a city terrified of the possibility of air raids—but the jarring transition to less-riveting tales creates a sense of disconnect and gives the book the feel of a rough-cut documentary filled with fascinating information but in need of judicious editing.
A concluding essay contextualizing New York’s role vis-à-vis other parts of the country would have been welcome, but Goldstein produces a worthwhile book for WWII buffs and lifelong New Yorkers.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8996-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
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.
