A journey back to the French rural landscape where so many American soldiers fell during World War I.
Maine-based journalist and author Rubin (The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, 2013, etc.) offers a fine on-the-ground account of some of the iconic battles of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, during which the Americans helped turn the tide finally against the Germans in late 1918. Readers following in Rubin’s scramble across the largely unmarked rural terrain will need a solid background to the actual fighting since, in many places, the author (who does not speak French) felt like he was the only “Anglophone tourist” who had been there since 1918. Artifact hunting is a serious avocation in these parts, and Rubin admits that one should be mentored in the pursuit, as he was for his previous research by Jean-Paul de Vries, the proprietor of a relics museum in Romagne-sous-Montfaucon. The author examines the sites of the most terrible battles missed by the Americans during the first months of the war: Verdun, the Somme, Ypres. The young doughboys of the American Expeditionary Forces were eager to join the fighting, which occurred in Bathelémont, where the first Americans fell in November 1917. Rubin explored the eerie chalk mines on the so-called Chemins des Dames, where the Yankee Division took shelter in early 1918 and where the walls are scrawled with American graffiti, in effect “their last will and testament.” From there, Rubin visited Château-Thierry on the Marne, where Gen. John Pershing’s Americans engaged the German Spring Offensive of 1918, including the legendary Battle of Belleau. Indeed, it was the Americans—and only the Americans—who could drive the Germans back, retaking the occupied territory held for four years. Throughout the book, Rubin sounds his theme of the Americans being crucial to France’s ultimate freedom (as amply recognized by the grateful French).
An eloquent dive into World War I cemeteries, monuments, mines, and trenches.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08432-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Categories: HISTORY | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
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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
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