A revealing—and troubling—portrait of a much-revered figure.
The story of a legendary Marine Corps commander who championed innovative tactics in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
In this admiring biography, novelist and biographer Coram (American Patriot: The Life and Wars of Colonel Bud Day, 2007, etc.) traces the life of Lt. Gen. Victor Krulak (1913–2008), who was born the spoiled only child of a Denver watchmaker and grew up to become “a man of dazzling intellect and extraordinary vision” and “the most important officer” in Marine Corps history. Against the broader story of the modern U.S. Marines, the author shows how Krulak’s tremendous drive and friendships with top officers fueled his rapid rise through the ranks; he eventually commanded all Marine Corps forces in the Pacific. He helped create the Higgins boat (its square bow became a retractable ramp), which famously carried troops onto the invasion beaches of Normandy and the Pacific in World War II; pioneered the use of helicopters in battle during the Korean War; and developed techniques for counterinsurgency warfare in Vietnam. He also successfully fought attempts to dissolve the Corps. But Krulak’s ceaseless quest for recognition was “driven by a dark wind.” The short, flinty officer hid secrets and told lies about himself. He never revealed that his parents were Russian Jews. Nor did he tell anyone—not even his wife and three sons—that he had been married, however briefly, at 16, a fact that would have prevented his admission to the Naval Academy. He claimed falsely that he was raised as an Episcopalian, that his father was a scientist and his great-grandfather had served in the Confederate army. Saddled with these and other lies, Krulak maintained an “icy self-control” to protect his inner self and the reality that “were it not for the Marine Corps, he would be an obscure little Jewish boy working in the family jewelry business in Denver.” Coram suggests that Krulak’s exemplary devotion to military duty and rectitude outweighs his duplicity. Krulak was denied the post of Marine Corps commandant after criticizing President Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War.
A revealing—and troubling—portrait of a much-revered figure.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-75846-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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