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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 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.
