Next up, Waterloo. A welcome biography, particularly for students of European geopolitics.
First of a two-volume life of Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, covering his first 45 years, a time in which he became a military legend and major political figure.
Wellesley was, writes historian Muir (Salamanca, 1812, 2001, etc.), “arguably, the greatest and most successful of all British generals.” He played a major role in the British subjugation of India and had risen to leadership when Napoleon Bonaparte decided to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. The French proved a tough and battle-hardened enemy—as Muir notes, during the Peninsular War, an account of which forms much of this book, the French were perhaps not the best in battle but were certainly great at getting from one place to another and being prepared for it—against which Wellington honed his own British forces to be the best in the world at the time. The author argues that Wellington was directly responsible for elevating Britain to the head of the list of world powers, where it would remain for the next century and more. Interestingly, he was not an uncontroversial figure; as an Irish-born politician, he had plenty of enemies in Parliament, while he came under criticism during the early campaigning in Portugal for allowing a French army to escape—and not only that, but for helping it evacuate back to France. Some of Wellington’s early biographers were among those who advanced these criticisms, and one of the virtues of Muir’s book is its political evenhandedness, as well as its understanding of the late-18th- and early-19th-century context. He is not above finding fault with his hero, either; as he writes, Wellington “could, on a bad day, be harsh and unjust, and his deep-seated conviction that he was invariably in the right did not make mending fences easy.”
Next up, Waterloo. A welcome biography, particularly for students of European geopolitics.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-18665-9
Page Count: 744
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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