A biography of the military commander who, in this sound and balanced portrayal, was bound by his training and convictions to win an unwinnable war, ultimately the costliest in US history. Zaffiri (Hamburger Hill, not reviewed), a Vietnam veteran, relates the life of a remarkable general whose career was shattered by his involvement in the Vietnam War. The book opens with perhaps the high point of Westmoreland's professional life: a speech before a joint session of Congress, an honor reserved previously for the likes of Pershing, Eisenhower, and MacArthur. As the applause and adulation fade away, the author dissolves to the general's ancestry and early life. Coming from a southern military family, he forsook the family tradition of attendance at The Citadel to go to West Point. He demonstrated courage and leadership during WW II in North Africa and elsewhere, becoming a hero and stepping on the Army's fast track. He was frustrated by the political nature of the Korean War, in which he also served. Coming to the Pentagon, he became a protÇgÇ of Maxwell Taylor, later JFK's military advisor. This ultimately led to his tenure as commander of MAC-V (Military Assistance Command—Vietnam). The Tet offensive, though in truth a disaster for the Communists, convinced both Congress and the American public that Westmoreland had deceived them about possibilities for success and broke the resolve of the US to prosecute the war. Although he still achieved his long-held dream of becoming Army chief of staff, he would live out his life in the shadow of perceived failure. A gubernatorial run in his native South Carolina and his famous libel suit against CBS round out the story. Based on meticulous research and interviews with many key figures (including Westmoreland himself), the book offers a fair hearing for a man who has been alternately overlooked and maligned by history.
Pub Date: July 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11179-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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