A satisfying morsel for fans of The Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia—or perhaps of Rafael Sabatini.
A ripping tale of martial glory, commemorating a little-known fighter in a now-forgotten war.
Amedeo Guillet, now 93, was born into a Turin family whose members considered themselves Savoyards first, Italians second, defenders and protectors of “Europe’s oldest and most tenacious ruling dynasty.” Entering military service as a young man, he shone brightly as a familiar of the soldier king Vittorio Emmanuele III, an equestrian member of Italy’s 1936 Olympic team, and an able leader. A fine soldier, yes—but was he a fascist? British journalist O’Kelly sidesteps such distinctions, suggesting that although Guillet had only the dimmest inkling of what Mussolini intended when he started sending his troops into Libya, and then Ethiopia, he stood ready to serve, convinced that it was his country’s duty to bring law, order, and civilization to the heathens. Guillet distinguished himself as a cavalry commander against the fish-in-a-barrel opposition of Haile Selassie’s troops, served a spell in Spain fighting for Franco, then returned to the desert to take on the British, who proved better armed and tougher than his earlier foes. After leading one of the last great cavalry charges in history against a British tank column, he slipped away to organize a guerrilla band that included his Ethiopian lover. (“They had been friends, enjoying each other as life flashed by,” O’Kelly writes in a bodice-ripping moment. “But an empire had fallen since then, and their relationship had deepened.”) After bothering the British a while longer, he returned to Italy just in time to surrender to the Allies, then spent the postwar years serving as a diplomat until retiring to Ireland, enjoying the company of former enemies. O’Kelly spins out this improbable tale with a good eye for dramatic incidents, in which this account abounds, avoiding the usual blood-and-guts clichés. If only our hero—and so he was—had fought for a better cause.
A satisfying morsel for fans of The Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia—or perhaps of Rafael Sabatini.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-655247-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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.
