Still, one wants a little more recognition that there were millions of soldiers and civilians involved. Reasonably good as a...
World War II as worldwide wrestling, in which four quite different but evenly matched champs gird up for the knockout.
British documentary producer and writer Berthon and researcher Potts know what makes for effective dramatization: strong characters doing amazing blood-spattered things, as Hitler, FDR, Churchill and Stalin surely did. Good TV does not always yield good history, though, and this book labors under the unstated sense that the four leaders fought the battle single-handedly, with Mussolini popping in for a cameo from time to time and old Hideki Tojo left out of the fun altogether; just so, Allied leaders such as Omar Bradley and Charles de Gaulle might as well have sat it out, for all the mention they’re given. The great-man approach has, of course, proven effective in introducing young readers to history, but this is a adult book, and adult readers deserve more complexity. And though complexity is sparingly offered here, it’s clear that Berthon and Potts have reserves of it: They know, for instance, that Hitler and Stalin signed their infamous non-aggression pact because each was afraid of being attacked by the other—and each thought he had fooled the other, and each rather admired the other all the while. The authors offer excellent coverage, too, of the slights, blunders and jealousies that so characterized the Allies that Hitler once boasted that their alliance would fall apart. One telling moment comes early on, when a pleading envoy promised that Britain would recognize Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic states if only they would switch to the Allied cause, while another moment comes very late, when Stalin professes great anger at being nicknamed “Uncle Joe” and wins a few more concessions from FDR and Churchill in the bargain.
Still, one wants a little more recognition that there were millions of soldiers and civilians involved. Reasonably good as a big-picture overview, except that the picture is so much bigger.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81467-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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