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 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
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