Hirshorn’s highly useful reevaluation will be of particular interest to students of modern military history.
A sprawling life of the brilliant but very nasty American general known by his soldiers as “Old Blood and Guts.”
Hirshson (History/Queens Coll.; The White Tecumseh, 1997, etc.) does a fine job of capturing George S. Patton’s contradictions and the decidedly unpleasant aspects of his character, both correcting and amplifying the work of earlier, often worshipful biographers. He carefully reconstructs the famed incident in which Patton struck a battle-fatigued soldier in a field hospital in Sicily and reveals that when the combat correspondents on hand reported his abusive behavior, Patton’s circle took it as yet another campaign on the part of Communists and Jews to sabotage their hero’s career. Patton himself was a lifelong anti-Semite, Hirshson reveals, his attitudes inherited from his patrician father; even after the liberation of the Nazi death camps he would insist that Jews “are lower than animals.” His prejudices, remarkable even in the context of the time, coupled with his refusal to remove former Nazis from government posts in occupied Bavaria, led to his removal from command; the 1970 movie starring George C. Scott wrongly attributes his demotion to Patton’s anti-Soviet views, which he indeed held but did not widely air. The chief flaw in this capable book is Hirshson’s tendency to overdetail. It is useful to know that Patton was dyslexic and did not learn to read until early adolescence, for instance, but not so much to know the statistical incidence of dyslexia in the present general population. Still, readers who keep at this long, dense biography will see that Hirshson treats Patton’s very real accomplishments on the battlefield with great respect. After all, the general who seized more enemy-held territory than any other at tremendous cost to the foe deserves his reputation as a strategist to rival Napoleon . . . or Genghis Khan.
Hirshorn’s highly useful reevaluation will be of particular interest to students of modern military history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000982-9
Page Count: 848
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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