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 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
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