A first-rate narrative take on the life and times of Lt. Gen. James Maurice Gavin, one of the US Army's few great WW II heroes to stand his last post without a full-dress biography or autobiography. Drawing mainly on their subject's personal papers (including an unpublished memoir), Booth and Spencer offer a sympathetic, albeit tough-minded, appraisal of a complex career officer whose combat record remains a legend in the American military. A foundling, Gavin was raised by foster parents in western Pennsylvania's coal country. Leaving his hardscrabble home as a teenager, he enlisted and soon earned an appointment to West Point. Graduating in 1929, Gavin was well prepared for senior command when the US entered WW II. A protÇgÇ of Matthew Ridgeway, Gavin made an enduring name for himself as the 82nd Airborne Division's up-front leader in its nonstop campaigns on Europe's bloodiest killing grounds. The unhappily married paratrooper made love as well as war; his conquests included the high-profile likes of Marlene Dietrich and journalist Martha Gellhorn. When the guns fell silent, America's youngest general since Custer never quite regained his stride. With little prospect of earning a fourth star, let alone becoming Chief of Staff (owing to his vocal critiques of Pentagon policy), Gavin resigned from the Army in 1957 at the age of 50. Contentedly ensconced in a successful second marriage, the former soldier went on to head Arthur D. Little, a world-class consultancy whose revenues increased almost tenfold during his 20-year stewardship. Gavin (who gave JFK the idea for what became the Peace Corps) took time out to serve as US ambassador to France and otherwise kept active in public affairs, e.g., opposing LBJ's commitment of American forces in Vietnam. Stricken with Parkinson's disease, he died quietly in 1990. A balanced account of a storied fighting man's achievements on and off the battlefield. (16 pages of b&w photos—not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-73226-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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