Custer completists will want to have a look, but there are many better books on the subject.
Revisionist study of one of the most signal defeats in the annals of America.
By Hatch’s (Glorious War: The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer, 2013, etc.) account, it is an enduring myth to think that Custer committed a mistake by splitting his forces and entering the field of battle on the grass of Little Bighorn in multiple columns. In previous engagements in the Civil War and Indian Wars, Custer had separated his command and lived to tell the tale, once at the Battle of the Washita River. Hatch does not add that at Washita it was mostly women and children who stood in Custer’s way, though the warriors managed to rub out one of those separated units, but his point stands: Viewing the lay of the land and where he thought his enemies were and how they would react, Custer was rightly engaging in a strategy that he had proven in past battles. In a library that includes work by such fine writers as Nathaniel Philbrick and Evan S. Connell, Hatch’s book is no competition in literary terms; the prose sags and strains (“the powers that be did not have to work too hard to demonize the Sioux and Cheyenne in the eyes of the average cavalryman”). As a purely military account that draws heavily on that library, though, it has its merits. Hatch does a good job of describing firearms, tactics, the minutiae of cavalry mounts and the terrible fury of a battle that might have been won had Marcus Reno's and Frederick Benteen’s columns arrived. To his detriment, though, Hatch goes on too long about “brotherhood under fire,” a sentiment the victorious Indians no doubt felt themselves. The author’s nonironic contrasting of the “civilized world” with theirs is something at home in Custer’s era but not in our own.
Custer completists will want to have a look, but there are many better books on the subject.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05102-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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