Military history that reads like a novel, full of great stories and vivid scenes.
Interwoven biographies of three of the great American military leaders of the 20th century.
Groom’s (The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight, 2014, etc.) three subjects are both interesting in their own rights and sufficiently contrasting personalities to keep the narrative from bogging down. Patton developed the essentials of tank warfare in World War I and went on to use them brilliantly in World War II. Marshall became typecast as a staff officer, too valuable at organizing logistics, personnel, and supply to risk in a combat command. He remains best known for the plan that led to the economic revival of Europe after the war. MacArthur was perhaps the finest field general of them all, yet like Marshall, his greatest achievement may have come when the war was over, in creating the groundwork for modern Japan. Steady, self-effacing Marshall was a team player, while the other two were ego-driven and jealous of all rivals. Groom takes each of them from youth to the ends of their careers, taking advantage of opportunities to comment on historical trends. While the author is by no means a strong stylist—too fond of clichés, given to piling up adjectives, often clumsy on the sentence level—he’s a first-rate storyteller, and these three men give him plenty of material. He trots out the great quotes and the telling anecdotes from each of their careers and takes full advantage of their many interactions with other famous figures, such as MacArthur’s discovery that Lindbergh was flying fighters in the South Pacific during the war. Groom also has a novelist’s sense of timing and scene-building. His research, drawing on his subjects’ own writings, effectively draws out their characters. Some readers may find his sympathy with the rather conservative politics of MacArthur and Patton off-putting, but one suspects that sympathy was a strong ingredient in his ability to paint such compelling pictures of them.
Military history that reads like a novel, full of great stories and vivid scenes.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1549-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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