A long but excellent, highly useful addition to the library of modern European history as well as the political history of...
Nearly 50 years after his death comes this exhaustive biography and reassessment of Charles de Gaulle’s political career.
As Jackson (History/Queen Mary Univ.; The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, 2003, etc.) notes, de Gaulle was not easy to peg politically. He emerged from a tradition of “social Catholicism” that “sought to overcome class struggle by finding a middle way between capitalism and socialism.” What de Gaulle was, pre-eminently, was French, fervently devoted to his nation. During World War I, he had been a junior officer under Marshal Pétain, whom he would oppose when France capitulated to the Germans at the beginning of World War II; Pétain’s role, de Gaulle thundered, put him “on the road to treason.” De Gaulle evacuated to London and set up a Free French government in exile, and he was so much of a thorn in the side of the Allies in demanding an equal place at the table that Jackson writes Churchill said something along the lines of, “Each time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I will choose Roosevelt.” Yet, because of de Gaulle, France did have an equal part as an occupying power of Germany after the war. Jackson writes clearly, if sometimes with a touch too much lingering detail, of de Gaulle’s maneuvering to play both sides against the middle in such instances as the near civil war that broke out in France over the anti-colonial war in Algeria, which nearly led to a modern coup d’état, and of de Gaulle’s elaborate efforts to calve the European powers away from American influence and into the French sphere. Throughout, Jackson insists, de Gaulle, though often considered conservative, was a modernizer who “celebrated scientific progress, economic and social reforms and the modernization of the armed forces.”
A long but excellent, highly useful addition to the library of modern European history as well as the political history of World War II and the Cold War.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-98721-0
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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