Despite not straying far from the almost universal veneration, this is a definitive, nuanced portrait.
An overdue, authoritative biography of one of America’s greatest soldier-statesmen.
Roll (The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler, 2013, etc.) emphasizes that George Marshall (1880-1959), a brilliant staff officer, always impressed his superiors. A favorite of Cmdr. John Pershing, he became aide-de-camp when the general served as Army Chief of Staff from 1921 to 1924, and few were surprised when Marshall attained that office in 1939. The author excels in describing the period from Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland until Pearl Harbor, when Marshall urged rearmament and Franklin Roosevelt, aware that most voters opposed it, proceeded too cautiously for his taste. Opposition vanished after Pearl Harbor, to be replaced by questions of strategy, and here, Marshall’s record is spotty. He advised defeating Germany before taking the offensive against Japan and invading France in 1942 or 1943 instead of expending resources on the periphery: North Africa and Italy. Always congenial, Roosevelt agreed and then, after listening to public opinion, Churchill, and other advisers, changed his mind. After the war, President Harry Truman sent Marshall to China to end its civil war in what everyone agrees was an impossible assignment. Appointed secretary of state in 1947, he vigorously supported the European Recovery Program, which became known as the Marshall Plan. He resigned in 1949 but returned as secretary of defense in 1950 during the nadir of the Korean War, when he helped restore confidence in the armed forces. He resigned permanently in 1951 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, the only serving military officer to do so. Roll admits that America would have won World War II even with a less competent chief of staff, and many of his decisions remain controversial, but he was a thoroughly admirable, surprisingly quirk-free figure who, even during his life, seemed larger-than-life.
Despite not straying far from the almost universal veneration, this is a definitive, nuanced portrait.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-99097-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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
SEEN & HEARD
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