Like Patton at his best: polished, precise and persuasive.
George Patton revolutionizes warfare while struggling with his inner demons during times of peace.
Axelrod (Patton on Leadership, 2001, etc.) kicks off editor General Wesley Clark’s “Great Generals Series” with a compact but insightful volume on one of the most controversial military leaders in American history, a man who, in his own mind, was born and bred to be a warrior. Descended from a long line of military men on his father’s side, Patton decided at a young age to make war his business. Accolades and controversy followed him in equal measure from the moment he arrived at West Point in 1904. For every brilliant tactical maneuver he conceived and executed, he managed to alienate those around him, whether by cheating on his wife, offending his fellow officers or being too hard on his men. It was Patton’s shocking abuse of a shell-shocked private—and proclivity for putting his foot in his mouth—that sidelined him for nearly a year during World War II, a period of time during which Patton’s lightning strikes might have inflicted heavy damage and, perhaps, shortened the war. Patton was a walking contradiction: a pious man who cursed like a sailor, a man who knew peace through war and warred with himself in times of peace and a man who projected confidence while enduring excruciating bouts of self-doubt. For the most part, Axelrod holds nothing back in painting the portrait of a man who was something of anathema to a democratic society leery of having a large standing army: a professional warrior whose sole goal in life was to be in the thick of battle and emerge covered in glory. At times, Axelrod stretches in trying to justify some of Patton’s more glaring faults, but this can perhaps be attributed to the nature of the series. Still, this is a concise yet in-depth look at a fascinating man whose myth, in many ways, outshines the facts.
Like Patton at his best: polished, precise and persuasive.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-4039-7139-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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