With accustomed adroitness Tuchman meshes details political and personal, major and minor, into a strong narrative of General Stilwell's career and thirty-five years of U.S. China policy. The result leans toward biographical rather than political history. Stilwell was an egalitarian, commonsensical, high-humored officer; his idiosyncrasies, hatred of pretense and incumbent loneliness are captured in particular through acute selections from his literate, rather ribald diaries. As staff officer to the American occupation force in Shanghai, head of road-building teams of famine-stricken laborers, but especially as roving intelligence officer from 1934 to 1940, Vinegar Joe is at his exuberant best. But Stilwell's orientation toward tactical military situations, rather than the international political climate in which American policy was formed and conducted, creates a hitch in Tuchman's effort to use him to illuminate these policies. After providing considerable pre-World War II background, she is not at her descriptive best during the 1942-1945 high points of Stilwell's career, as he tries to make the Chinese army capable of stopping the Japanese. Press hero of the China-Burma theater, Stilwell is afforded only meager logistical support from U.S. air and ground forces, denied enough political support to arm-twist Chiang, burdened with consistent British shirking, and then ignominiously canned. Never disposed to tune in the political emanations from Washington and other headquarters, he doesn't try to analyze his defeat, and Tuchman falls down here too. As epilogue she asks wanly "What would have happened in postwar China if Stilwell had succeeded in reorganizing Chiang's armies?" Yet the surpassingly readable style and sensibility mobilized in her earlier works sustain the misfit heroics and suffice for high demand.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1970
ISBN: 0802138527
Page Count: 1342
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1970
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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