For military buffs, surely, but also for general readers looking for an introduction to the Navy’s senior hero of WWII.
A military historian’s look at the five-star admiral “who commanded the 2 million men and 1000 ships that won the war in the Pacific.”
When Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966) entered the Naval Academy, the Spanish-American War had only recently concluded. By the end of his distinguished career, the U.S. Navy featured supercarriers and nuclear submarines, innovations he’d vigorously championed. Retired Navy captain Harris (War News: Blue & Gray in Black & White: Newspapers in the Civil War, 2010, etc.) revisits every stage of Nimitz’s era-straddling career, from his Texas boyhood and Annapolis years through his various postings and commands, to his crowning 1945 appointment as Chief of Naval Operations, where his postwar pushback against the move to unify the armed services probably preserved naval aviation and the Marine Corps. The bulk of this short narrative, however, focuses on Nimitz’s command of land, sea and air forces in the Pacific during World War II. FDR ordered Nimitz to Pearl Harbor only days after it was attacked. He took over a shattered force and eventually orchestrated a string of naval battles and island conquests that culminated in the Japanese surrender, with Nimitz signing for the United States. Although it was Nimitz who memorably said of the Marines on Iwo Jima, “Uncommon valor was a common virtue,” he was neither especially eloquent nor charismatic. Rather, he was a steady leader whose outward calm and ready supply of jokes masked the partial deafness and nervous tension that plagued him, and he was a superb handler of me. Intolerant of poor performance or discourtesy and horrified by any internecine squabbling, Nimitz rarely permitted his feelings to show. Still, he once explained the framed photo of Gen. MacArthur he kept on his desk as a reminder “not to be a horse’s ass and make Jovian pronouncements complete with thunderbolts.”
For military buffs, surely, but also for general readers looking for an introduction to the Navy’s senior hero of WWII.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-230-10765-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 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
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