Students of strategy and tactics, as well as of the Civil War, will find this a useful look at a storied partnership.
A study of the working relationship between Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, masters of strategy.
“His equal can never be found for fighting; for planning, Genl Lee stands unsurpassed; for both, I place Genl Jackson at the head of any list.” So noted a Virginia cavalryman in his diary after Jackson died as a result of wounds suffered under “friendly fire.” The Army of Northern Virginia consistently fought against the odds, almost always outnumbered and outgunned by Union forces. Even so, thanks to strategic innovation and a certain derring-do—to say nothing of a willingness to expend lives for their cause—that force’s chief generals managed to outfight their opponents. Jackson and Lee, writes Keller (History/United States Army War Coll.; Chancellorsville and the Germans, 2010, etc.), were friends who relied on each other for advice and leadership, Jackson taking the role of the chief strategic adviser who executed Lee’s orders even when he disagreed with them. (In this respect, Jackson was much different from James Longstreet, who, Keller notes, always believed that his own strategic ideas were best and sulked when Lee overrode them.) Jackson had no shortage of ideas and plans, even venturing policy suggestions that led to such things as the “first national draft in American history.” Together, Lee and Jackson developed early plans that would take the war north to such battlefields as Gettysburg, a battle that might have turned out much differently had Jackson not died in 1863. With Jackson’s death, a partnership of near equals ended, and Lee reorganized his army while facing what Keller considers a thorny dilemma: “how to ‘build’ another Jackson-type subordinate in [Richard] Ewell and [A.P.] Hill within an extremely time-constrained and pressure-filled environment.” He could not, and even though the Army of Northern Virginia managed to fight on until 1865, Jackson’s loss was a critical turning point.
Students of strategy and tactics, as well as of the Civil War, will find this a useful look at a storied partnership.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-134-4
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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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