A keen psychological study that aims at honing leadership skills via example.
A military theorist at the School of Advanced Military Studies looks closely at Lawrence of Arabia’s self-styled conversion into an effective guerrilla leader.
Young, brash, well-schooled and smitten with a romantic idea of Arab culture, T.E. Lawrence (1888 –1935) began to fashion himself in “Arab skin” fairly soon after arriving in the Middle East in 1909 to work on his Oxford University thesis on the Crusades. He learned Arabic and worked on archaeological digs in Turkey and in strategic intelligence in Palestine in 1913. With the outbreak of World War I, Britain’s policy in the region was to “detach the Arabs from the Turks,” in order to bring about the demise of the ailing Ottoman Empire. Though Lawrence often witnessed “an arrogance of power wedded to an ignorance of culture” on the part of the British, he aided the British as a necessary step to Arab independence. When the Arab revolt erupted in 1916, Lawrence, with his knowledge of Arab culture and language, became indispensable to the British as a staff officer and diplomatic conduit. But Lawrence learned quickly that the traditional Western military style of leadership did not suit the Arabs, and during a long hallucinatory spell of sickness, which Schneider elaborates on as conveying “a flash of genius,” Lawrence clarified in his mind the means of guerilla warfare—wear down the opponent by exhaustion rather than annihilation, and by the employment of small, effective “clouds of raiders.” His empathy was key to leadership success, and Schneider takes us through skirmishes at the port of Aqaba, the battle of Tafileh and eventual march to Damascus in 1918. The author bestows on Lawrence the supreme compliment of being an “autonomous leader,” and deeply probes his conflicted sense of helping the Arabs while also being a “fraud” in upholding British imperialism.
A keen psychological study that aims at honing leadership skills via example.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-553-80764-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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