Good reading for military buffs who enjoyed the authors’ previous book.
Six long accounts of wars in which great captains fought on either side.
Excepting the occasional masterpiece like John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, military buffs often look down their noses at the “great battles” genre. However, historians and professors Lacey (Marine Corps War College) and Murray (Naval War College) follow their previous book, Moment of Battle: The Twenty Clashes That Changed the World (2013), with another expert mixture of lively nuts-and-bolts descriptions of combat and opinions on why some legendary generals won their wars and others did not. Hannibal kept defeating Roman armies, but Romans never gave up; eventually, their best general, Scipio, defeated Hannibal. Caesar is better known, but Pompey, equally triumphant during his lifetime, chose the wrong allies when the two had a falling out. During the Crusades, Richard the Lionhearted won many victories, but Saladin possessed more resources and patience, so Richard’s goal, Jerusalem, remained out of reach. Napoleon’s early victories saved revolutionary France and then megalomania took over. Against stubborn enemies, megalomaniacal leaders, no matter how brilliant, sooner or later make stupid decisions, and Napoleon did not break the mold. Robert E. Lee knew how to win battles, but Ulysses S. Grant knew how to win the war. Erwin Rommel, Bernard Montgomery, and George Patton were successful despite vastly disparate personalities. “Entirely different cultures, both national and military, formed their approaches to leadership,” write the authors in the “Conclusion” section of that chapter. In this genre, it’s obligatory to tie matters together with an insightful historical analysis, and the authors do their best without breaking new ground. They emphasize that wars are won by generals with a strategic overview of what they must accomplish (Scipio, Saladin, Grant) and lost by those who concentrate on winning battles (Hannibal, Napoleon, Lee). While collections of descriptions of famous campaigns remain the lowest common denominator of military history, this is a solid addition to the genre.
Good reading for military buffs who enjoyed the authors’ previous book.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54755-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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