A densely researched, thorough history for students of Roosevelt and World War II.
A new history of the Franklin Roosevelt/World War II era and the many significant characters who inhabited it.
Beating Germany or Japan was not a given in the bitter early stretches of the war, and it could not have happened unless the United States effectively harnessed its resources quickly. Military historian Lacey (War, Policy, and Strategy/Marine Corps War Coll.; Great Strategic Rivalries: From the Classical World to the Cold War, 2016, etc.) shows how the U.S.—which, in 1940, had a military the size of Bulgaria’s—would, within 30 months, turn the tide to victory. Much of the success owes to the leadership and strategy of Roosevelt and Gen. George Marshall, yet the momentum toward victory was years in the making. Roosevelt played his advisers against each other—e.g., Henry Hopkins, secretary of commerce, and Harold Ickes, secretary of interior, who were both tasked with ending the Depression—and he often worked in secret, as when he jump-started the military procurement in 1938 before the public knew of his motivation to aid England. As the European conflict intensified, Roosevelt stood firmly by the people he trusted. Ever politically astute, he appointed two Republicans to key war-building positions just on the eve of his own dicey decision to run for a third term: Henry Stimson at the war department and Frank Knox to run the Navy. With the Cabinet stocked with men in a driving hurry, Roosevelt tapped the brilliant Ernest King as chief of naval operations. Lacey manages to gather together the many strands of this remarkable story of how the U.S. government harnessed the disparate talents of business leaders, congressmen, volatile generals, and prickly heads of state such as Churchill. As the author notes, these “titanic rows almost always led to better outcomes than would have prevailed had there been a single man or apparatus directing events.”
A densely researched, thorough history for students of Roosevelt and World War II.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-345-54758-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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