A straight-shooting, comforting account—though not super-enlightening, considering the mountain of previous Ike bios.
One of the most favored subjects of eminent historians receives yet another lofty tribute as the prescient general and “most successful” president of the 20th century after Franklin Roosevelt.
Having written biographies of FDR, John Marshall and Lucius Clay, Smith (History/Columbia Univ.; FDR, 2007, etc.) is amply qualified to reshape the life of the late, great president, whom the author calls an “enigma.” The making of the leader seems to interest Smith most, and he breezily tracks Eisenhower’s (1890–1969) early years as the third of seven sons born to a brooding, difficult father who finally found work at a creamery in Abilene, Kan., and a vivacious, energetic mother whose confidence in her sons’ abilities propelled them to prosper in the world. Smith dutifully points out a few weaknesses in the general’s legend, such as that he lied about his age when applying to West Point, and participated with alacrity in General MacArthur’s shameful clearing of the Bonus Army encampment in Washington, July 1932. Popular, capable, ambitious and a hard worker if not a brilliant mind, Ike was furious that World War I had passed him by, relegated to the peacetime Army—although he leapfrogged the ranks while ingratiating himself wit the major generals of the day. Although he had never led an active command, he was swept into General Marshall’s War Plans Division of the Army after Pearl Harbor. Smith examines Eisenhower’s leadership in the European theater, concluding that he was a master at consensus and delegating, offering the appearance of casual confidence; however, as a field commander his understanding was “abstract and academic.” As president, he capably handled the Suez crisis and sending troops into Little Rock, kept the country out of war and would not abandon his vice president Richard Nixon. He ended his presidency with the still-ringing warning about “the military-industrial complex.”
A straight-shooting, comforting account—though not super-enlightening, considering the mountain of previous Ike bios.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6693-3
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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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