Meatier and more substantive than books like The 48 Laws of Power and a font of well-considered guidance.
The former secretary of defense delivers lessons for would-be leaders.
The title might describe the current White House, from which Mattis (co-editor: Warriors and Citizens: American Views of Our Military, 2016) departed after disagreeing on one issue too many with the sitting president. However, it derives from an ironic Marine Corps acronym. Mattis spotted trouble from the start, noting that, after all, the separation of military from civilian leadership, by which officers were forbidden from serving in the office “within seven years of departing military service,” is there for a good reason—a reason disregarded by Trump and company. Still, Mattis, writing with Bing (One Million Steps: A Marine Platoon at War, 2014, etc.), has relatively little to say about his time in that orbit. Instead, he focuses on his military career, during which he rose through the ranks and replaced Gen. David Petraeus as head of the U.S. Central Command; and on the leadership lessons he learned in the field and on base. Considered an intellectual, he insists foremost on lifelong learning and constant reading: When he was called on to lead the 1st Marine Division in the Iraq War, for instance, he devoured books, from T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (“few Westerners in recent history had achieved his level of trust with Arabs on the battlefield”) to memoirs and studies of William Tecumseh Sherman, Gertrude Bell, and Alexander the Great. “I may not have come up with many new ideas,” writes Mattis, “but I’ve adopted or integrated a lot from others,” and he insisted that his officers and enlisted personnel read and study. Some lessons are obvious (don’t play favorites), some gung-ho (show an “obvious bias for action”), and most eminently useful for leaders in whatever sector (“You must decide, act, and move on"). One wishes for a little more dirt, but the author, a cool-headed diplomat, seems to be reserving that for magazine interviews, dishing it judiciously.
Meatier and more substantive than books like The 48 Laws of Power and a font of well-considered guidance.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9683-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 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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