A moderately revisionist, entirely engrossing WWII history.
An expert, opinionated World War II history with some unsettling conclusions.
McManus (U.S. Military History/Missouri Univ. of Science and Technology; Hell Before Their Very Eyes: American Soldiers Liberate Concentration Camps in Germany, April 1945, 2015, etc.) points out that Marines received almost all the glory during the war, a fact still resented by the Army, which did “the vast majority of the planning, the supplying, the transporting, the engineering, the fighting, and the dying to win [the] war.” Unlike most histories that move quickly from Pearl Harbor to the gratifying mid-1942 victories in the Coral Sea, Midway, and Guadalcanal, half of this book covers the painful earlier months. Japan invaded the Philippines two weeks after Pearl Harbor. The commander in the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur, considered himself a warrior. Warriors attack, so he discarded the long-planned retreat to the Bataan peninsula and announced that he would defeat the Japanese at the beaches, an impossible task. By the time MacArthur, seeing his forces in full retreat, reinstated the Bataan plan, it was too late. The troops made it, but most supplies remained behind. Despite outnumbering the enemy, starvation, disease, and shortages doomed them. Evacuated to Australia, MacArthur directed the reconquest of New Guinea, where, despite a better outcome, troops suffered the same miseries as they had on Bataan. McManus moves on with gripping accounts of campaigns in China, Burma, the Solomons, and the Gilberts. Readers may learn more than they want to know about Japan’s vicious treatment of POWs and flinch at the author’s low opinion of Gen. MacArthur. Military historians rarely share the worshipful view of civilian colleagues, who give him a pass on the Philippine debacle, brush off the fact that his troops disliked him, and happily pronounce him a military genius with an inflated ego. McManus’ MacArthur comes off as an arrogant self-promoter with modest military skills and no rapport with fighting men, routinely sacrificing their lives (and the careers of subordinate commanders) to burnish his image.
A moderately revisionist, entirely engrossing WWII history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-47504-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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