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
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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