For the general reader looking for a handy guide to Eisenhower’s long, important and event-filled life in the armed forces.
A condensed version of five-star General Dwight David Eisenhower’s military career.
Eisenhower was overshadowed as a general by contemporaries Patton and MacArthur, sandwiched as president between the important FDR/Truman and the charismatic Kennedy. But his virtues become more manifest as time passes. Ike may not have been either America’s greatest general or president, but he has emerged as our best combined such leader since Washington. Drawing heavily on previously published materials, Wukovits (One Square Mile of Hell, not reviewed) has efficiently distilled Eisenhower’s life as a soldier, following his career from the plains of Kansas to West Point, where he was an avid footballer and an indifferent student, to a series of Army posts in Texas, Maryland, Panama, Kansas, the Philippines and Washington D.C., where his uncommon organizational ability and talent for training men kept him, against his own wishes, off the battlefield. Instead, he developed an interest in and devotion to the military; acquired a thorough understanding of all branches and levels of the Army; and learned first-hand strategic and political lessons from the likes of Patton, MacArthur and, most importantly, Generals Fox Connor and George C. Marshall. He emerged during WWII as the indispensable Supreme Allied Commander, able, through consensus, to conceive grand strategy, to tame prima donna generals and to deal with Roosevelt and Churchill as an equal. After defeating the Nazis, he became Army chief of staff and later head of NATO before running successfully for president in 1952. Wukovits attributes Ike’s military ascent and success to his focus, his dedication to teamwork, his empathy for the common soldier, his media savvy and his absolute devotion to duty. The brief text contains sufficient evidence to support this analysis. Mercifully infrequent references to contemporary conflicts come off as ham-handed attempts to make Eisenhower relevant and detract from a biography otherwise so tightly focused.
For the general reader looking for a handy guide to Eisenhower’s long, important and event-filled life in the armed forces.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4039-7137-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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