A fine appreciation of the military professional who arguably ranks among America's very best generals. Drawing on interviews with contemporaries and family members as well as on archival sources, Sorley (a USMA grad who served in Vietnam) offers an unsentimental portrait of a career officer who fought in three wars. A member of West Point's Class of `36, Abrams became an authentic hero leading a tank battalion in WW II's ETO. Winning promotion to brigadier general after a tour of duty in Korea, he handled a number of increasingly responsible assignments before being posted to Southeast Asia as General William Westmoreland's deputy and successor. As Sorley makes clear, Abrams probably would be better and more warmly remembered today had he been given a better war to fight. In any case, Abrams gave a brilliant account of himself despite restrictive rules of engagement and the fact that his civilian superiors had begun a phased reduction of US combat forces. Back in the States after a four-year absence, he was appointed chief of staff, a position that allowed him (before his untimely death at 59 in 1974) to initiate the reforms that eventually helped the US Army win in the Persian Gulf. While Sorley focuses on the talents that gained Abrams renown as a world-class strategist and tactician, he does not scant the qualities that also made him a soldier's soldier and a very human being. In addition to recounting the feats of arms that earned the colorful, cigar-chomping Abrams a legendary reputation among front- line troops and peers, the author provides affecting glimpses of his subject's personal and spiritual life. Though tough-minded and a stickler for integrity and honesty, Abrams (a late-in-life convert to Roman Catholicism) was evidently a devoted father of six, a loving husband, and a compassionate, if demanding, commander. A well-told tale of a paradigmatic warrior. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70115-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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