The general’s defenders will have their hands full answering Sorley’s blistering indictment.
A military historian’s harsh take on the career of the general most associated with America’s most controversial war.
An Eagle Scout, First Captain at the U.S. Military Academy, a combat veteran of World War II and Korea, Commanding General of the 101st Airborne Division, Superintendent of West Point and, just before his retirement from the military, he served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. 1965’s Time magazine Man of the Year, he addressed a Joint Session of Congress in 1967. Married for more than 50 years, he fathered three children. By almost any measure William C. Westmoreland’s life (1914–2005) and career would be deemed successful. But he’ll be forever defined by his tenure as commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam, where his strategy of attrition and his search-and-destroy tactics failed utterly to daunt the enemy and frustrated Americans at home who detected no progress in the war. Under Westmoreland’s leadership, “the light at the end of the tunnel” never dawned. Although Sorley (A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, 1999, etc.) treats every aspect of the general’s life, the bulk of the biography deals with the Vietnam years and the various controversies surrounding Westmoreland’s command: his failure to properly arm and train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, his obsession with body counts, his manipulation of the order of battle, his surprise at the 1968 Tet Offensive. Handsome and humorless, Westmoreland had a penchant for self-promotion, for playing to the press and for disguising stalemate as progress. In these respects, not to mention his successive requests for more troops, he resembles no one in our history more than Union Gen. George B. McClellan, although Westmoreland was, by all accounts, a decent man, more the tool than the antagonist of his civilian superiors. Westmoreland spent the 30 years of his retirement defending his actions in Vietnam, but his reputation never recovered. He authored a tendentious memoir, ran an amateurish and unsuccessful campaign for South Carolina’s governorship and ignominiously settled a weak libel suit against CBS.
The general’s defenders will have their hands full answering Sorley’s blistering indictment.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-51826-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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