A majestic overview with an engaging sense of the nuance of character. Thankfully, Perry doesn’t become mired in familiar...
In a study of quiet authority, Perry spotlights the presumptuous commanding general at the moment of his evolving maturity during the Pacific theater and apotheosis in the Philippines.
Working by comparison and contrast as he has done in previous works on George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower (Partners in Command, 2007) and Ulysses Grant and Mark Twain (Grant and Twain, 2004), Perry draws Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) in sharp relief against the actions and policies of Franklin Roosevelt, who recognized his rival’s power and perversity and privately called him the most dangerous man in America. Roosevelt admired the war hero and Army chief of staff, inherited from Hoover’s administration, and mistrusted his motives and ambition, but Roosevelt resisted dismissing him, as recommended by his New Dealers. Instead, he shrewdly employed him as a foil to his Republican opponents. While Perry is not blind to MacArthur’s overriding character issues—including arrogance, vanity and paranoia—the author does suggest that the general has been judged overwhelmingly by his strong-arm tactics, his leadership obtuseness after the Pearl Harbor attack and his later confrontation with President Harry S. Truman—and also underappreciated for some of his actions during his wartime command in the Pacific, namely the coordinated land, sea and air assault of Operation Cartwheel. “Exiled” to the Philippines yet providentially situated in 1940 when chaos was unleashed in the Pacific, MacArthur nonetheless underestimated the Japanese threat and overestimated the Philippines’ troops. His “dilatory” response on the morning of Dec. 8, 1941, led to the Clark Field debacle and the “dooming” of the Philippines. Perry impressively moves through each of the seminal arenas of the Pacific war.
A majestic overview with an engaging sense of the nuance of character. Thankfully, Perry doesn’t become mired in familiar biographical detail.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-01328-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
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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