Warriors are like the rest of us, Hastings observes—which makes the accomplishments of the great ones all the more unusual....
An old-fashioned book about battles past, before the technocrats came along to ruin the notion of courage under fire.
Indeed, writes British military journalist and historian Hastings, “this study will be of no interest to such modern warlords as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, because it addresses aspects of conflict they do not comprehend, creatures of flesh and blood rather than systems of steel and electronics.” What characterizes the flesh-and-blood creatures whom Hastings studies is a particular kind of gumption in the face of mortal danger. To some, such as the impossibly accomplished Napoleonic soldier Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcellin de Marbot, courage seems second nature; he was apt to jump into freezing lakes to rescue wounded enemies, incur multiple wounds and save his beloved emperor, all in a day’s work. To others, initiative under fire was as much an intellectual, learned process as a reflexive, physical one; Hastings offers an affecting portrait of Joshua Chamberlain, the Maine rhetorician who became one of the Union’s most outstanding officers during the Civil War. To still others, courage was a nearly unwilling and certainly unexpected response; none of his fellow officers could have guessed that John Chard, the hero of Rorke’s Drift, would have organized so brilliant and successful a defense. And to still others, bravery in grave danger seems almost a path to escape from an unhappy life under ordinary circumstances; its revisionism will perhaps displease diehard fans, but Hastings’s portrait of the woeful Audie Murphy, “widely perceived as a soldier fighting a war of his own,” is sensitive and revealing, and it explains much about the ways in which heroes allow logic and instinct to be overridden by something much more elemental—and dangerous.
Warriors are like the rest of us, Hastings observes—which makes the accomplishments of the great ones all the more unusual. Of interest to students of tactics and military history—and perhaps of psychology as well.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4441-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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