An engaging history, guided by an elegant, witty sense of characterization.
Distinguished man of letters and former Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief Korda (Journey to Revolution, 2006, etc.) stylishly and sympathetically restores Dwight D. Eisenhower to an eminent place in the military and political pantheon.
The author begins in 1942, when Ike gained instant fame as supreme commander of the European theater of operations and began the dogged strategic planning that would defeat Nazi Germany. The long-postponed Allied invasion of France finally took place on June 6, 1944, and it showcased Ike’s skillful ability to manage staggering logistics and bring together the kind of manpower that the effort demanded. His sincerity, grasp of detail and lack of ceremony made it impossible for even the British and French not to like the unassuming, hardworking general. Korda too is evidently enchanted by the decency of his subject, for whom “duty would always come first.” Unscholarly and outdoorsy in Mennonite Kansas, Ike escaped small-town Abilene by attending West Point. Second Lieutenant Eisenhower married Denver debutante Mamie Doud in 1916, and they began a trying, peripatetic Army life that required long absences on Ike’s part and enormous amounts of suffering and forgiveness on Mamie’s. After tours of duty in Panama and France, in 1932 Eisenhower found his first mentor in General Douglas MacArthur, under whom he worked for six years at the War Department and then in the Philippines, building up America’s “arsenal of democracy.” With the outbreak of World War II, Ike was summoned to London to make order out of chaos, squired around by glamorous volunteer driver Kay Summersby, who may or may not have been his lover. (The author demurely chooses not to judge.) Korda’s command of military history is impressive in the wartime chapters. He treats Eisenhower’s two-term presidency more summarily, but hails Ike’s little-regarded devotion to keeping America out of war and the groundwork laid for the Civil Rights movement.
An engaging history, guided by an elegant, witty sense of characterization.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-075665-9
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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