Of considerable interest to students of presidential and American military history, though likely to court criticism from...
The final installment of the biographer’s significant study of Franklin Roosevelt’s sine qua non leadership in World War II.
It seems safe to say that, following his Commander in Chief: FDR’S Battle with Churchill, 1943 (2016), Hamilton is not Winston Churchill’s greatest admirer. As this volume recounts frequently and at length, Churchill often attempted to assert British leadership of the tripartite alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union, especially by pressing not for a cross-Channel invasion of Europe but instead for a push up through Italy, “an alternative Mediterranean strategy” that had the virtue, for Churchill, of taking place in a theater that was largely in the British sphere to begin with. Churchill’s strategy endangered one of D-Day’s lesser-known effects: The Western Allies’ pledge to open a second front in continental Europe would in turn produce a deepening of the war in the East—so Stalin promised, at any rate, while nursing a private bitterness that the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of the fight. Meanwhile, Germany exploited the weaknesses that emerged by floating hints of making a separate peace, with Joseph Goebbels noting in his diary that “Americans have only a secondary interest in the war in Europe and are only inspired by the war against Japan.” Even so, and against the odds, the Allies held together, an achievement that Hamilton credits to FDR’s unwavering leadership even in the face of Churchill’s maneuvering—and even though FDR, by the author’s account, knew that he was dying and still pressed on. The fact that those German offers were floated in March 1945, however—no secret from Hitler but a deliberate strategy—increased the Soviet mistrust of the Western powers and, Hamilton suggests, may have “presaged the Cold War" that followed the defeat of the Axis powers.
Of considerable interest to students of presidential and American military history, though likely to court criticism from the Churchill camp.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-544-87680-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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