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
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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