A 120-page monograph cannot replace a complete biography, the best being Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace...
When he left office in 1961, historians considered Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) a second-rate president. His reputation’s steady rise is not interrupted by this admiring, opinionated account by veteran British journalist and historian Johnson (Mozart, 2013, etc.).
Although he remained in the United States during World War II and spent two decades in the shrunken peacetime Army, Eisenhower’s talents were well-known. Gen. Douglas MacArthur kept him as an aide for nine years, and George Marshall summoned him to Washington a week after Pearl Harbor. Commanding the largest military force in history (20 times the size of MacArthur’s), Eisenhower kept Allied generals focused on the effort against the Nazis, even when they were often fighting among themselves. Victory made him a national hero, and he easily won the 1952 election over Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson. During the 1950s, the prospect of World War III seemed imminent. Several joint chiefs wanted to get on with it, but Eisenhower kept the military firmly under his thumb. He receives credit for ending the Korean War but little for refusing to strike back at China’s threats to Formosa; his military advisers were raring to go. Despite national panic that followed the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, Eisenhower quashed efforts to launch crash military programs. John F. Kennedy, a far more aggressive Cold Warrior, spent the 1960 campaign denouncing Eisenhower for underestimating the communist threat. Johnson astutely points out that Eisenhower enjoyed being president since, unlike generals Washington, Jackson and Grant, his best qualities were not those of a warrior but a staff officer: efficiency, administration, economy and flexibility.
A 120-page monograph cannot replace a complete biography, the best being Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace (2012). Though Johnson’s well-known right-wing views deliver an occasional jolt, this book remains a thoroughly entertaining introduction.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01682-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
