Despite not straying far from the almost universal veneration, this is a definitive, nuanced portrait.
An overdue, authoritative biography of one of America’s greatest soldier-statesmen.
Roll (The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler, 2013, etc.) emphasizes that George Marshall (1880-1959), a brilliant staff officer, always impressed his superiors. A favorite of Cmdr. John Pershing, he became aide-de-camp when the general served as Army Chief of Staff from 1921 to 1924, and few were surprised when Marshall attained that office in 1939. The author excels in describing the period from Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland until Pearl Harbor, when Marshall urged rearmament and Franklin Roosevelt, aware that most voters opposed it, proceeded too cautiously for his taste. Opposition vanished after Pearl Harbor, to be replaced by questions of strategy, and here, Marshall’s record is spotty. He advised defeating Germany before taking the offensive against Japan and invading France in 1942 or 1943 instead of expending resources on the periphery: North Africa and Italy. Always congenial, Roosevelt agreed and then, after listening to public opinion, Churchill, and other advisers, changed his mind. After the war, President Harry Truman sent Marshall to China to end its civil war in what everyone agrees was an impossible assignment. Appointed secretary of state in 1947, he vigorously supported the European Recovery Program, which became known as the Marshall Plan. He resigned in 1949 but returned as secretary of defense in 1950 during the nadir of the Korean War, when he helped restore confidence in the armed forces. He resigned permanently in 1951 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, the only serving military officer to do so. Roll admits that America would have won World War II even with a less competent chief of staff, and many of his decisions remain controversial, but he was a thoroughly admirable, surprisingly quirk-free figure who, even during his life, seemed larger-than-life.
Despite not straying far from the almost universal veneration, this is a definitive, nuanced portrait.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-99097-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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