Lussu’s philosophy of war was born in the days he lived through and wrote about. Like so many soldiers, he was against it,...
The recovered memoir of a brave Italian soldier in World War I.
A lieutenant in the Sassari brigade of the Italian infantry, Lussu (1890–1975) waited 20 years to publish his memories of World War I in the Asiago Plateau, fighting the Austrian offensive. It is a story of trench warfare in 1916, but more importantly, it is the story of the men who fought and their derision of their commanding officers. They felt the enemy was not the Austrians but rather the men behind them giving orders that could only get them killed. The author’s memory is vivid, and the characters demand it. He writes of a general who demanded a different kind of definition of victory—not, “do you have enough supplies?” but a philosophical discussion. Gen. Leone, a pure wacko, demanded men wear body armor he had specially brought. Of course, when he sent them into battle, the armor was absolutely worthless. Another officer couldn’t understand why Lussu didn’t drink, something everyone in that army did—all day long and especially before a battle. The author writes about a war of maneuver to save lives rather than a war of position that would cost them. Regardless, the fact that they succeeded to take Monte Fior only to abandon it left them mostly in the same position throughout the conflict. These men were surely cannon fodder, and a short mutiny was the precursor to a much more serious revolt. One company abandoned their position in a cave that threatened to collapse, and their leader ordered the execution of every 10th man.
Lussu’s philosophy of war was born in the days he lived through and wrote about. Like so many soldiers, he was against it, and most readers will be persuaded to agree with him.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8478-4278-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Rizzoli Ex Libris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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