If these sensible lessons break no new ground, the biographies make good reading.
Principles of leadership drawn from the lives of 10 admirals from ancient Greece to the present.
Exploring self-improvement through the lives of great leaders has become a popular—and often eye-rolling—genre, but this earnest mixture of biography, memoir, and pop psychology makes no outlandish claims, and readers will absorb some significant naval history. Well-read but no scholar, Stavridis (Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World's Oceans, 2017), the former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and current chairman of the U.S. Naval Institute, has done his research in the works of popular historians. For the most part, the author has chosen his subjects well, and ambitious readers can follow up using his excellent bibliography, which includes works by such noted historians as Jan Morris, Walter Borneman, and James Hornfischer. Stavridis begins with history’s first great sea commander, Themistocles, who led the ancient Greeks to victory over the Persians at Salamis and then fell from favor, ending his life in exile. Stavridis concludes that Themistocles represents a case study in charisma, risk-taking, and overweening arrogance. Perhaps most obscure is 15th-century Chinese Adm. Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch who rose to the top of the imperial hierarchy and led a titanic fleet in several voyages across south Asia as far as Africa. Demonstrating grit and self-reliance, he was “carefully organized, calm of spirit, devoted to his prince, and willing to take risks.” More familiar figures march across the pages, including Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson, John Arbuthnot Fisher, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Chester Nimitz, Hyman Rickover, and Elmo Zumwalt. Stavridis ends with Grace Hopper, whose “vision of the distant future” guided a not-always-enthusiastic Navy into the computer age. In the final chapter, the author summarizes character traits that these impressive figures demonstrated, and few readers will deny that they include creativity, resilience, humility, empathy, decisiveness, and determination.
If these sensible lessons break no new ground, the biographies make good reading.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55993-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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