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Class of 1957 Book Review Site. ©2007. To add a Book Review, or to comment on a book already in this listing, send your material or review to Sam Coulbourn at Persnav@shore.net. Photo at top of each page shows ENS Arleigh Burke beneath 14-inch gun aboard Battleship USS Arizona, 1923. Revised 27 March 2008. |
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BIOGRAPHY What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
By Daniel Mark, Epstein, 2001.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in extreme poverty and was reared in Camden, Maine, where today there stands a statue in her honor. She wrote magnificent love poems, was the first woman to win the Pulitzer prize, wrote several plays, and composed the libretto for an opera, the premiere of which was performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her personal life was one of blazing passion – her affairs with many men and women were often on public display. The author, in describing her tumultuous life does us the great favor of including many excerpts from her poetry that were written during the various episodes he describes.
Review by Paul Roush
BIOGRAPHY Tunney
By Jack Cavanaugh, 2006.
Gene Tunney, a "man for all seasons" beat Jack Dempsey twice and was the world heavyweight champion. Not only was he a great boxer but self educated and very well read. He even gave a lecture at Yale about Shakespeare. Tunney was a Marine in WWI and a Navy Captain in WWII. He married a wealthy niece of Andrew Carnegie and entered the business world after retiring from boxing. Cavanaugh does a good job describing not only Tunney and Dempsey but many other fighters in that era.
BIOGRAPHY My Losing Season
By Pat Conroy, 2002.
Conroy gives us a splendid accounting of his four years as a student at the Citadel, primarily as those years were influenced by his time on the Citadel basketball team. It is a terrific account of basketball, but it is much more. He describes the terrible cruelty of the then-existing “knob” (plebe) year, the memory of which he has carried into all the years of his adult life. The well-documented, almost-psychotic, excesses of his famous father, the “Great Santini,” are pervasive in the book, and, it turns out, they are far worse than portrayed in other accounts. He devotes considerable space to describing the nature of college athletics, which, in his case, involved a coach who spent four basketball seasons during Conroy’s time demeaning and humiliating every one of his players publicly and privately. Conroy describes his painfully rare interaction and inordinate discomfort with the female gender. Somehow, in spite of what should be a personal disaster, he manages to find fragments of life to sustain and even prosper the soul. It is, against all odds, an endearing account of the human spirit’s capacity for snatching an element of victory from the jaws of pervasive defeat in every one of life’s important aspects. A quite wonderful book.
Reviewed by Paul Roush.
BIOGRAPHY Mellon
By David Cannadine, 2006.
A great bio about Andrew Mellon. Cannadine presents an exhaustive and critical history of Andrew who together with his brother Dick owned Alcoa, Gulf Oil, Mellon Bank and Koppers, and was one of the richest men of the 20th Century. After making his fortune fellow Republicans in Pittsburgh got him appointed Sec. of the Treasury where he served Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover for 10 years and then was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain for 2 years before FDR came into office. Mellon also was one of the founding benefactors of the National Gallery of Art, gifting all his famous art collection and paying for the construction of the Gallery. The book will be particularly meaningful for those who hailed from Western Pa. and those who like the National Gallery.
BIOGRAPHY John Adams
By David McCullough, 2001.
A book about our second President, who started the US Navy as a defensive measure against the French while making an unpopular but successful decision to negotiate peace with the French. Adams was well-educated at Harvard, and served as our Ambassador to France, Holland, and England before becoming President. McCullough not only describes Adams life in detail, but also gives insight into the life of Jefferson. A worthwhile read.
BIOGRAPHY Andrew Jackson
By H. W. Brands, 2005.
A fascinating, well-written account of the life of "Old Hickory," who was very popular in his day. His leadership in battles with various Indians, including Tecumseh, and against the British in the Battle of New Orleans led to respect by the populace and his election as the first "common man" to become President. He was overwhelmingly elected President for a second term and then influenced the election of his Vice President Van Buren.
BIOGRAPHY 20th Century Journey; A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Vol. II: The Nightmare Years
By William L. Shirer, 1984. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 654 pp.
Now, in 2007, even if you lived through the years of World War II, it is hard to imagine how a little man like Adolf Hitler could ever have gotten himself elected chancellor of Germany, and then systematically converted the country to the Nazi Third Reich. Bill Shirer was a young correspondent for the Chicago Tribune at the start of the 1930s, but just after he had married a pretty young Austrian woman, he was fired. He had been sending back stories that warned of Hitler and his struggle for power. Colonel McCormick, like a lot of influential Americans in those years, was so dead-set against Bolshevism that he saw the rising star of Hitler as something to be nurtured and encouraged. Hitler had written Mein Kampf, his blueprint for Nazism, dictating it to Rudolph Hess while he stamped around his prison cell in 1924. His first goal in that book was to re-unite Germany with Austria. Shirer relates how Hitler used his hoodlums in Germany and Austria to stir up emotions, how he appealed to a population suffering from all the indignities of losing The Great War of 1914-1918, how he blamed so much on the Jews. Shirer went to work for Universal Service, a wire news service, and then in 1937 Edward R. Murrow hired him for the Columbia Broadcasting System, which was just starting the experiment of broadcasting news live from Europe. Shirer is there as Hitler delivers speeches and stirs the German people to frantic furor. His troops march into Austria, while the leaders of other nations in Europe look on with anxiety. Hitler’s troops march into Czechoslovakia, while the leaders of other nations look on. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, is someone we remember today for his “Peace in our time” speech as he tried to “negotiate” with Herr Hitler to save the peace in Europe. Shirer describes how Hitler bullies his way into war, cooking up lies for excuses to conquer nations. Next come Poland, and then Belgium and Holland and France. Even though France and Great Britain could have applied massive power to stop Hitler at any point, they relied upon hope and love of peace and wishful thinking, and Hitler made fools of them. The Nazis flew the war correspondents to France to observe the French surrender, and to watch as the Germans began their operation to invade Great Britain. Usually Shirer uses the German official radio system to transmit his news broadcasts to New York for re-broadcast on CBS. The Nazis are happy to have Shirer use their service as long as he is saying what they want the Americans to hear. Of course, this is all while America is still neutral. Shirer figures ways to get across his message, but with the heavy German censorship and the threat of being thrown into jail or simply killed, it eventually becomes too much. Finally, he sends his family to America, and then he leaves Europe.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, February 2007.
BIOGRAPHY Virginia Woolf
By Hermione Lee, Alfred Knopf, 1997
This is simply the finest work of biography that I have ever read. The subject, Virginia Woolf, was a woman of immense complexity, and Hermione Lee does a superb job of plumbing the depths of her variegated life. Woolf was born into a family that mirrored the upper-class world of mid-to-late nineteenth century England. A brilliant child, Virginia was denied the right of a college education by a patriarchal father who didn't want to waste his money on education for his daughters, though Virginia's brothers went to Cambridge. The myriad circumstances and interactions of siblings, parents, and relatives receive extensive coverage in the forty chapters of this nearly nine-hundred-page volume, but the volume retains for the reader a sense of anticipation and interest throughout. For me the fascinating aspect of the book is the extensive insights it provides on English life and society in that age. Obviously the work focuses on Virginia Woolf, but is gives extensive coverage to all the members of her family over several generations. In the process it is possible to grasp something of the mores, fashions, class relations, even architecture of the times. Woolf was a part of the "Bloomsbury Group," (most of whom were homosexuals or went through phases in which they engaged in homosexual behavior) a collection of brilliant thinkers that included Maynard Keynes, whose economic ideas would later have a significant influence on the world's economies. Lee's work gives sufficient coverage to the ideas of the group's members that it was possible and exciting to obtain a running commentary on the philosophical debates that raged over a period of decades, debates that involved such events as socialism, capitalism, pacifism, World War I, the great depression, the rise of fascism, and the early years of the Second World War. The book also provided exceptional glimpses into the changing medical world of the time, particularly in terms of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Virginia Woolf experienced several episodes of very serious mental illness, resulting sometimes in lengthy hospitalization. Eventually, of course, the illness overwhelmed her and she took her own life by drowning, as she was convinced that she would not recover from the latest episode. Ms Lee explores sexual issues that possibly were contributors to the mental difficulties, including apparent sexual abuse by a step brother. At any rate, Woolf spent an entire lifetime with sexual frustration, including forty years of unconsummated or seldom-consummated marriage. Her marriage and a number of affairs with various women also receive extensive coverage by the author. My interest in the work of Virginia Woolf began with a short non-credit course at William and Mary this spring, and now I'm hooked. I'm also hooked on Hermione Lee. This morning I began reading her newest volume, this one entitled Edith Wharton. Since it's also nearly 900 pages long it will be a while before I have an assessment.
Review by Paul Roush, July 2007 __._,_.___ BIOGRAPHY Wisdom of Our Fathers
By Tim Russert, 2006
This is a great book containing short letters about fathers. If you don't shed a few tears reading these stories you are a pretty tough character. Russert also adds some stories about his Dad and son.
BIOGRAPHY Witness
By Whittaker Chambers, 1952.
Despite the exposure of Alger Hiss, a key State Department adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta and an architect of the United Nations, as a member of the Communist Party and his conviction for perjury, “widespread lingering belief in Hiss’s innocence” persists. As Whittaker Chambers’ memoir testifies: “It was, not invariably, but in general, the ‘best people’ who were for Alger Hiss ... prepared to go to almost any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.” Witness reminds us that only then-Senator Richard Nixon stood with Chambers when the press was hailing Hiss’s innocence, and who rallied support for a beaten Chambers, eventually exposing Hiss’s perjuries. This is a lengthy and difficult book. It outlines the evil that Chambers withstood at so great a cost. It helps explain some of the press perspective today even though it was written more than 50 years ago. It’s part of history. It’s worth our time to read.
BIOGRAPHY Churchill, a Biography
By Roy Jenkins, 2001.
This is a monumental biography and a sweeping study of the history of Britain during the long life of Winston Churchill (1874-1965). Churchill lived his life with a destiny for greatness. He was a soldier, but unlike nearly any other. He managed to position himself where he would experience danger, and then he managed to capture the exclusive rights to the story. Even when he was on the Queen’s list as a young soldier, (in India, Sudan and South Africa) he was mailing back thick dispatches to London newspapers. Roy Jenkins wrote this voluminous engorgement of parliamentary history in two and a half years, when he was in his eighties. At every point one can sense Jenkins’ rather tart view of Churchill. He gives Winston his due, as a statesman, elegant speaker and writer, but also as an almost mythical character, who always, in the direst of times, manages to sit down to a well-laid table and enjoy a fine meal, with plenty of champagne, port, brandy and a good cigar. Jenkins’ account of Churchill’s leadership of Britain after he became Prime Minister in May, 1940 is particularly interesting. Winston flew to France numerous times to try to give the French leaders (PM Paul Reynaud et al) encouragement to resist Hitler. At the same time, Churchill was trying his best to bring the United States into the fray, so once he promised the French that American intervention was nigh. Jenkins called Churchill’s hopefulness of that “living in cloud-cuckoo land”. Churchill tried everything to get Roosevelt to commit to U.S. intervention. Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to visit Churchill early in 1941, and Hopkins spent a month with him. The two formed a fast friendship. Jenkins notes that Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s relationship was never that warm sort of friendship. This is a marvelous, albeit very fine-grained, study of one of the great men of our times.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, May 2006.
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