Terrific detective work revealing a man determined to forge his own destiny when his country said he couldn’t.
The picaresque adventures of a former slave’s son who achieved glory in both world wars and was nearly forgotten by his own country.
Two intrepid authors and researchers—military historian and former Navy aviator Keith (America and the Great War: A 100th Anniversary Commemorative of America in World War I, 2019, etc.), a Purple Heart recipient, and Clavin (Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter, 2019, etc.)—team up in this dogged effort to excavate the facts of the amazing life of Eugene Bullard (1895-1961). In 1959, France recognized the achievements of the American pilot and soldier with its highest honor, the Legion of Honor, which subsequently gained Bullard, then an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center, his 15 minutes of fame on The Today Show. However, there was much that was never revealed in Bullard’s remarkable trajectory from indigent runaway to Jazz Age impresario and many details he fudged or perhaps forgot in an era of turbulent race relations when he later wrote his autobiography. Two traumatic events in his childhood propelled him to strike out on his own at age 11: the death of his Creek Indian mother when he was 6 and a white mob’s threatening to lynch his Haitian-born laborer father after a violent altercation with his foreman. Bullard managed never to look back, and the “French connection” from his roots propelled him to “a land where racial prejudice did not exist”—or so he imagined. The authors diligently pursue his story: learning to box in Scotland and then arriving in France just as World War I broke out; getting wounded at Verdun before embarking on a legendary, if short-lived position as a fighter pilot, probably the first black American to do so; and forging a career as a nightclub and athletic club owner in Paris before his next soldierly stint in World War II. Keith and Clavin constantly keep readers guessing about Bullard’s next move.
Terrific detective work revealing a man determined to forge his own destiny when his country said he couldn’t.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-00556-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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