Publishers Weekly Review
| Best known for When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson, Smith has a solid and well-deserved reputation as a writer of popular biography. Here, he reprises the WWI period with a more challenging subject. John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force during WWI, is familiar as a stern, remote figure whose insistence on rifle marksmanship in an age of firepower cost American lives; whose insistence on maintaining an independent American army came close to costing the war; and whose ineffectiveness in high command had him on the brink of being relieved when the Armistice was signed. Without modifying those interpretations, Smith uses personal correspondence and the general's uncompleted memoirs to construct a kinder, gentler Pershing. In sometimes overblown prose, Smith describes the cadet at West Point, the lieutenant on a rapidly vanishing frontier and the ROTC instructor at the University of Nebraska. In each situation, Pershing emerges as able to synthesize a masterful performance of duty with an understanding of people, lifting him above the level of a gifted martinet to that of a capable field commander and talented proconsul. But the 1915 death of his wife and three of their four children in a fire left Pershing irrevocably changed. And it is here that Smith's biography falls short, by failing to address the rationales behind Pershing's behavior as head of the American Expeditionary Force, a position in which he demonstrated little of the humanity apparent in his earlier career. Donald Smythe's Pershing: General of the Armies is a more thorough guide to the general's ways and means, but Smith's book offers a worthy introduction to this complex man. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved |
School Library Journal Review
| Gr 7-12-By Harold Keith. Sixteen-year-old Jefferson Davis Bussey can't wait to leave his Kansas farm and join the Union forces. He discovers there is little glory in war. When he infiltrates the enemy as a spy, he wonders if he will be able to betray his rebel companions. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. |
Booklist Review
| Smith, a prolific popular biographer, produces the best recent compact study of the commander of the American Expeditionary Force of World War I, a figure who deserves to be better known. Missouri-born Pershing (1860^-1948) graduated from West Point in 1886, served against the Indians during the frontier's dying days, and was promoted to brigadier general for his service in the Spanish-American War and the Philippines. In Mexico before and in Europe during World War I, he commanded under the shadow of the loss of his wife and three daughters in a fire. Smith paints Pershing as a much more agreeable individual than his popular image as "Black Jack" would have it, revealing that Pershing possessed much humanity, as well as great appeal for the ladies, beneath his disciplined exterior. Smith is clearly sympathetic to his subject, and his style occasionally turns purple as he puts in a good word indeed, if not the last word, on an undeniably good soldier. --Roland Green |
