WE LIKE IKE :

A charmed life : a review of Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life By Carlo D'Este (Steven Martinovich, Enter Stage Right)

D'Este's account of Eisenhower's life is a sprawling effort that required a heroic amount of research, as evidenced by the extensive footnotes he provided. Despite that, Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life is not a pedantic exercise in biography. Almost playing the role of a journalist on the spot, D'Este adopts the approach of showing and not telling the reader about the man behind the image. Where many military biographies are reworded after action reports, D'Este's only becomes more gripping as he chronicles the rising stakes Eisenhower faces right up until the final battle of the war.

Mr. Martinovich--who if we understand Canadian employment practices correcty, only has to edit ESR for about three more days before he becomes editor-for-life--has a good review of the massive summer read I'm in the middle of now.

MORE ESR :
Correcting a miscarriage of reporting : a review of No Gun Ri : A Military History of the Korean War By Robert L. Bateman (Steven Martinovich, Enter Stage Right)

In September 1999 an explosive Associated Press story broke which alleged that beginning on July 26, 1950, soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Calvary Regiment slaughtered hundreds of South Korean civilians beneath a railway trestle near a village called No Gun Ri. According to AP, the story was buried for decades until survivors and some soldiers began speaking out about the horrors they lived through. [...]

Unlike My Lai, however, No Gun Ri may have never happened, or at least the claim of a deliberate massacre is false. That's the conclusion that Robert L. Bateman, a former officer with the 7th Calvary Regiment reached after investigating both the AP's Pulitzer Prize winning story and the sources the news organization relied on to build its case. Although AP maintains that its facts are accurate, Bateman has built an strong case that while civilians were killed at No Gun Ri, the numbers and the reality of what really happened are significantly different from AP's story.

He's also got a review of what looks like a helpful corrective to a book that I thought was way over-the-top when I reviewed it : The Bridge at No Gun Ri : A Hidden Chapter from the Korean War (2001) (Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza) (Grade: D) .

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2002 10:45 AM