Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Combining a crusty overview with extensive oral histories, Citizen Soldiers follows combat units and individual battle-numb troopers from the invasion of Normandy to the Allied victory in Berlin. Not many starters finished. The period from June 7, 1944, to May 7, 1945, is saturated in blood, sometimes frozen solid. What was called the Crusade in Europe is in large part a story of questionable judgments, dumb luck, trial and error (the easiest way to dig a foxhole in icebound terrain is to start with a hand grenade; the main lesson learned in street fighting, says one survivor...
...Army player to make Walter Camp's All-America team at two different positions, who died in a Japanese pow camp after smuggling his unit's flag past his captors; Ed White, who walked in space and died in Apollo 1; Joe Stilwell of China; Lucius Clay of the Berlin airlift; George Goethals of the Panama Canal. The biggest monument, however, a large pyramid, belongs to a general named Egbert Viele. An eminent engineer, he helped design the cemetery, which perhaps explains his prominence. The entrance to the pyramid is guarded by a pair of sphinxes. These...
DIED. SIR ISAIAH BERLIN, 88, British historian-philosopher of awesome erudition; in Oxford, England. The son of a Jewish timber merchant, Berlin became one of Oxford University's most eminent thinkers. His essays still dazzle, whether ruminating on determinism in Historical Inevitability, updating Mill in Two Concepts of Liberty or exploring Tolstoy's conflicted nature in The Hedgehog and the Fox. (See eulogy, below...
Spending time in the presence of Sir Isaiah Berlin was daunting for several reasons. Here was a man who was known and admired by a Who's Who of the 20th century: Einstein, Freud, Picasso, Churchill, Nehru. And then there was his conversation, which tumbled forth with amazing rapidity--he was once clocked at 400 words a minute--all of it gargled through the remaining traces of his childhood Latvian. When British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan proposed Berlin for knighthood in 1957, the PM suggested that the honor might be deserved "for talking...
Fortunately, Sir Isaiah in print was more comprehensible than in person. Although the Oxford philosopher was casual about his writings--he never attempted a major book--his lectures and scholarly papers, including Russian Thinkers and Against the Current, established Berlin's reputation as a formidably learned defender of liberal values. His most famous and influential essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), divided humankind into those who have one big idea and those who have many smaller ones. Berlin's hedgehogs included Plato and Dante; among the foxes he named Aristotle and Shakespeare. Although too modest to make such...