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Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life. By Carlo D'Este. (New York: Holt, 2002. xiv, 848 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8050-5686-6.)
Carlo D'Este, an accomplished World War II historian, attempts to introduce Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower "to new generations of Americans who know too little of this remarkable man" (p. 5) and to understand "what it was like to have been the Supreme Allied Commander" (p. 4). On these and other counts, he succeeds.
D'Este traces Elsenhower's unlikely ascent from an impoverished Kansas childhood, through his years as an indifferent student and West Point cadet, his long career as a frustrated junior officer in the interwar U.S. Army, to his short but spectacular rise to command of the "great crusade" (p. 526) against the Axis. Appropriately, more than half of the roughly seven hundred...