A robust, immensely entertaining portrait from a master biographer.
A shimmering portrait of a tempestuous monarch.
British novelist and biographer Wilson (The Potter’s Hand, 2012, etc.) has written on a wide variety of major historical figures, from John Milton to Leo Tolstoy to C.S Lewis to Adolph Hitler. Here, he lends a lively expertise to his portrayal of the forthright, formidable, still-enigmatic sovereign. In 1837, 18-year-old Victoria, a rather “ignorant little child,” acceded to the throne, delighted to be independent of her overbearing mother but hardly schooled in political and constitutional matters. Wilson gradually reveals the unfolding of her true self apart from her marriage to the beloved Albert, prince consort. The author examines her platonic yet significant relationships with succeeding prime ministers and her mysterious Scottish manservant, John Brown. Aside from didactic correspondence from her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, Victoria was first taught about the affairs of a head of state by Lord Melbourne, who was also her first crush, until her marriage to Albert of Coburg, her German-speaking cousin whose solid Protestant intellectual ideals helped “establish monarchy as a workable modern political institution” in England. Their family of nine children, all of whom survived childhood and were used to cement familial ties to the neighboring monarchies, created a bulwark against the forces of revolution overtaking Europe. Yet Wilson also notes how the marriage caused Victoria to surrender “her own freedom and personality.” She was not a happy mother, always scolding her children, and she was immensely volatile, especially after Albert’s death, when she largely retired from court to her estates in Scotland or the Isle of Wight. In the company of Brown, she resisted her official public duties, preferring instead to write in her journals. During her long reign, Victoria had come to embody the experience of an entire age, overseeing great reform and the strengthening of ties between India and the British Empire.
A robust, immensely entertaining portrait from a master biographer.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1594205996
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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