A perceptive history of the British monarchy under the management of the current Queen—just not the “intimate” one promised...
A title that sets an impossible standard, with predictable results.
The problem for any writer setting out to produce an intimate biography of Queen Elizabeth II is that the people who might supply the necessary anecdotes will never do so. The British monarch is on public view so much that an impenetrable institutional wall protects what remains of her private life, leaving the would-be biographer little to work with but carefully orchestrated public appearances and statements and rank speculation. Journalist Marr (The Making of Modern Britain, 2010, etc.) could not overcome these obstacles, which is just as well. Rather than serve up more warmed-over family soap opera, the author provides a comprehensive and lively history and analysis of the British monarchy as a political and social institution from the World War I to the present, more than half of which time has been taken up by Elizabeth’s reign. During this period the monarchy has had to adapt to Britain’s transition from ruler of a vast empire to head of the Commonwealth of Nations, and to the nation’s steady decline in global influence. Elizabeth has also had to guide the change in the social role of the royal family from the starchy and unrealistic model of conventional middle-class family values promoted at the time of her accession to one more accepting of human failings in the wake of her children’s divorces. Marr describes in thorough detail Elizabeth’s diligent exercise of her constitutional duties as sovereign through the crises of almost six decades, including her relationships with more than a dozen prime ministers. He also ably discusses her activities as head of state, her efforts to cope with her children’s marital problems and controversies surrounding the royal finances in the context of the ongoing debate about the sovereign’s proper role in a modern democratic society.
A perceptive history of the British monarchy under the management of the current Queen—just not the “intimate” one promised by the title.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9416-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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