Moving in a stringent chronology, the author’s impressive nuts-and-bolts account finds Churchill’s golden years crowned by...
Just when you thought there could not be another angle to this endlessly fascinating character, here’s a serious, thorough look at Winston Churchill’s lifelong struggle to pay the bills.
Writing for hire allowed Churchill to keep the bank at bay over many decades, as noted scrupulously by English financial officer Lough, who asserts that, during his long career advising families about their finances, he has “never encountered risk-taking on Churchill’s scale.” Hailing from a family of spendthrifts, especially his American-born mother, Churchill recognized early on in his political career that he would have to supplement his official government salary by writing journalism, giving lectures, buying polo ponies, and speculating in the stock market, thanks to his financial guru brother, Jack. Like his mother, Churchill patronized only the best suppliers, and he was often scrambling to pay the bills, borrowing hugely to cover amounts owed to wine, cigar, shirt, and saddle merchants. His marriage to Clementine Hozier did not greatly add to his wealth, though his elevation to First Lord of the Admiralty in 1909 allowed him use of the HMS Enchantress and a fine Admiralty House in central London. While World War I impoverished a generation of Edwardian aristocracy, transforming them into a “new class of entrepreneurs,” Churchill managed to inherit a tidy sum from a distant cousin in 1921, quickly depleted by the purchase of a country seat and the birth of his fifth child and prompting stock market speculation. (Miraculously, he was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in 1925.) The U.S. stock market crash wiped out Churchill’s “new world fortune” (for each chapter, Lough offers a contemporary exchange rate and inflation multiples) without dampening his enthusiasm for America’s “vitality…[to] help shape his wartime strategy a decade later.” Chockablock with credits, debits, taxes, and inheritances, the book is nothing if not meticulous.
Moving in a stringent chronology, the author’s impressive nuts-and-bolts account finds Churchill’s golden years crowned by selling his memoirs and film rights.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07126-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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