A touching portrait of Victoria offstage and unguarded.
Mining the record left by six intimate Victorian servants, Hubbard (Rubies in the Snow, 2007, etc.) discovers a great deal about the British monarch, wife and mother.
Discretion, self-reliance and the stamina to endure staggering periods of immobility and ennui marked the duty of the reliable courtier of stalwart Queen Victoria, who acceded to the throne at age 18 in 1837 and reigned until 1901. In this nuanced study, the author meticulously picks her way through the lives of the women and men carefully chosen to serve as Victoria’s intimates over her long life: ladies of the bedchamber, maids of honor, lords-in-waiting, grooms-in-waiting and equerries, drawn from a low-aristocracy pool and serving the queen in rotation. Lady Sarah Lyttelton, a 50-year-old widowed lady-in-waiting, was new to the game in 1838, charmed by the young and still-single sovereign. She was in charge of keeping an eye on the maids of honor and making sure the new regime was not besmirched by the “doings” of the previous Hanoverians. The “frank and fearless” Victoria married her cousin Albert in 1840, and he proceeded to reorganize the household into a tight system of efficiency; soon the babies arrived like clockwork and Lyttelton was put in charge of the nursery. Charlotte Canning, an ace artist and young wife who became lady of the bedchamber, found her duties essentially companionable and social: accompanying Victoria on her open-air afternoon rides. Dining with the queen meant jawing an infinite parade of platitudes with an injunction on broaching politics. In other chapters, Hubbard highlights maid of honor Mary Ponsonby and her adviser husband, Henry Ponsonby, physician James Reid and Windsor chaplain Randall Davidson, who all endured a stultifying monotony of duty and probity, weddings and funerals, systems of etiquette and middlebrow refinement.
A touching portrait of Victoria offstage and unguarded.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-226991-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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