Hawksley conveys Louise’s story fully and clearly, but just as importantly, she shows the devastating damage Queen Victoria...
Hawksley (March, Women, March: Voices of the Women's Movement from the First Feminist to Votes for Women, 2013, etc.) does a yeoman’s service providing an illuminating biography of Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise (1848-1939).
Denied access to the Royal Archives, those of the National Gallery, and other sources, the author also had to contend with records that had been scrubbed. Besides the Canadian records of the years Louise’s husband, the Marquess of Lorne, served as Governor General, the diaries of Queen Victoria were brutally edited and partially destroyed by her youngest daughter, Beatrice. Still, Hawksley ably shows how difficult it was to be a child of Victoria; her children were constantly afraid of displeasing her, knowing she was quick to punish. The queen was self-obsessed, and she rarely acknowledged love for her children and forced them to adopt a skill in lying that became second nature. Louise acted out often as a child. Her parents thought her mentally deficient, but they recognized her artistic ability, found her tutors, and built her a studio. Part of the reason so many records are locked away is the widely held rumor of Princess Louise’s illegitimate son, Henry Locock, fathered by Walter Stirling. Companion to Louise’s brother, Stirling was dismissed but given a lifelong pension, as was the adopting family. Louise was closest to brothers Leopold and Bertie, the Prince of Wales, whose wife, Alix, brought out the best in Louise simply because she was kind to her. Her tutor, John Edgar Boehm, long believed to be her lover, encouraged her sculpting and painting. Her artistic accomplishments, her ease in public duties, her sense of style, and her beauty led the public to hold her in much higher regard than the queen or her siblings.
Hawksley conveys Louise’s story fully and clearly, but just as importantly, she shows the devastating damage Queen Victoria inflicted on her extensive family.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05932-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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
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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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