Almost certainly not the last word on Wellington but, for now, the most definitive biography of him.
Australian historian Muir (Wellington: The Path to Victory 1769-1814, 2013, etc.) completes his suitably imposing biography of the Iron Duke, guiding him from war to an uneasy peacetime.
All great generals are also diplomats. So it was with Arthur Wellesley (1769-1852), first Duke of Wellington, who found himself at the head of an international army in his final showdowns with Napoleon at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. When not balancing the claims of contending generals and nobles, Wellington was wooing the ladies at oddly timed balls, famously one just after Napoleon’s attack at Charleroi. Wellington might deservedly have been nostalgic for battle when, after Napoleon was packed off to Saint Helena, he was pressed into the service of the British government in various capacities, rising eventually to prime minister. Muir is unshakably comprehensive, and few details of his subject’s life and deeds go by unremarked. Naturally, there’s plenty of ammunition thereby for Monday morning quarterbacking and counterfactuals: What might have happened had the French column at Waterloo not been stacked up, one brigade after another? Might the Peterloo Massacre have been avoided? Wellington emerges from Muir’s pages as a man generally unafraid of bullets and controversy alike, well-deserving of a reputation for both sternness and honesty. Certainly, he was no saint, and not simply because of the whispers about his many affairs (which Muir, naturally, enumerates). As the author notes, his diligence and enormous appetite for work were accompanied by impatience and a lack of generosity even to the veterans of his own campaigns (“it is not easy to understand or sympathise with his motives on this occasion,” he writes of one failed effort on the part of those veterans for recognition). It helps to have a handle on late Georgian and Hanoverian British politics to understand such things as Corn Laws and Test and Corporation Acts, though this isn’t a prerequisite for appreciating Muir’s great accomplishment.
Almost certainly not the last word on Wellington but, for now, the most definitive biography of him.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-18786-1
Page Count: 728
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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