An admirable success at generating the sense of impending change that surrounded the death of Queen Victoria.
The final month of Queen Victoria’s reign, told in minute detail and set square within the flux of fin-de-siècle Britain, from countryman Rennell.
When Queen Victoria retired to Osborne House in January 1901 to die, the sun still rose everywhere on an outpost of the British Empire. But it was also a country on the doorstep of change, writes the author, much more so than was suggested by the fanfare that had accompanied the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee just four years earlier. The aristocracy ruled, yet socialism was in the air—and trade unions boasted a membership in the millions. Republicanism was on the march, and Germany and the US were industrially ascendant. Concern over the health of Victoria was on everyone’s lips, but more so was fear over the end of an age, for the queen embodied stability and continuity amid all the change. Rennell chronicles the moment-by-moment dwindling of the Queen, the gathering of the family, the apprehension of the populace, the arrival of her grandson the Kaiser of Germany (along with the intrigues the strained relations between Germany and Britain had to offer despite all the familial ties), the every ministration of her personal doctor, the absence of Albert and John Brown (Rennell even speculates on their sexual relationship; he gives it a thumb’s down). Then, after the death, all the circumstance that attended the funeral, from the color of the draping on the buildings to the coffin snafu to the wreath sent by the King of Portugal, “lilies and orchids on a cushion of violets”—Rennell doesn’t let an iota of minutiae escape. He is also quick to point out that upon Edward’s becoming king, the court exhaled a great breath of air, loosened the corset strings, and enjoyed laughter for the first time in over 60 years. Pretenses dropped, and frivolity took root.
An admirable success at generating the sense of impending change that surrounded the death of Queen Victoria.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27672-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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