Rich in intrigue, Ward’s book offers not only an enlightening look at the two men who defined Queen Victoria to the future,...
An Australian historian’s study of the two men who edited Queen Victoria’s letters and how their methods and choices affected posterity’s view of her.
Queen Victoria (1819–1901) was a remarkably prolific correspondent. According to some historians, she produced upward of “two and half thousand words each day of her adult life [and] sixty million words in the course of her reign.” When she died, her son, Edward VII, commissioned a well-respected official, Reginald Brett, otherwise known as the second Lord Esher, to produce a memorial biography of the late queen. Esher in turn decided to create a publishable collection of her letters up to the death of Albert in 1861. Realizing he could not do the task alone, Esher hired noted essayist, poet and Eton academic Arthur Benson to assist. Esher wanted to create a two-volume collection that focused on Victoria’s relationship to the men who shaped her as a ruler. Benson, however, sought to emphasize the historical and social events in which the queen participated and proposed adding up to two more volumes. Neither sought to consider Victoria’s roles as wife, mother and friend to other women. In her analysis of these two biographers, Ward examines the complex working relationship between them. In particular, she focuses on their internal power plays, which stemmed from their very different temperaments and social classes. Wealthy, charming and polished, Esher had all the advantages, including access to, and influence over, King Edward. Though born to an upper-middle-class family with good connections, the depressive Benson often found himself at odds with aristocrats, even as he struggled to gain acceptance into their circles.
Rich in intrigue, Ward’s book offers not only an enlightening look at the two men who defined Queen Victoria to the future, but also the ways that notions about gender influenced early-20th-century biographical portraiture.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78074-363-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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