That story is better told elsewhere, most recently Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi (2007).
Tepid account of the end of the Raj, though with a little imperialist-colonialist hanky-panky thrown in for good measure.
It is small news that Britain ceded its empire willingly, forgetting about little exceptions such as the U.S. and Malaysia. When it gave up India at midnight on August 14, 1947, the civil strife that led to the partition of India and Pakistan ensued almost instantly. The architect of empire’s end—and, at least in part, of that partition—was the viceroy, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, “Dickie” to his friends, who, British historian von Tunzelmann writes, had a jape two minutes before his tenure ran out by “creating the Australian wife of the Nawab of Palanpur a highness, in defiance of Indian caste customs and British policy.” Hardly an example of enlightened rule, one might think, but Dickie had a thoroughly modern attitude otherwise, even encouraging his wife Edwina to enjoy a ménage-a-trois with none other than Jawaharlal Nehru, on the way to becoming the father of his country. Edwina was the chief beneficiary of the arrangement; writes von Tunzelmann, “With Dickie, she was in an affectionate, sexless companionship; with Jawahar, she had found something more profound and more passionate.” All well and good, and even though Edwina would later threaten divorce and took off by herself for India annually once the couple had returned to England, Dickie was at ease, continuing a long correspondence with Nehru on such things as the status of Kashmir and the political makeup of Nehru’s new cabinet—the dry and boring stuff of history, in other words. Von Tunzelmann too frequently strives for effect (“Bose emerged from the foam off the coast of Singapore, a fascist Aphrodite spewed up from the deep”), and the Mountbattens’ unusual accommodation too often threatens to overshadow the real story, which is that of Indian independence.
That story is better told elsewhere, most recently Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi (2007).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8073-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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