A footnote to Anglo-Indian history, to be sure, but a telling one, and very well done.
A carefully reconstructed story of political murder that began to unfold a century ago.
The mass killing of protestors in Amritsar on April 13, 1919, is a central moment in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi. It is also a moment enshrined in Indian memory—and, in many ways, the beginning of the end of British rule. The officer who ordered the killings, Gen. Reginald Dyer, was forever haunted by his act, writes British journalist and BBC presenter Anand (Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary, 2015, etc.): “His family would always believe that he died of a broken heart” and not the cerebral hemorrhage on the death certificate. While no one can quite agree on how many died there, hundreds or thousands, one man vowed to do something to avenge them, traveling to Britain and laying a careful trap for the colonial governor who had not only authorized the killings, but spent the rest of his days defending them. It took 20 years to enact that vengeance, but, as the author writes, when Udham Singh shot Sir Michael O’Dwyer in central London, he “became the most hated man in Britain, a hero to his countrymen in India and a pawn in international politics”—lauded, among other champions, by Joseph Goebbels as a hero of the anti-British struggle. Anand painstakingly follows Singh’s long path from the killing fields of India to the Houses of Parliament and that climactic moment, which might have resulted in the deaths of many other officials had he used the right caliber for the bullets he fired. Singh was executed for his act, though supporters tried to give him the means to kill himself while in prison—and his jailers therefore even took away Singh’s glasses lest he “break one of the lenses and slit his wrists.” A memorial in Amritsar now commemorates Singh’s act, which, as Anand suggests, was far more nuanced than the simple act of assassination it was made out to be.
A footnote to Anglo-Indian history, to be sure, but a telling one, and very well done.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9570-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
