A highly readable social history that contains all of the juicy drama of a prime-time soap opera.
Downton Abbey fans will swoon over this trip through the privileged turn-of-the-century world of cash, class, and coronets.
Anyone seeking to fill the void left by the ending of the hit TV series need look no further than this comprehensive work penned by one of the period’s leading chroniclers. De Courcy (Margot at War: Love and Betrayal in Downing Street, 1912-1916, 2014, etc.) brings the Victorian and Edwardian eras vibrantly to life with her meticulously well-researched book, conveyed in an approachable prose style. Though the narrative’s central focus is the 454 American women who married into the British aristocracy between 1870 and 1914, the scope is far broader than just the ladies themselves. To demonstrate the complicated gender and class relations within the period, the author spends considerable time explaining the sociopolitical ramifications that led to these unusual marriages, some of which ended up being love matches. De Courcy explores everything from the differences in education for American girls versus their English counterparts to their value as progeny within their families, and she ably explains the particular fascination American women held for British nobles. In the 19th century, the right dress, jewels, upbringing, carriage, and conversation effectively demonstrated female power. Like Scheherazade, the author weaves tales of royalty, millionaires, dress makers, and social climbers who render the Edwardian era a tangled web of wealth and intrigue that continues to fascinate readers, filmmakers, and TV writers. Famous “dollar-princesses” Jennie Jerome and Consuelo Vanderbilt receive their own chapters, but the most entertaining sections center on lesser-known heiresses such as the Machiavellian Marietta Stevens and the irrepressible “marrying Wilsons.” The author’s occasional repetition of details—e.g., the girls’ physical characteristics—is unnecessary, but the approachable narration and attention to detail make up for any deficiencies.
A highly readable social history that contains all of the juicy drama of a prime-time soap opera.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16459-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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