Yet another portrait of the British throne’s much-maligned heir, timed for His Royal Highness’s 50th birthday on November 14, from a top royal biographer who’s the author of several other books on Charles and Diana (Prince Charles, 1979, etc.). While Holden’s new portrait gives precedence to the prince’s private life, readers also get a fair overview of Charles’s various public initiatives, from the supervision of city planners and the founding of the ill-fated Institute of Architecture to his attack on the conventional medical establishment. Despite the author’s dry and often ironic tone, what he reveals about the prince’s endorsement of organic farming, vegetarianism, holistic healing, and environmental protection resonates with numerous concerns relevant for 1990s readers. Holden attributes Charles’s inability to express affection—the trait that was the cause of much pain to his late wife—to a childhood devoid of emotional contact with his parents: The prim and prudish Elizabeth II always valued public duty more than her maternal responsibilities. As a result, in one famous instance, Charles insisted on attending a Royal Opera House concert while his son William underwent surgery; the more motherly Diana kept vigil at the boy’s hospital bedside. Overall, Holden’s criticisms of the British royalty echo the recent mood of British taxpayers, tired of supporting an expensive monarchy that has lost even its symbolic status as the guardian of national moral and religious values. Charles’s adulterous relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles is one focus of the book; so are other royal sex scandals. Without taking sides, Holden portrays Diana sympathetically but also as a manipulator of public opinion and a master of intrigue. He credits the princess, nevertheless, with reforming the now-ever-so-slightly-more-human royal family. Replete with quotes from anonymous confidants and sundry royal “lunch guests,” Holden’s opus will find favor with all lovers of the never-ending Windsor soap opera. (32 pages color and b&w photos) (Radio and TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50175-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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