An exemplary biography evoking, in classic form, lives and times just gone.
The reigning authority on all things Betjemaniac squeezes his assiduous three-volume biography about the late poet laureate into one really big paperback.
The sometimes naughty, sometimes haughty Sir John Betjeman (1906–84) was the very archetype of a Bright Young Thing, one of those madcap eccentrics larking about London all those years ago between the wars. World War II service found him in Dublin, Bath and Blenheim Palace. He gained postwar recognition at home and abroad as a critic of architecture, books and film, as well as a poet, building his popularity with appearances on the Beeb’s radio and telly. He sought to save heaps of Victorian landmarks from destruction and railed against ugly lampposts. But Jolly Sir John, it appears, was not much of a father. Married to horse-loving Penelope, he maintained a lengthy relationship, discretely described by Hillier (Young Betjeman, 2004, etc.), with a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. W.H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Lancaster and Dame Edna Everage numbered among his friends, but perhaps the poet’s dearest companion was Archie, the teddy bear who was nestled in his arms on the morning he died. Poet laureate for 12 years, Betjeman was buried in Westminster Abbey. Hillier provides a few samples of his poesy, verse with little vice that, like Ogden Nash’s or W.S. Gilbert’s Bab Ballads, is best read aloud. The rhymes, in strict meter, contain japes, jokes, pranks, puns, sense and nonsense—as well as momentary, startling tugs at the heart. This Betjeman encyclopedia, though, isn’t about the poetry; it’s about the poet. Ornamented with such lingo as “clunch” and “festinant,” his life story is as British as a tea room in old Drayneflete, and bloody well done too.
An exemplary biography evoking, in classic form, lives and times just gone.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7195-6443-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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 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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