A charming, unassuming account by Winston Churchill’s granddaughter of the adventures that made him famous during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899—1902. Churchill was just 25 at the outbreak of the war between Britain and the Boer Republics, but he had already published well-regarded books on wars in India and the Sudan. His combination of service in the army and in the press had not made him the favorite of the brass hats; still, he was one of the best-paid reporters covering the war (though not, as Sandys claims, —the highest-paid war correspondent of the day—). In her trip around South Africa, Sandys followed the route taken by her grandfather, spoke to the descendants of many of those who played a role in the events, and found material that had lain unnoticed. Churchill was captured by the Boers while helping (in cheerful disregard of his noncombatant status) free an armored train from an ambush. Although it was conduct that, as Sandys shows from contemporary accounts, would have earned him a Victoria Cross if he’d been anything but a war correspondent, it landed him in a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria. His escape 25 days later raised many an eyebrow. It has often been alleged that he took advantage of the plan of two other prisoners to make his escape, yet Sandys is persuasive in demolishing this canard. Churchill’s risky and exciting trip through enemy territory down to the coast 300 miles away and his arrival in Durban just after the British had suffered three defeats in battle launched his career in Parliament. Even the military establishment gave grudging approval. —I must say I admire him greatly,— said Commander-in-Chief Sir Redvers Buller. —I wish he was leading irregular troops instead of writing for a rotten paper.— A pleasant and undemanding excursion into the experiences of the young Churchill in a more chivalrous time. (24 pages b&w photos, 6 maps)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7867-0704-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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